Glory Days

“Mon zen no kozō narawanu kyō wo yomu.”

It’s a Japanese saying that translates roughly to “An Apprentice Near A Temple Will Recite Scriptures Untaught” and it suggests that a person can learn and grow simply by being in the right environment and surrounded by the right people.  This one resonates with me and I can see its truth when I think back to the time I spent in Japan.  I had two opportunities to live and work in Japan for a total of 7 years and both were important learning and growth experiences for me.  I’ve met many Americans who fell in love with Japan and saw the country, its people and it’s culture as more meritorious than their own.  That’s not me.  There are many things about Japan for which I developed a deep and abiding appreciation.  I’m also objective enough to recognize the negative aspects of it’s culture.  On balance, however, I find it a fascinating and admirable country and I’m very thankful for the chance to have so thoroughly experienced all it had to offer.

Some of the aspects of the culture that I most appreciated and that affected me most fundamentally:  1) the sense of community and the importance of group identity, 2) the personal discipline so critical to fulfillment and success, 3) the expectation that respect, consideration and courtesy permeate all human relationships, 4) a commitment to a shared set of values that define both the person and the nation.  For a young man, still in the process of defining himself as a person and a professional, those are not the worst set of foundation stones upon which to build.  I can’t say that I was a perfect student but all left their mark as I learned to work with and relate to my Japanese colleagues and peers.

This book captures many of those elements and I appreciated both the refresher course and the memories it conjured up.  This is an older book – published in 2002 – based on a fictional country and culture modeled on that of medieval Japan.  It’s one I’ve always been aware of and interested in but never purchased or read.  I finally took the opportunity to do so this week and it was a pleasure.  The two protagonists – Shigeru and Takeo – are portrayed in such a way that they either embody or strive to reflect those values.  They’re juxtaposed against a set of antagonists – Noguchi and Iida – that exemplify some of the more negative aspects of the culture.  As with so many Japanese stories – or stories about or modeled after Japan – death is the defining experience.  The story makes it clear that death is preferable to the dishonor of a poorly lived life and how and when you choose to die or accept death is the ultimate measure of the individual.

The Author – Gillian Rubinstein – an Englishwoman who eventually moved to Australia and who wrote this series using the pseudonym Lian Hearn – definitely resisted the temptation to satisfy her readers with a typically American happy ending.  A whole host of characters that you come to respect and appreciate do not survive the story and those that do are forced to make tortured decisions regarding their future – denying or deferring love – refusing the opportunity to embrace power and fame.  Ultimately, that is what makes this story so interesting and so very Japanese.  Your choices define you and life makes no promise with respect to easy decisions or joyful outcomes.  The needs and desires of the individual are, by necessity, subjugated to the needs of the larger group or to the demands of dignity, duty and honor.  Happiness is not a goal worthy of pursuit if it asks the individual to violate a higher or greater set of obligations to family, society, justice or nature.

I would think that many who read the book will find it sad – I only see nobility of intent and purpose in the protagonists and that is one of those aspects of Japan which I often – not always but often – experienced and did come to truly and deeply appreciate.  I am very glad I finally read this one and it has me thinking about a return to Nihon after a 17 year absence.

The series is called “Tales Of The Otori” and it consists of three volumes – the second and third being:  1) “Grass For His Pillow” and “Brilliance Of The Moon”.  I would recommend them to anyone interested in considering a very different way of thinking about what we’re placed on this world to do or how we should live.

This one was unplanned.  I’d just finished my second April release – “The Night Dahlia” by R.S. Belcher – and I was honestly without direction on to what I was going to read next.  It’s not that I didn’t have plenty of choices – the Library’s full of them – I just didn’t have anything that was on its knees – begging to be read.  When I wind up in that situation, I sometimes just allow myself to be guided by chance.  I’ll sit in my chair in the Library:

and let my eyes wander – scan the room and see what I fasten on first.

That’s exactly what I did this week and I wound up landing on “The Thousand Names” by Django Wexler.  I’d bought this one at Barnes & Noble in 2013 when it first came out but had never gotten ’round to it.  Thankfully, my random selection turned out to be a pretty good one.

Once I jumped in, I found that I really didn’t want to put it down.  There were so many things Wexler did well in this story that I found myself regretting the need to leave for work every morning – I just wanted to read through to the end.  Here’s just a few of the things that made it fun.

