Book review: Napoleon's Pyramids by William Dietrich

The 52nd book I read in 2017 was Napoleon's Pyramids, the first book in the Ethan Gage Adventure series by William Dietrich.  I saw a later book in the historical fiction series on sale at Half Price Books but waited until I found the first one, for continuity's sake.

The fictional Ethan Gage is an adventurer with a touch of scoundrel about him, but blurbs comparing him to George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman are greatly exaggerated.  The story opens with Gage, a sometime Freemason once in the employ of Benjamin Franklin, now halfheartedly kicking around revolutionary Paris, ostensibly in search of trade opportunities but mostly gambling and whoring.  After winning an unusual and supposedly cursed medallion in a game of cards, the prostitute with whom he spent the night turns up gutted, and, framed for her murder, Gage quickly joins Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt until the heat is off on the continent.

Comparisons to Indiana Jones are far more on point.  Napoleon is looking to "liberate" Egypt but is also bringing along a team of "savants" to unlock the secrets of the pyramids, a team of which Gage, by merit of his Freemasonry and experience with the new science of electricity, makes a part.  Arriving in the newly-conquered city of Cairo, Gage meets a beautiful priestess, a hearty Mameluke, and a scholar of antiquities, all of whom help Gage decipher the meaning of his mysterious medallion.

Gage plays a bit too much the "dumb Westerner" for my taste, so that his local allies have to overexplain everything they say for the reader's benefit.  Add to that the fact that Dietrich wants to have his cake and eat it, too: Astiza gives a rationalistic explanation of Egyptian religion -- the 'priests' were originally just the people scientific enough to figure out and record the pattern of the Nile's ebb and flow and made up the gods and rituals to cement their own power -- yet also claims to believe in the power and existence of Horus. 

My dislike of the book was cemented by the author's treatment of female characters.  From the initial prostitute whose tortured death impels Gage in the direction of the plot, to Astiza who, despite being Gage's actual property still 'falls in love with him' (based on what character qualities, I'm not sure) and then conveniently drops literally out of the plot at the end to allow him to move on to other adventures (and lovers), they exist entirely as plot devices to motivate the main character, a fellow who, if he never descends to Flashmanlike levels of depravity, similarly fails to impress the reader with his positive qualities.  He's a white American male!  Isn't that enough for him to be the hero?

Book review: Dictator by Robert Harris

The forty-ninth book I read in 2017 was the final volume of Robert Harris's Cicero trilogy, Dictator.  The book begins where Conspirata left off, with Cicero fleeing into exile after Clodius's rise to tribune.  The politics of the Republic during this time, however, were in very rapid flux, and after only a year, Cicero is welcomed back to Rome -- and sucked back into the political jockeying that would eventually lead not only to his own death but to the end of the Republic and rise of the Empire.

This book covers the last fifteen years of Cicero's life, and decline is never as fun to read as rise.  The shifting allegiances which Cicero rode to power in Imperium, like Mario jumping from platform to platform in a video game, this time around lead to Cicero's ultimate downfall, and yet it is hard to see what he might have done differently to ensure a different outcome. 

Book review: A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear

The forty-eighth book I read in 2017 was the eighth Maisie Dobbs novel, A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear.  Maisie has inherited not only her mentor Maurice Blanche's money and property but also his value to His Majesty's Secret Service.  Detective Chief Superintendent Robert MacFarlane calls Maisie in to go undercover at a private college in Cambridge.  Its founder rose to fame by publishing a pacifist book during World War I, and the British government doesn't trust his motives in shaping the minds and morals of the next generation.

Maisie being Maisie, she has hardly gotten unpacked in Cambridge before a murder with political implications occurs.  She turns out to be not the only spy at the college.  Sandra, a former domestic in Lady Rowan's employ, asks Maisie for help when her husband dies under mysterious circumstances.  On the domestic front, Billy and Doreen have their baby, James Compton renovates 15 Ebury Place with the hopes of Maisie being its mistress, and Priscilla is throwing Maisie so hard at James's head I could scream.  In other news, James and Maisie are sleeping together regularly, seemingly without any worry about Maisie finding herself pregnant.  Winspear is eager to provide history lessons about all kinds of other things going on in the 1930s; one wonders why she is reticent on the subject of the period's methods of birth control.

