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annathepiperLaurie R. King's The Game and Locked Rooms are the last couple of entries in her Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series. I read them back to back, which actually seemed to improve the overall experience of reading both, though the transition was not entirely flawless--and Locked Rooms was overall a stronger story than The Game.
We'd talked on a prior entry on my journal about how the entire Mary Russell series can be easily argued to be one of the most successful and longest-running Mary Sue storylines ever. This is not to say that the storyline and concept suck--just that the notion of sticking a new character into the established canon of a popular set of stories, having her be every bit as brilliant as the main character, having her be the main driving force behind the resolution of a lot of the storylines, and winding up as the wife of the aforementioned main character is, well, rife with Sue-ishness.
And unfortunately, that kept lingering in the back of my mind as I was reading The Game. Another Mary Sue symptom is how the "new character" is (to borrow a word from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
waysofseeing) omni-competent, able to do everything that the canon characters do and oftentimes better. Russell does a lot of this in The Game. She slurps up Hindustani in the course of several days' hardcore studying, and while she claims to the reader that she gets to the point of being able to sound like an "amiable idiot", her presumed lack of true facility with the language does not seem to impact her ability to communicate later on through the book. She takes a scant nineteen hours to practice passing herself off as a male British officer, despite her assertion that to do it properly would take longer. And naturally, despite her lack of experience with the entire concept of an Indian pig hunt, she manages to achieve the honor of a first blood on an animal--and then later actually kills it when she and the maharaja go back out to take care of it.
A Mary Sue can also frequently be identified by how often everyone around her likes her. In this plot, we got a young woman (Sunny Goodheart--and what a name, I might add) who more than once gushingly admired how Mary was, well, omni-competent--and it is further hinted that the young woman's brother Thomas is attracted to her. Nor is he the only one--the aforementioned maharaja, nicknamed Jimmy, is clearly also drawn to Russell and wants to keep her around. While he shows no sign of actual attraction, the British agent Russell and Holmes meet up with, Nesbit, certainly seems to exude masculine respect for Russell's competence. So does Kimball O'Hara, once he finally comes on camera (and I'll get back to him in a minute). And even aside from all the major characters in the plot, none of the minor ones present Russell with any real difficulty. No one hinders her in any interesting fashion or even takes ill to her in any way.
All of this combined to pretty much make me really wish that Russell had run into more challenges in this book. The previous entries in the series did not seem to come across to me as having this problem so much, but in this one, I fear I kept mentally rolling my eyes and thinking, "yeah yeah yeah, of course she's going to kill the pig" and other similar thoughts. I was actively disappointed when she started telling the reader about how she'd pissed off the maharaja by stating her intention to leave--and how she then lobbed the red herring of starting to talk about how she didn't hear the men sneaking in to lock her into her rooms, making you think "oh, finally, things are getting interesting." Except that the reason that she didn't hear them coming was of course because she wasn't there, because of course she already knew that they were on to her and she'd escaped already. Sigh.
Aside from all of the Mary Sue issues, the plot struck me as shaky as well--mostly due to the whole idea of Russell and Holmes going to India to look for O'Hara, except oh look, here's this potential Russian spy wandering around, and he's got connections to this maharaja, so let's send Russell over to check the maharaja out instead. Except oh look! Of course this maharaja's had O'Hara locked up for the last three years! And oh yeah, did we mention that the mysterious smart kid (see previous comments I have made about how an Uncannily Smart Kid is a sign that a plot is going to suck) who's attached himself to Holmes and Russell is of course O'Hara's son? Way, way, way too much convenience all around.
Last but not least we have O'Hara himself. Now, I'm already well aware that it's very gimmicky to have Russell, King's protagonist, running around in the Sherlock Holmes universe to begin with--King is already invoking the gimmick of using someone else's long-established and by now public-domain characters in her work. So one could argue that for her to also pull in O'Hara from the work of Rudyard Kipling is hardly unexpected. But the problem is, for me that crossed a line somewhere and made his presence feel almost "gimmicky" to me. I've had a similar feeling from oh, say, episodes of the Young Indiana Jones TV series, where Young Indiana Jones had a pile of adventures meeting all sorts of Famous Historical Persons and as I recall, some Famous Actually Fictional But Real In the Series Persons as well. Handled well, it can be entertaining--and from what little we saw of O'Hara, he seemed like an interesting character. But I also suffered from never actually having read Kim in the first place, and I can't help but think that The Game might have been way more interesting to someone who's read that book.
