Thursday, January 26, 2017

Coldest War's Unnecessary Evil

So it's been a while. But since I only recently finished up the sequels to Bitter Seeds, it feels like a decent time to try to resurrect this blog. [Take self examining whatever as having been written and then deleted.]

So Coldest War and Neccessary Evil, in which Mr. Tregellis takes his alternate history (WW2 + Cthulu and the X-MEN) and adds a spy thriller, a time travel parallax, and the children of the corn. He also screwed up a perfectly good series halfway though. Guess where.

You're correct.

Book two is a thriller starring the saved (by the love of a good woman) warlock out to punish the others of his kind, the scarred by what he had to sacrifice to win the war spy, protecting England, and the three remaining German super soldiers. (Pyro, Shadowcat, and I can't think of one that can see all the branching futures and pick among them the closest thing is from Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series.) They were captured by the Nazi's at the end of book 1, and are back to help the British fight the Soviet super soldiers. Who are super advanced. This actually works out well as a decent thriller with the almost end of the second book bringing us to a nice tied up place for most of the characters, but not the universe as a whole. Had the book ended in mid stride like Our Game or The Night Manager, it would have been a decent point to wrap up the action in some other way, and walk off into a future of possibilities. People would have been happy or unhappy but that's the point of LaCarre, They're people at the start and they're still people at the end. You're just along to watch some events in their lives.

Then the end of book two, and all of book three becomes a rehash of The Proteus Operation, as our (anti?) hero fights to make the cool setting disappear, and we walk back across the period given to us by the first book. Which is a choice, but fighting against the main character are the plans of a precognitive who suddenly stops being able to precog just when the plot needs her to, and that's a damn shame, and a shabby way to treat a character. So we end up with the WW2 which we already know, plus an extra older copy of the spy, and none of the self-reflective character endings that book two offered us.

Hell if the time travel has to happen (and it appears to have been planned given moments in the first book) there wasn't a need to undo the setting itself. I can see the desire to wrap a thing like this up with a bow, but the tighter you tie it, the more stray details slip through. Plus, if you're going to undo the setting, it needed to happen earlier, before you created a hugely powerful precog and wrote yourself into a corner with her powers. Or you need to explain why in this timeline the Cthulu aspects (which we learn are linked to the X-Men like abilities in book 2) are becoming blocked off from reality (which I just made up to make it make more sense). But we don't learn that, so the only reason is plot, and that's not satisfying in and of itself, it's just one damn thing after another.

Sneak preview of the next few: Rivers of London (read the series it's good), Three Parts Dead (ugh, no), and I'm sure I'm behind on Temeraire.

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