First, he keeps it simple.  He obviously wrote this as the first volume in an extended narrative but he didn’t feel the need to hit me with too much up front.  In the same way that Weber started small in his Honor Harrington epic with “On Basilisk Station”, we start out in a small, insignificant corner of his world with characters who are, at the time, small insignificant people.  He gives you a simple yet compelling baseline story that allows you to get to know his protagonists when they’re still nobodies who, at the time, are playing small ball.  Marcus and Winter become that much more worthy to the reader because you get to see them at that point in time when they’re on a very slow boat to nowhere.  Their growth over the course of the story is more believable and compelling due to how they’re introduced and the minor ugliness they have to overcome during the first few chapters of the book.

Second, I actually love the fact that magic plays no part in the narrative until the final 100 pages or so.  The entire first book is devoted to a very conventional military campaign – something that really appealed to me.  While you’re introduced to Colonel Janus relatively early in the book and while there are hints that he’s arrived to assume command of the Colonials for reasons far more complex than putting down a local rebellion, almost the entire book focuses on just that – his work to rebuild the Colonials and the military campaign he conducts to destroy the rebel coalition.  It’s actually a very well written fictional military history.  Wexler gets this part right and serves up descriptions of a series of battles that are both exciting and feel factual.  While Janus is obviously a skilled tactician, he’s conventional and there’s nothing in his battles that ever strike me as silly or out of bounds.

In fact, it’s pretty obvious that he’s modeled Janus on Napoleon as a tactician and a battlefield commander.  He makes reference to this in the introduction and he calls out David G. Chandler’s “The Campaigns Of Napoleon” as one of his sources of inspiration:

This is THE definitive history of Napoleon and his military campaigns.  At almost 1,200 pages in hardcover, reading it is no small task but for anyone interested in the time and the man, I would strongly recommend it.  I can’t begin to tell you how much I learned by reading this book.

As you read through this first volume of the series, you see Napoleon in Janus – his emphasis on mobility, effective use of cavalry as screening elements, willingness to split his command and fight multiple, concurrent engagements, the decisive nature of artillery and a willingness to put smaller units at risk in order to isolate and defeat larger elements of an enemy army.  Combine this with pretty accurate descriptions of the hardware used by armies during the Napoleonic age as well as the way he makes you feel the random and terrifying nature of the battlefield experience and you have a great fictional military history.  If you like this stuff, you’ll love the novel just for the way he marches you through the campaign to defeat the rebels – the Redeemers – and place his King’s allied Prince back on the local throne.

Finally, once he does introduce the element of magic – as well as the larger political context  at home that explains Janus’ presence in this far corner of the world – he does it skillfully and in a pretty compelling way.  There’s only a taste of this in the last 100 pages of the book but the way Wexler brings it in – serving up just enough to make you want to learn more – he’s opened a huge door for his readers to walk through.  By the time you get to the final pages of the book, Janus has convinced Marcus and Winter – who have grown into pretty formidable characters over the course of pretty grueling military campaign – to ally themselves with him in the larger project he’s pursuing on behalf of King and Country.

It’s all very skillfully done and it makes for a great read.  Short to long – there’s a lot to like about this book and I enjoyed it enough so that I’ve already ordered Book Two – “The Shadow Throne” – which should be arriving next week.

I was actually amazed that this series, since I picked up the first volume in 2013, has grown to 5 main novels, one short story prequel and one novella.  Titles are listed below in reading order:

The Penitant Damned – prequel short story

The Thousand Names – Main Novel #1

The Shadow Throne – Main Novel #2

The Shadow Of Elysium – Supplemental Novella

The Price Of Valor – Main Novel #3

The Guns Of Empire – Main Novel #4

The Infernal Battalion – Main Novel #5

If “The Shadow Throne” is as good as “The Thousand Names”, I’ll be buying and reading all of these.

I’ve commented in several past posts on R.S. Belcher and his three series:  Golgotha (very good), Nightwise (good) and Brotherhood Of The Wheel (not good at all).  This is the second book in the Nightwise series and I downloaded it the day it was released.  I enjoyed the first in the series – “Nightwise” – very much and have been looking forward to this one.  It didn’t disappoint but it also didn’t do anything to change the way I feel about these three series.

I read a lot of books built on this relatively common formula – set in our day and age, assuming the existence of a supernatural counter-culture consisting of a range of powers – from puissant to pitiful – from relatively righteous to disgustingly dangerous – with the common, daylight world protected from it’s supernatural residents by either self-appointed or organizational guardians.