Which leads me also into thinking that it may well have relied too heavily upon a reader's previous familiarity with Kim to evoke interest in this new plot. A good bit of O'Hara's backstory was given, except that it went into the territory of "too much tell and not enough show". O'Hara is on camera for so little a portion of the book that I felt kind of cheated, given all this buildup and hardly any payoff.
So overall, not terribly satisfying. King has done better--and in fact did do better with Locked Rooms.
Locked Rooms picks up pretty much immediately where The Game left off, as we learn that Russell and Holmes have left India--and instead of heading back to Britain, they've gone through Japan instead on their way to San Francisco to take care of some family business of Russell's. The transition between stories, I fear, is a bit shaky; we are told that this was part of their plan all along, and yet, having just read The Game immediately beforehand, I recollect exactly nothing in that book about how they'd intended to head to San Francisco.
There's also several bemusing references to their stop in Japan and hints that Interesting Things happened there. Russell at one point uses the phrase "complexity of events" to describe what happened there--and yet we never are told what actually happened, which was confusing and vaguely annoying to me as a reader. I was torn between wanting to yell "um, so, WHAT HAPPENED IN JAPAN?", half-wondering if I'd somehow missed a book somewhere (though I knew I hadn't), and strongly suspecting that there will in fact be a future book about What Happened In Japan. Which struck me as, well, gimmicky.
So did the use of Dashiell Hammett as a character in this plot, for that matter. See all my comments up above about reacting to the use of Kimball O'Hara as a character; they apply here, only more so since Hammett was an actual real person. As with The Game for me, so too with Locked Rooms; I am not familiar with Hammett's work or his history, so the use of him in the plot doesn't mean much to me and pretty much came across as another excuse to have Russell and Holmes meet a Famous Person.
All that said, I enjoyed Locked Rooms a lot more than I did The Game. All the problems in the previous book with Russell being omni-competent get turned on their ear here as we learn that why yes, Russell can be thrown hugely off her stride. Seeing her trying to come to terms with her past and the deaths of her parents and brother, and even fight with Holmes when he gets too close to the sensitive bits of her repressed memories? That was interesting.
And so was seeing things from Holmes' POV for once! King jumped into Holmes' head for two long chunks of the book, and it was about damned time she'd done so as well. I mean, if she's going to have her protagonist go and marry the world's most renowed detective, it's good to actually see him do some on-camera detecting--not to mention see him reacting to the stresses that Russell's going through and to have their relationship rounded out quite a bit more.
There was some measure of "convenience" to certain aspects of the plot--the 'faceless man' of Russell's nightmares turning out to be her father's shady friend, for example--but not nearly so much as in the previous book, and the far more interesting aspects of the plot helped balance things out rather nicely. The flashbacks that helped bring to life the events of the 1906 earthquake were particularly vivid, as were the descriptions of Chinatown. And I liked how things were tied in to a seemingly random incident in the previous book--the attempt on Russell and Holmes' life with the collapsing balcony in the marketplace.
All in all, two thumbs up!
We'd talked on a prior entry on my journal about how the entire Mary Russell series can be easily argued to be one of the most successful and longest-running Mary Sue storylines ever. This is not to say that the storyline and concept suck--just that the notion of sticking a new character into the established canon of a popular set of stories, having her be every bit as brilliant as the main character, having her be the main driving force behind the resolution of a lot of the storylines, and winding up as the wife of the aforementioned main character is, well, rife with Sue-ishness.
