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The Compass Rose, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 2002 |
| Fiction | Film | Nonfiction | Video |
Note: Links within reviews take you to pages where you can purchase the item that is being discussed. A portion of the proceeds from purchases made through the Dragonlords Bookstore goes toward funding the official Mercedes Lackey fanclub, Queen's Own.
This installment of the Bedlam series follows the adventures of Eric Banyon in New York City as he returns to Juliard after spending many years Underhill with Beth and Kory. (Beth and Kory put in a couple of cameo appearances, but that's it.) This time out Eric's foe is a Celtic deity, Annwn (ck spelling), who decides to drop in on Central Park and lead his Wild Hunt throw the city.
On the charming side, Eric's new friend is the gargoyle who usually perches outside his apartment windo but who sometimes drops in for a drink or to listen to the Bard's CD collection. On a more perplexing note, Eric lives in an apartment building that houses four(?!) Guardians, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you've read the Diana Tregarde series and which is very hard to follow at all if you haven't read the Diana Tregarde series. (There's a lot of assumed knowledge that is not conveyed in the current book.) On a techinical note, the proofreader seems to have been asleep on this one (Things such as the first letter missing from words and other easy-to-catch typos abound.), but at least the story is well plotted. I can see why the decision was made to tell certain portions of the tale in flashback, but just about the entire first chapter is spent telling the reader information that is necessary to bring him/her up to speed. I can't help but think that there was a better way to tell the story that would not have required such grounding. That style contributed to the unfortunate "feel" of the book, which reads more as if you are reading a treatment for a screenplay rather than a fully developed novel.
There is considerable overlap with Misty's other urban fantasy books, particularly the Chrome and Diana Tregarde series. The overlap points are much more comprehensible if you have read the other novels first. In fact, fans of those other series might enjoy the book more than fans of the Bedlam series who are not familiar with the other books.
As a Celtic scholar, I found myself gritting my teeth at a number of points, reminding myself that this is fiction and that the name "Celtic" simply makes for easy window dressing that is familiar to a number of readers. The so-called "Celtic" details have absolutely no bearing on what scholars actually do or don't know about Celtic mythology.
In spite of the drawbacks, I did find the book readable and easy to pick up again after I put it down. It wasn't exactly a page-turner, but it did keep me coming back for more. I'd call this a fairly average outing as Lackey books go. You might want to wait for the paperback, though, unless you are a serious Lackey fan.
I had high hopes for this book. I'm not sure exactly what I had envisioned. Possibly something along the lines of Peter Connolly's reconstructions of life in Roman Britain at a specific location that happens to hold a great deal of interest for me. Unfortunately, Edwards's book does not deliver anything remotely along that line. The book should have been more properly titled Discovery and Excavations of the Roman Remains at Ribchester because the text consists almost entirely of accounts of who found what where and when and how that information was either lost or wound up in the local museum. Of the ten chapters, only two--for a grand total of eight pages--talk about the Romans at Ribchester. For some reason that passes understanding, the decision was made to separate the evidence that supports the conclusions presented in those two chapters into two additional chapters that appear later in the book and into Appendix B (Appendix A being a walking tour of the village suitable for presentation by the local tourist authority).
The text features outright errors that would have been very simple to check. For instance, Edwards (p. 49) claims that Cassius Dio wrote that 7,500 Sarmatians were sent to Britain during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, when in fact Cassius Dio (72.16, Cary 1932:37) says that 8,000 Sarmatians were conscripted by Marcus Aurelius, of whom " fifty-five hundred . . . [were] sent to Britain". On page 51 Edwards engages in speculation of the type I had hoped to see, but his attention is fixed on what the commander at Bremetennacum (Ribchester) would have done when the 5,500 Sarmatians became veterans and had to be settled in the immediate vicinity of the fort since they could no longer return home. A relatively short time spent with records of the garrisons of the nearby forts would have shown him that while the Sarmatian garrison at Bremetennacum was at full strength (ca. 175 C.E. through 197 C.E.), the surrounding garrisons were abandoned but that, after the civil war between Septimius Severus and Albinus, the Sarmatians controlled roughly half the space they had prior to the civil war and the nearby forts were regarrisoned with troops drawn mostly from above Hadrian's Wall. On page 90 Edwards cites a very good bit of evidence as to what was happening, since a detachment of cavalry from Upper Germany is suddenly posted at Bremetennacum, presumably as watchdogs for the Sarmatians who survived the civil war since the German unit goes away and the Sarmatians remain through at least the fourth if not the fifth century. It would seem from this and evidence I have presented elsewhere ("Lucius Artorius Castus, Part 1: An Officer and an Equestrian", The Heroic Age 1, 1999) that a good half of the Sarmatian unit at Bremetennacum was either killed or executed for treason following Severus's defeat of Albinus and that the remainder, who presumably remained loyal to Severus, were allowed to return home with German troops keeping an eye on them for a few years to ensure their loyalty. Now, my own work on Castus, who was probably one of the commanders of the garrison at Ribchester, is rather recent, and Edwards may not have been aware of it prior to the publication of this book, but he certainly had access to C. Scott Littleton's work on Ribchester, which has been available since 1978, none of which Edwards cites.
Edwards also fails to consult basic texts on Sarmatians, such as Sulimirski's work, which is absent from the bibliography. If Edwards had consulted such texts, he might have had an explanation for something that he mentions on p. 53, that the vicus, the village associated with the fort, seems to have come to an abrupt end concurrent with the arrival of the Sarmatians at the fort. Sarmatian warriors needed support personnel who fulfilled the needs of Sarmatian warriors, not support personnel who fulfilled the needs of regular Roman cavalry. The people in the vicus lost their market, if you will, and the people who replaced them were not the sort of folk who lived in timber houses; the people who supported the Sarmatians lived in wagons, which leave little if any archaeological evidence. On p. 77 Edwards goes to great lengths to interpret a soldier's hat on a carving as a "jester's cap" when the article of clothing is quite clearly a steppe-style felt hat characteristic of the Sarmatians.
Edwards's coverage of the excavations at Ribchester is admirable, although his documentation of the finds leaves something to be desired. (For instance, he does not seem to have access to the most recently published fascicules of RIB.) The result is a text that is wonderful for something like the Ribchester Museum to distribute about how it was established and how it acquired its collection but that leaves much to be desired for anyone who wants to know more about the Romans at Ribchester.
A star studded cast, a queen with radical ideas of equality, and an adventure worthy of mission impossible, were not enough to save this movie. The main problem was I don't believe the cast or crew had ever played the game. The props were not as well done as in other recent films. I would probably watch this again on cable . . . for free.
I was one of the first in line on opening day for this much anticipated feature. It began as the book and cartoon with Grinch's heart "two sizes too small" and ended witht his heart growing three sizes in one day. I had always wondered what made him so . . . Grinchy. Cindy Lou Who, who was much more than two in the film, did some investigative reporting. This movie did a wonderful job filling in all the characters from Suess's sketches and did so without adding fluff. As far as the original lines they were there mixed in with the new story. This is definately worth a second and third viewing.
A doctor must battle within himself to find a greater good. He is overtaken by pitfalls of medicine of the seventeenth century, the plague, and the love of a king. Every time I thought I knew where this movie was going, it changed course. It kept me entertained, as well as my husband. This was a movie dubbed "chick flick" at the theaters and then surprisingly gripped the men in the sweeping epic. I highly recommend this one.
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