Book Review: The Winds of All Worlds, by Mikal C Johnson

[lethargic_man]

Some of you might remember how, after I blogged about trying to teach myself to read cuneiform, I received an email from claidheamdanns asking for help writing a birthday (and later, also a name) in cuneiform for a novel that would shortly be published. As I blogged at the time, I thought it would be either a five minute google, or completely beyond me, and hence completely failed to predict it would be somewhere in between and suck an entire evening out of me. At the end of the process, I had a page of wedge-shaped marks, a promise of a dedication in the book, and, in the fullness of time, a gratis copy of The Winds of All Worlds by Mikal C. Johnson, with handwritten thank-yous from claidheamdanns and the author:

(aviva_m: "That's your Limmud presenter blurb!" YHN: "Not any more; this year it's also going to have '...and created the cuneiform texts in a recently published novel.'" :o))

I have to confess, I was a bit sceptical about the work when claidheamdanns first described it to me; his outfit came across (admittedly, from sparse evidence) as rather small press. But then, it's difficult to blurb a book in such a way as not to elicit a "<marvin>Sounds awful</marvin>" reaction from a cynic such as myself, particularly when a brief summary is going to be along the lines of: A drunken accident with a matter transporter catapults its inventor and his party guests into a series of alternate universes, differing from ours in anything from whether dinosaurs went extinct to the presence of a crashed alien artefact in New York, with a Tower of Babel and its ominous rulers lurking in the background of each.

My scepticism was reduced a bit by seeing the tagline "2010 NaNoWriMo Winner"... but only due to not realising what being a "winner" entailed (i.e., completing at least 50,000 words of first draft within November). So, I started reading in critique mode, and was initially underwhelmed by the writing style.^* My confidence remained low for a while, as the novel read to me like science fiction written by someone who has not read any (or at least, none more recent than Edgar Rice Burroughs), just seen the media SF that gives the genre a bad name... though possibly the latter applies more to the characters than the author? At any rate, the author seemed more familiar with fantasy (of at least the traditional (pre-Dunsany?) kind), though even so the novel features (possibly deliberately) as stereotypical a wizard as one gets (who makes a reference to the Wood between Worlds, so he's read some twentieth-century fantasy at least!); and I cringed when I saw the protagonists expecting to just pick up a sword and use it. (To be fair, though, they never got to use it against anybody trained in swordsmanship, which could only have resulted in either the character or the author being given very short shrift indeed.)

* <begin writer geeking> Such as by the back to back character dumps in the first few pages; also the fact it was written in omniscient. (To be fair, though, omniscient is not itself a problem unless it involves serious head-hopping; it's just very out of fashion, and writing in bad omniscient is often the mark of a beginning writer. The other half of the coin is that because all the writing advice nowadays (or in the 1990s at any rate) decries writing in omniscient, I don't really have the skills to assess well-written omniscient.) <end writer geeking>

Nevertheless, as I read on, it became apparent that the author was erudite, and drawing on all kinds of things in his storytelling, from (to give just a couple of examples) Wabar to Völuspá. I was over halfway through, though, by the time I really got drawn in, when the story took a digression through a retelling of the Tam Lin story (with a bit of Thomas the Rhymer thrown in for good measure). And, towards the end (and afterwards, when discussing) the book with claidheamdanns, I became aware there were layers and meanings in the work, some of which I was picking up (such as the love interest's surname spelling amor backwards), some of which I wasn't, such as the relevance of the Tetragrammaton in Palaeo-Hebrew on the back cover (a real kick-myself one, that!), and some of which I'm sure I remain oblivious to, even now.

Indeed, a love of languages is something which pervades the book. As well as the cuneiform, there are chapter headings in Arabic, hieroglyphics, Mayan and Ogham, and references to names of gods from more cultures than you can shake a stick at. I was rather narked, however, at the book's claim that שַׂר is pronounced "zar" or "tzar", and is derived from the same root as "caesar". (Nope, שַׂר was /sar/ in Biblical Hebrew, deriving from the Semitic root Ś-R-R, where Ś was originally (i.e. in Proto-Semitic) pronounced /ɬ/, like Welsh ll; "caesar" derives from Latin caedere, "to cut" (after an ancestor of Caesar's delivered by caesarian section), which in turn derives from a Proto-Indo-European base *kae-id- "to strike".)

The various ends left dangling during the course of the book were brought together nicely at the climax into a confrontation in which the reader is left rooting for both sides, and enough ends left dangling afterwards that I now want to read the sequel, when it's written. I suppose this is the most important endorsement of the book, at the end of the day. In summary, despite all I said above in criticism of the book, I'm reminded of rysmiel's comments to me on The Armageddon Blues: "about as good as one can expect [for being] written by a [novice] with more imagination than wordskill. He's gotten much better since." And indeed, three books down the line, I was rating the author of that book as excellent; so, assuming his writing likewise improves over time, I have high hopes for Johnson!

Comments

Confusion between sar and tsar

[claidheamdanns.livejournal.com]

Firstly, let me thank you for a very nice review. Very thoughtfully written.

Secondly, I just want to say that the confusion between sar and tsar/caesar would be my fault, as it was based on a speculation of mine that these two words probably had their origin in sar, but without a certain knowledge of their etymology.

Thanks again for all your help on this. From one language geek to another, I freely admit that your language geekiness far outstrips my own ;-)

Re: Confusion between sar and tsar

[(Anonymous)]

Caesar was the cognomen of the family to which the dictator Gaius Julius Caesar was born. Its origin has been explained in various ways:

The cognomen “Caesar” originated, according to Pliny the Elder, with an ancestor who was born by caesarian section (from the Latin verb to cut, caedo, caedere, cecidi, caesum).[5] The Historia Augusta suggests three alternative explanations: that the first Caesar had a thick head of hair (Latin caesaries); that he had bright grey eyes (Latin oculis caesiis); or that he killed an elephant (caesai in Moorish) in battle.[6] Caesar issued coins featuring images of elephants, suggesting that he favoured this interpretation of his name.[7] (Wikipeda)

Julius Caesar himself had a receding hairline so another possible explanation is that his family may have carried the gene of male pattern baldness and the nickname “Caesar” (hairy) was ironic.