The Hotel Under the Sand
Kage Baker
Tachyon Publications, 2009
U.S. trade paper, first edition
ISBN 978-1-892391-89-6
144 pages; $8.00

Kage Baker left us on January 31, 2010, at the much-too-young age of 57. Those of us who read and loved her Company novels and short stories, beginning with In the Garden of Iden, will miss her more than we can collectively say – though we tried, in those last few weeks, many of us, to tell her what her work had meant to us.

There is still more of her work to come: The Bird of the River, a fantasy novel set in the same milieu as The Anvil of the World and The House of the Stag, will be published by Tor in July 2010. In the meantime, though, her delightful children’s book, The Hotel Under the Sand, will tide us over.

Nominated for the 2009 Andre Norton Award for Young Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Hotel Under the Sand is the kind of book that you resolve to send to your nieces and nephews even before you have finished the first page. Any book that starts, “Cleverness and bravery are absolutely necessary for good adventures,” is a book you know those budding book lovers in your family are going to enjoy, and maybe even the non-readers who are usually busy playing sports instead. The book starts with a terrible storm, as all good books should (think of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, after all). The storm sweeps Emma away and out to sea, and she must swim for her life. She winds up on an island that has almost nothing but sand – and shipwrecks – for as far as she can see.

Soon, though, she finds that the sand hides something wonderful, and I don’t mean just the ghost who finds her. The Grand Wenlocke, a magnificent hotel, is uncovered by the same storm that brought her to the island. Above the registration desk is a sign that reads, “Time is Forgotten Here,” and sure enough, as long as one remains on the hotel grounds, time outside stands still. The idea was to allow vacationers to spend a month or more without missing more than a weekend or so from their jobs, which I think is an invention that really ought to be perfected in the real world.

The hotel has a magnificent library, of course, putting one in mind of the library from the Disney movie, Beauty and the Beast. There’s a cook who has been there since the hotel slipped under the sand (time stands still, remember; the cook was frozen in time with the hotel, as was the bread she was baking; nothing burned!). A dachshund named Shorty immediately takes to Emma. Before long, a pirate shows up, complete with parrot (yes, this story has everything), and a search for treasure begins. The search has very unusual clues to guide it, and turns up all types of treasures, and even a person who might not be very treasurable at all; it rather depends on how spoiled he is.

The Hotel Under the Sand is an instant classic. Read it to your nine-year-old, or let your 12-year-old read it to you. Or if you’re a grown-up, like me, just sit back and enjoy it. One is never too grown up for this sort of book.

Peripheral Vision
Patricia Ferguson
Other Press, 2008
U.S. hardcover, first U.S. edition
ISBN 978-1-59051-287-6
376 pages; $24.95

Sylvia is a medical specialist; in the nomenclature of the United Kingdom, she is a consultant. Her specialty is eye surgery, and her work with those who have impaired vision forms the continuing metaphor for all of the characters of this confused and confusing novel.

We meet Sylvia first in 1995, shortly after she has had her first baby. Immediately after we learn how tired this baby has made her, we flash back to the tale of how she and her partner came to be together. We learn of the troubled birth of her child, and her lack of love for the infant – and by the end of the chapter, we’re 20 years in the future, after Sylvia has spent all this time caring for a child she did not love.

Do we get the story of how this relationship works next? No; oddly enough, that story is never told in this book. Instead, after 23 pages we switch to Will and his mother, the latter dying, the former a “resting” actor who is taking care of her. After introducing the characters, Ferguson suddenly whisks us to 1953 and the story of an accident suffered by a young boy named George, which tells us about a number of individuals who will come to occupy different niches in this continuing story: George (who has managed to put his eye out), Ruby (his mother), Iris (one of George’s nurses), and Rob (one of the medical students who has observed the surgery).

Then it’s back to 1995 and more about Sylvia for three pages, then back to Will for six pages – and then we’re in 1954, and Rob and Iris are now a couple. The reader now feels dizzy and disoriented, especially because there is no connection at all between any of the characters in the 1950s and the characters in the 1990s; why are these stories all jumbled together?

The answers are very slow in coming, with one revelation uncovered only in the final two or three pages of the book, entirely unforeseen or unforeseeable, and encompassed in a single sentence. In an effort to produce a complicated plot, it seems that the author has started so many threads that she dropped a few stitches somewhere along the line, and has simply gathered them up into a big heaping mess and tied them in a bow at the end of the book.

