This review of Perish by the Sword by AM Romer will be at the
top of the blog for the next week. Newer posts will appear below it.
The outstanding thing about Perish by the Sword is that Poul Anderson
has captured a particular time and place perfectly. It’s like a
tourist’s guide to Northern California, 1959. You can see it, hear it,
and feel it in the air. Here are the Berkley scientists in their labs
and offices, the post-war tech, and Russia forever in the background.
Here are the San Francisco Bay houses, complete with sunken lounges and
after-work martinis, and the women with their cropped hair, their own
jobs and their own sports cars. And here’s the bar, Howl, full of beat
poets (of course) and groovy cats, and young men who’ll do anything for
‘the experience’. The sense of place and time he’s given us is awesome;
it’s a gift, and that’s the joy of this book. But unfortunately, what is
joyless outweighs it.
In an interview (find it here),
Anderson explains how he begins to conceive of a book: he wants to say
something about a particular topic – a philosophical concept or thought
experiment, or an observation on the political and social movements
around him, for example – and then develops a story around that. It
sounds great for sci-fi. Arguably, the motivation at the core of all
sci-fi is the question What if…? But this is where Perish by the Sword
falls down.
It reads as though the author has made a
decision to write a novel in the ‘detective’ genre, maybe as a kind of
exercise, to see if he can do it. He has developed his plot points, the
crime and the solution, and the elements of contemporary culture he
wishes to include, and then – and only then – has he populated this plot
with characters. It’s as though he has precisely mapped out all the
moves in a game of chess for both players, and then carefully places the
pieces on the board in their required positions, rather than letting
the game unfold. The plot is enacted by the characters – it does not
grow naturally from them. There is the strong sense that they exist
mainly to fulfil plot points and genre requirements, whereas great
characters seem to have a life of their own and are caught up in events
which they or other characters have created. The result is that I can’t
care about them. I don’t care if they live or die; they are items moved
upon a game board because the author needs them to move. This results in
a distinct lack of tension – because I don’t care enough to be
invested, to worry about the wrongly accused or who might next be put to
the sword.
Even their names felt carefully
constructed, along with their background, psychological profile,
linguistic habits, eccentricities of behaviour and interests. Yes, the
name Trygve Yamamura indicates his ‘San Francisco melting pot’ heritage,
but it will never get this detective into the canon. And Colquhoun
(huge, fiery-tempered bloke with a suitably Scottish moniker) was
slowing the pace – not because of his character, but because of having
to read and then remember how to pronounce his name.
For
someone who is a seasoned reader in the crime genre, the perpetrator
stood out from the beginning. In fact, it seemed so obvious that I
thought there must be a twist, and it was the thought of this that kept
me reading… but there was no twist. By the end, when Yamamura gives a
straightforward walkthrough of the murder and how it was done, I’d
already been waiting some time for the characters to catch up to what I
already knew. If this doesn’t happen quickly, it doesn’t matter how
brilliant the writer is in terms of language or imagery – frustration
sets in. Some elements of the denouement were a surprise, hinging as
they did on the tiniest, seemingly throw-away lines and observations.
But rather than coming across as ‘clever’, so that the reader has that
rush of revelation, Oh, of course! Why didn’t I see it? that
characterises the best Poirot stories, it felt almost mathematical: the
clues so carefully scattered, gathered together at the end by the
detective into a neat equation, but one I had no real interest in
working out.
People love to solve problems. The
detective story is a sophisticated series of problems and puzzles, and
good ones test their readers’ knowledge of human psychology, as well as
their familiarity with the conventions of the genre itself. Perish by
the Sword was not so much a test for the reader as an illustration of
Anderson’s ability to create a plot. The characters were figures made to
fulfil the plot’s requirements: the detective, the victim, the suspect,
the love interest, the murderer. And the overall reason for the book’s
existence felt like it was an exercise for a very intelligent author in
‘writing a murder mystery’. Detective Yamamura occasionally showed
glimpses of being his own person, rather than the author’s puppet, but
in the end he too felt like a chess piece in an intellectual game. So
despite my fantastic tour of Berkley and San Francisco in the late
1950s, I was left cold and, ultimately, bored by the novel – and by the
characters who played out their pre-assigned roles and behaviours
exactly as planned.
AM Romer
August 2019
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