The Nightwise books and their protagonist – Laytham Ballard – represent a respectable addition to this sub-genre but in some ways, it may be one of the hardest to read.  The primary challenge lies in the nature of the protagonist – Laytham Ballard.  I know what Belcher is trying to do with this guy – he’s a tortured individual – thoroughly compromised spiritually – completely polluted physically.  He wants desperately to hold onto a tiny sliver of decency and humanity but carries around a list of past transgressions and violations of rules, relationships and personal discipline – that leave him with little faith in his ability to do so.  He has a lot of red in his ledger – similar to Black Widow – with very little of the personal and professional discipline he would need to see it expunged.

I really want to empathize with Ballard – find a way to like him – but he makes it almost impossible.  He’s incredibly powerful but thoroughly dissolute.  He picks appropriate causes and strives to achieve ethically acceptable outcomes but he repeatedly compromises principles and relationships along the way.  While he does achieve some very small measure of redemption by the end of this book, he does it at significant cost to one of his oldest and most loyal allies as well as the one true innocent in the book – the person whose well-being he’s charged with protecting – and who he ultimately betrays to save his own life. He may bring bad guys down but he’s a drunk, a drug addict, a user and a selfish jerk.  I just don’t know how anyone comes to like this guy and that – in my opinion – bodes ill for the long term success of the series.

I find myself enjoying those around Ballard – the supporting characters who repeatedly choose to help him – at great risk to themselves – far more that Ballard himself.  While this crew are motivated by their belief in the existence of a kernel of good within Ballard – a belief reinforced by the relative worthiness of Ballard’s objectives – he deals with them all in a disappointingly transactional manner.  This group displays a repeated willingness to sacrifice themselves on his behalf and he gives them very little reason to continue to want to do so.  I have to say that this structure has worked for the first two volumes but it’s going to wear thin if Ballard doesn’t evolve – if he doesn’t begin to re-establish at least some small degree of the faith in himself and a measure of commitment to those around him – get back to the relatively virtuous and noble young Ballard that Belcher gives us a very brief flashback glimpse of at one point in the book – the young kid who doesn’t smoke, who runs and who reads when he’s not serving The Nightwise in their effort to protect normal human society from supernatural predators.

When I hold these books up against two other similar series – The Dresden Files series, by Jim Butcher and The Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey – I feel like it falls somewhere in between.

Dresden has a rich life filled with friends who support him and who he, in most cases, has been able to protect – with a few notable exceptions, he’s always been fighting the good fight – he’s dealt with his demons and has a solid sense of self – he’s rational and represents a source of order in his world – he’s made mistakes and hurt people but it rarely shakes him and never breaks him.  Harry is a White Night – a protector and guardian – a bonafide good guy.  It’s easy to like him.

Sandman is an amoral, ruthless, uncaring killer who indulges any / every vice accessible to  him.  He is a source of chaos in a very unsteady world – an actor with the potential to send the whole thing spinning off it’s axis – he has friends and he cares for them but he is guided by pure, unadulterated self-interest and he makes it clear to those who choose to connect themselves to him that they do so at their own risk and that he can’t be held responsible for the consequences of those decisions – he’s a bit of a monster but he’s completely comfortable with who and what he is – he’s not tortured – he feels few, if any regrets – and he’s still weirdly likable.  He’s insanely funny and he stumbles through book after book somehow doing a reasonable amount of good – whether that was his original intention or not.

Ballard is something different altogether.  Where Harry is noble and Sandman is reprehensible and both are comfortable with their choices – Ballard is reprehensible but lives with regrets and struggles with choices he might have made.  While Harry has true friendships based on mutual affection and obligation and while Sandman has twisted relationships based respect and loyalty – Ballard has one way relationships that are all take and very little give.  Harry moves fast and saves people and you love him for being a hero.  Sandman moves fast and breaks things and you love him for being a crazy clown.  Ballard moves fast, he saves people, he breaks things and it’s almost hard to care for him one way or another.

Now, having said all that – this was still a good read and I’ll buy future installments.  As stated above, Ballard did find some very small measure of redemption by the end of the book and he seems poised to try and exorcise some of his demons – make a real effort to find his way back to a better version of himself.  I’m willing to see where Ballard takes this and whether he’s willing to make Ballard someone I want to invest in.  My fear is that Belcher might like Ballard too much the way he currently is and just may not be able to get me there.

One final note on both this series and on the Sandman Slim books.  I really wish both Authors would stop trying to impress me with their voluminous knowledge of popular music.  There are very few scenes in all of these books that don’t contain a reference to the song playing in the background.  Thanks.  You’ve impressed me.  Could you now please move on.  It doesn’t really add anything to the story.