Book review: The Christie Caper by Carolyn G. Hart

The forty-seventh book I read in 2017 was the seventh installment of Carolyn G. Hart's Death on Demand series, The Christie Caper.  In this volume, a double-length "special" in Sweet Valley High terminology, Annie and her tagalong husband are planning a Christie convention in honor of Dame Agatha's hundredth birthday.  Of course, as always happens when Annie plans an event, someone ends up murdered.

A visiting British Christie expert, Lady Gwendolyn Tompkins, rounds out the eccentric-older-woman-as-force-of-nature troika with Laurel and Henny this time around.  The cozy, estrogen-steeped weekend is rudely invaded by Neil Bledsoe, a nasty caricature of toxic masculinity with a hatred for ... well, just about everything good and true and feminine, it seems.  Naturally, Bledsoe ends up dead (I won't even count that as a spoiler, though the murder feels a long time coming; Hart has to vamp longer than she's accustomed to to account for the greater length of the book), and the list of suspects encompasses virtually the entire guest list of Christie enthusiasts.

This book is a tribute to Christie in more than just the constant references to her books and life which pepper the text.  Christie was an expert at presenting a murder in a way that the reader felt no sympathy for the victim, only academic interest in unraveling the mystery.  Hart likewise presents Bledsoe as so wholly vicious that the reader explicitly is meant to applaud the agent of his death.  Unlike other books in the series, not only does the killer go unpunished, but Annie and her gang conspire to pervert justice -- which, again, is okay because justice is personified in Brice Posey.

I found the reader's assumed complicity in the murder off-putting, and I hadn't realized before how very female the point of view in this series is.  Men are evil, or weak, or, like Max and Chief Saulter, happily submissive to the women in charge.  It is certainly true that in the past the opposite was true in most literature: male characters had all the narrative power, and women were damsels, temptresses, or sidekicks; turnabout, however, doesn't make fair play.  I find myself choking on the implied sisterhood.

Book review: The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear

The forty-sixth book I read in 2017 was the seventh Maisie Dobbs novel, The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear.  In this installment, Maisie is retained by an American couple to investigate the final days of their son, who died in World War I but whose remains had just been discovered in France.

Winspear finally kills off Maurice Blanche in this novel, eliminating the Obi-Wan to Maisie's Luke and making Maisie a rich woman as she inherits his considerable fortune.  Billy and Doreen are expecting again, and Billy is still hoping to fulfill his dream of emigrating to Canada.  And Maisie is being courted by James Compton, raising the possibility that she may end up not only a rich woman but an aristocratic one.

Book review: The Girl Before by JP Delaney

The forty-fifth book I read in 2017 was The Girl Before by JP Delaney.  It was marketed as similar to The Girl on the Train, which was, eh, okay.  It was a page-turner, at least.

This book deals with two successive tenants of One Folgate Street, a minimalist house with a beyond-strict lease agreement.  Both Emma and Jane agree to a long list of rules, like changing nothing in the house or garden, never leaving clothes on the floor or objects out in the open, no smoking, no pets, no potted plants.  Jane has one further detriment to deal with: the previous tenant died in the house.

Both Emma and Jane are unreliable narrators, which can be done well but most of the time just comes off as the author yanking your chain.  This is one of those times and one of those books in which everything the book lets you know about pretty much every character turns out to be a lie.  It's just too much; you start wondering why you even bother reading the book if it's just going to jerk you around like that, and you stop caring, particularly when every character you try to empathize with turns out to be vile. 

In addition, I read this book after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about a new trend in literature: authors using their initials to conceal their gender.  That's right; "JP" is a man, though he's trying very hard to come off as chick-lit.  I won't say that men can never write a novel with a female protagonist; but Delaney has not one but two, and his attempts to depict them in situations involving rape and pregnancy comes off as mansplaining, particularly given the deception he freely admits to using in his pen name.