I don’t trust people who never read trash, because it generally means they never read at all. I also don’t think “trash” needs to be a pejorative category: we all need books that don’t make heavy demands of us, the same way we need forms of light exercise that we can do for hours on end. If we’re going to find joy in something, it can’t always feel like work, and there’s nothing wrong with competent prose, a decent plot, and an author who’s more interested in making a buck than in winning the Pulitzer. In that spirit, here are some of the trashy books I’ve read or re-read recently.
A Power Unbound, Freya Marske: The conclusion of Marske’s “Last Binding” trilogy, it confirms my fear that Marske didn’t really know what made her first book good. A Marvellous Light featured interesting lead characters, a solid mystery plot, and a world whose magic walked an excellent line between being predictable (and therefore useful for solving problems) and mysterious (and therefore useful for posing obstacles). Being period (fantasy) romances, one expected a couple of sex scenes in each novel, but the third book gets entirely too carried away with itself, and her attempt to make sex a commentary on English class politics is pretty wretched. The problem with interesting characters in a first novel is that your readers will want to know more about them, and switching perspectives in every subsequent novel is liable to turn them off. I know this is the done thing in queer romance novels these days, but as the publishing industry itself shows, the done thing is rarely the best thing. Decent enough to finish, but ultimately pretty disappointing.
The Will of the Many, James Islington: Too few fantasy authors attempt giving a Roman flair to their setting. It can be a lot of fun, particularly if the author has enough of a classical education to name people well and to create the kind of grand political intrigue that makes Roman history so delightful to teach and learn. Islington has done that in the first third of the novel, but the remaining part plunges us into yet another Hunger Games iteration: teens competing for first place, big reward at the end, various kinds of lethal obstacles and scheming judges…you know the drill. Magic in this book is intriguing and underexplored: the premise is that every resident of the Catenan Empire cedes half of their Will to someone ranked above them, and every rank above the bottom has eight people ceding Will to them. It’s appropriately Roman, and since the hero is determined not to participate in this system at all, it gives high stakes to his being thrust into the world of high-ranking aristocrats. The later part of the book gets bogged down in exploring ancient ruins of a lost society, and although this seems to be linked to the Roman-ish social order, it’s clumsily done. This is the first in a trilogy, and I’ll probably read the next one when it becomes available in a library, but I’m not going to put the release date on a calendar.
The Cicero Trilogy (Imperium; Lustrum; Dictator), Robert Harris: This was an old favorite, and after reading about ersatz Romans I wanted to get back to the real thing. Since my volumes of Cicero, Sallust, and Tacitus are currently in storage, I grabbed these from the library. Harris’s trilogy is told from the perspective of Tiro, Cicero’s slave and longtime amanuensis and the inventor of one of the earliest known forms of shorthand writing; his symbol for et (“and”), rendered ⁊, appears in Old English and Old Irish manuscripts a thousand years after his death and continues to be part of traditional Irish script. The books are a bit starry-eyed in their admiration for Cicero, but they prove that you really don’t need to embellish Roman history to make it a good thriller. We probably know more about Cicero than about any other human being born before the 17th century thanks to Tiro’s preservation and publication of his speeches and letters, so Harris doesn’t really need to make anything up about Cicero’s character either. Highly recommended if you want entertaining political thrillers that don’t fudge the history.