Jonathan Palfrey

This is an odd book about an odd man: a science-fiction story starring a tall, bald, overweight vegetarian, a beer-drinker and cat-lover, who doesn't much like the company of humans, and speaks in an oddly formal and pedantic manner. He's highly intelligent but eccentric, and determined to play by the rules—at least, whatever he conceives to be the rules of any situation.Initially he's an unsuccessful interstellar trader, a role that doesn't suit him well. At the end of the first chapter, he acquires a new role that seems to suit him better, and it continues for the rest of the book.The stories in the book are somewhat interesting and entertaining, but I think the main entertainment here is in the character of Haviland Tuf, the protagonist, and in his quaint way of speaking. If I met the man, hypothetically, I don't suppose I'd actively like him: he doesn't tend to like other people and doesn't usually care what they think of him. But I quite enjoy reading about him. He's literally extraordinary. I could readily read another book about him, but as far as I know this is the only one.It certainly deserves at least three stars, perhaps four, but I'm not sure about that, so for the time being I'll leave it at three. This is, incidentally, the only fiction I've read by George R. R. Martin: the Game of Thrones saga doesn't appeal to me, from what I've heard about it, and I've neither read it nor seen it on screen.I've read that, in writing this book, Martin was trying to imitate [a:Jack Vance 5376 Jack Vance https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1207604643p2/5376.jpg], and indeed Haviland Tuf seems like a character that Vance might have created.

This novel includes various significant developments in the overall plot of the series: Lesley begins her slow recovery from the events of the previous book, Peter's father begins to recover his life and his career, the Pale Lady comes and goes, and there are some first appearances: the Faceless Man, Harold Postmartin, Abigail Kamara, Sahra Guleed. We visit Nightingale's old school, briefly.

The tragic story of Simone seems of no significance to the series as a whole, but it's the central feature of this particular novel. I suppose it's a good tragic story, but I'm not a fan of tragedy in general, so this is not one of my favourite books in the series.

On reading the book for the fourth time, I got through it more happily by skipping most of the bits about Simone and concentrating on all the other things going on.

As usual with this series, I don't really enjoy the crime/mystery element of the story, but the dialogue is amusing and the characters somewhat entertaining.

Unusually, this one is set in London rather than Egypt, but the change of scene doesn't make as much difference as you might expect (except to the weather).

A wonderful adventure story in which the main characters are children, but their struggles are no less real for that, as the author doesn't talk down to them. This is life as it was once lived, back in the early 20th century, long before mobile phones.

There's no sex or violence here, and indeed no villains. Our heroes are struggling only against their environment: an unusually cold winter, an attack of mumps that disables their leader, and the approaching end of the Christmas holidays, which gives them a deadline for all adventuring. They manage to find adventure in spite of it all.

This story also introduces two new characters to supplement the existing six (the Swallows and Amazons); and it gets plenty of mileage out of the new ones.

Really one of my favourite books. Thank you, Arthur Ransome—70 years older than me, and we'd have had little in common, but I appreciate his work.

This is one of the better sequels, and ideally I'd like to give it 3.5 stars. The author is on good form with both the story and the characters. Ramses and Nefret are now young adults; in fact Ramses is only 16 but seems older.