And unfortunately, that kept lingering in the back of my mind as I was reading The Game. Another Mary Sue symptom is how the "new character" is (to borrow a word from
waysofseeing) omni-competent, able to do everything that the canon characters do and oftentimes better. Russell does a lot of this in The Game. She slurps up Hindustani in the course of several days' hardcore studying, and while she claims to the reader that she gets to the point of being able to sound like an "amiable idiot", her presumed lack of true facility with the language does not seem to impact her ability to communicate later on through the book. She takes a scant nineteen hours to practice passing herself off as a male British officer, despite her assertion that to do it properly would take longer. And naturally, despite her lack of experience with the entire concept of an Indian pig hunt, she manages to achieve the honor of a first blood on an animal--and then later actually kills it when she and the maharaja go back out to take care of it.A Mary Sue can also frequently be identified by how often everyone around her likes her. In this plot, we got a young woman (Sunny Goodheart--and what a name, I might add) who more than once gushingly admired how Mary was, well, omni-competent--and it is further hinted that the young woman's brother Thomas is attracted to her. Nor is he the only one--the aforementioned maharaja, nicknamed Jimmy, is clearly also drawn to Russell and wants to keep her around. While he shows no sign of actual attraction, the British agent Russell and Holmes meet up with, Nesbit, certainly seems to exude masculine respect for Russell's competence. So does Kimball O'Hara, once he finally comes on camera (and I'll get back to him in a minute). And even aside from all the major characters in the plot, none of the minor ones present Russell with any real difficulty. No one hinders her in any interesting fashion or even takes ill to her in any way.
All of this combined to pretty much make me really wish that Russell had run into more challenges in this book. The previous entries in the series did not seem to come across to me as having this problem so much, but in this one, I fear I kept mentally rolling my eyes and thinking, "yeah yeah yeah, of course she's going to kill the pig" and other similar thoughts. I was actively disappointed when she started telling the reader about how she'd pissed off the maharaja by stating her intention to leave--and how she then lobbed the red herring of starting to talk about how she didn't hear the men sneaking in to lock her into her rooms, making you think "oh, finally, things are getting interesting." Except that the reason that she didn't hear them coming was of course because she wasn't there, because of course she already knew that they were on to her and she'd escaped already. Sigh.
Aside from all of the Mary Sue issues, the plot struck me as shaky as well--mostly due to the whole idea of Russell and Holmes going to India to look for O'Hara, except oh look, here's this potential Russian spy wandering around, and he's got connections to this maharaja, so let's send Russell over to check the maharaja out instead. Except oh look! Of course this maharaja's had O'Hara locked up for the last three years! And oh yeah, did we mention that the mysterious smart kid (see previous comments I have made about how an Uncannily Smart Kid is a sign that a plot is going to suck) who's attached himself to Holmes and Russell is of course O'Hara's son? Way, way, way too much convenience all around.
Last but not least we have O'Hara himself. Now, I'm already well aware that it's very gimmicky to have Russell, King's protagonist, running around in the Sherlock Holmes universe to begin with--King is already invoking the gimmick of using someone else's long-established and by now public-domain characters in her work. So one could argue that for her to also pull in O'Hara from the work of Rudyard Kipling is hardly unexpected. But the problem is, for me that crossed a line somewhere and made his presence feel almost "gimmicky" to me. I've had a similar feeling from oh, say, episodes of the Young Indiana Jones TV series, where Young Indiana Jones had a pile of adventures meeting all sorts of Famous Historical Persons and as I recall, some Famous Actually Fictional But Real In the Series Persons as well. Handled well, it can be entertaining--and from what little we saw of O'Hara, he seemed like an interesting character. But I also suffered from never actually having read Kim in the first place, and I can't help but think that The Game might have been way more interesting to someone who's read that book.
Which leads me also into thinking that it may well have relied too heavily upon a reader's previous familiarity with Kim to evoke interest in this new plot. A good bit of O'Hara's backstory was given, except that it went into the territory of "too much tell and not enough show". O'Hara is on camera for so little a portion of the book that I felt kind of cheated, given all this buildup and hardly any payoff.
So overall, not terribly satisfying. King has done better--and in fact did do better with Locked Rooms.