It’s unfortunate, because there are so many threads that would have supported interesting stories all on their own. I’d like to know more about Sylvia’s relationship with her child, Clio, for instance. By the end of the first chapter I know that Sylvia “was to live for twenty years in the closest possible service of someone she did not love,” but I don’t know what this means, precisely. Is she a cold mother who leaves her child’s care to a nanny, faking enthusiasm on those occasions when she cannot avoid Clio’s company? Is her devotion explained solely by the generous financial support she is able to give the child based on her income as an eye surgeon? How does Clio react to her mother’s disinterested devotion – a contradiction in terms if there ever was one? This could be an entire book in itself, but in fact we learn almost nothing about Clio except that her mother doesn’t love her.

Nor do we learn enough about eye surgery to justify it as a continuing metaphor. There are a few tantalizing tidbits, but this isn’t a story of anyone’s career in the field. It is a merely a device, which diminishes both the force of the metaphor and the power of the book as a whole. I would have enjoyed reading more about eye surgery in the 1950s compared to the 1990s, and the miracles that can be wrought with these strange orbs we all carry in our heads, and use for the sublime pleasure of reading books. Instead, though, we learn tiny bits about England’s class system, lingerie in the immediate aftermath of World War II, French cheeses, British sitcoms and a dozen other things.

I was surprised to read on the cover of this book that it was long-listed for the Orange Prize when it was first published in Great Britain in 2007, and even more surprised to read that this is the author’s sixth novel. I would have guessed that this was a first novel by someone not yet in control of her evident gifts at characterization and historical accuracy. It is promising in some ways, but ultimately no more than an interesting failure.

Peripheral Vision is Patricia Ferguson’s first novel to cross the Atlantic and see publication in the United States. And perhaps that explains it: the book simply didn’t translate to this American reader.

The Professional
Robert B. Parker
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2009
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0-399-15594-9
289 pages; $26.95

One of my favorite literary daydreams has for years been that my husband and I shared a lovely dinner with Robert B. Parker and his wife, Joan. I imagined us talking about literature while Joan took tiny sips of a martini and Bob – we’d be on first name terms, of course – took gulps of Scotch, or listening to Bob wax rhapsodic about the Boston Red Sox, or dissecting the character of Spenser, Bob’s series detective. Alas, it will never be: Parker died this past January of a sudden heart attack while sitting at his desk writing. An enviable death, I think, but one that came much too soon. Parker was only my father’s age, a young 77.

The Professional is not the last Spenser novel; Painted Ladies is due out this coming October. And it is impossible to read The Professional as any sort of elegy for Parker; it is, as are all the Spenser novels, “merely” a tale full of moral ambiguities, starring a bad guy who doesn’t really seem all that bad if taken on his own terms and some normal people who can’t really face up to what they’ve done and who they are. Parker seems to have been fascinated by the lies we tell ourselves, even the best of us. The only one who seemed to have a policy of strict refusal to ever fool himself about anything was Spenser – and even he occasionally fell victim to his own demons.

On its face, The Professional is about a gigolo who turns to blackmail and the women who refuse to flout him by confessing their unfaithfulness to their spouses. A closer reading, though, suggests that Parker is talking about the nature of marriage – or, more specifically, monogamy (as Spenser and his long-time lover, Susan Silverman, have never married or even lived together (aside from one disastrous experiment in cohabitation)). Throughout the book, Spenser and Susan question each other as to whether they’d prefer to open up their relationship, but the questions seem to be more or less the equivalent of me asking my husband if he still loves me: they know the answer, but they just want to hear it. It’s a sort of flirtation, a verbal hug. In the hands of a lesser author, it would be mighty annoying, but for the long-time reader of Parker’s novels, it is a comfortable reassurance that all is right with the world.

Parker’s style has long been to tell his stories mostly through dialogue. It reads very smoothly and swiftly, making it very natural to read this book in one sitting. It might fool a reader into thinking that this type of writing is easy. But advancing the action mostly through dialogue is a lot harder than it looks. It’s even harder to carry it off when your protagonist is a smart aleck who is constantly tossing out jokes and bon mots. Any aspiring writer would do well to study one of Parker’s novels for his technique.

I’ll say no more about the plot. No one who knows Parker’s work ever reads his books because they expect a lot of the plot, anyway (though Parker manages, as always, to give readers a few surprises in this one); they read him to revisit Spenser, Susan, Hawk and Parker’s other characters, who have become old friends over the years. Were I to talk about the plot, I’d give away too much and still say too little, because that’s not the real point of the book. Spenser is ultimately a philosopher, and that’s his real charm.

I wish I didn’t know there was only one more Spenser novel coming my way. I wish Parker were still at his computer, putting together the 2011 entry in the series right now. If there’s a heaven, though, and I get there someday, I expect there will be an entire shelf of new novels by Robert B. Parker for me to read. He’s probably tapping away at a celestial keyboard even now.