Locked Rooms picks up pretty much immediately where The Game left off, as we learn that Russell and Holmes have left India--and instead of heading back to Britain, they've gone through Japan instead on their way to San Francisco to take care of some family business of Russell's. The transition between stories, I fear, is a bit shaky; we are told that this was part of their plan all along, and yet, having just read The Game immediately beforehand, I recollect exactly nothing in that book about how they'd intended to head to San Francisco.
There's also several bemusing references to their stop in Japan and hints that Interesting Things happened there. Russell at one point uses the phrase "complexity of events" to describe what happened there--and yet we never are told what actually happened, which was confusing and vaguely annoying to me as a reader. I was torn between wanting to yell "um, so, WHAT HAPPENED IN JAPAN?", half-wondering if I'd somehow missed a book somewhere (though I knew I hadn't), and strongly suspecting that there will in fact be a future book about What Happened In Japan. Which struck me as, well, gimmicky.
So did the use of Dashiell Hammett as a character in this plot, for that matter. See all my comments up above about reacting to the use of Kimball O'Hara as a character; they apply here, only more so since Hammett was an actual real person. As with The Game for me, so too with Locked Rooms; I am not familiar with Hammett's work or his history, so the use of him in the plot doesn't mean much to me and pretty much came across as another excuse to have Russell and Holmes meet a Famous Person.
All that said, I enjoyed Locked Rooms a lot more than I did The Game. All the problems in the previous book with Russell being omni-competent get turned on their ear here as we learn that why yes, Russell can be thrown hugely off her stride. Seeing her trying to come to terms with her past and the deaths of her parents and brother, and even fight with Holmes when he gets too close to the sensitive bits of her repressed memories? That was interesting.
And so was seeing things from Holmes' POV for once! King jumped into Holmes' head for two long chunks of the book, and it was about damned time she'd done so as well. I mean, if she's going to have her protagonist go and marry the world's most renowed detective, it's good to actually see him do some on-camera detecting--not to mention see him reacting to the stresses that Russell's going through and to have their relationship rounded out quite a bit more.
There was some measure of "convenience" to certain aspects of the plot--the 'faceless man' of Russell's nightmares turning out to be her father's shady friend, for example--but not nearly so much as in the previous book, and the far more interesting aspects of the plot helped balance things out rather nicely. The flashbacks that helped bring to life the events of the 1906 earthquake were particularly vivid, as were the descriptions of Chinatown. And I liked how things were tied in to a seemingly random incident in the previous book--the attempt on Russell and Holmes' life with the collapsing balcony in the marketplace.
All in all, two thumbs up!
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-24 07:49 pm (UTC)HH
no subject
Date: 2006-05-24 07:55 pm (UTC)I've described several of the classic traits of a Mary Sue up in my remarks about The Game, which goes to show you that Mary Sues are not limited to fanfic. ;) Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake is also frequently described as a Mary Sue--another Mary Sue trait being whether the character shares any traits with the actual author, such as physical description, a similar name, a similar profession, etc.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-24 08:00 pm (UTC)Thanks!
no subject
Date: 2006-05-24 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-25 09:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-25 09:52 pm (UTC)And my problem with The Game was that there wasn't enough balance. Russell had it way, way too easy in that book, so it came across way too Sue-ish for me. Which is not normal for this series, so I was really glad that Locked Rooms was in better form.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-29 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-29 04:44 pm (UTC)It'll be interesting to see the What Happened in Japan book, though the next thing we're getting out of King is a Kate Martinelli, The Art of Detection. (Which seems to have some tie-ins to Russell and Holmes, or so the description of this book on her site would lead one to believe.) So not sure when we'll be getting the next Russell/Holmes.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-06 02:30 am (UTC)Star Trek.
Anna the Piper.
Hmmmm.....
no subject
Date: 2006-09-03 06:27 am (UTC)(Ooh wow, really old LJ comment. But this is what I get for being massively behind! But I had to snicker at this one.)
Mm-hmm.
Date: 2006-09-05 01:42 pm (UTC):)
Re: Mm-hmm.
Date: 2006-09-06 03:53 am (UTC)No wait. I'd be in print with Star Trek novels. ;)