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annathepiperLast year when I read Elizabeth Peters' The Serpent on the Crown, I'd remarked that it really rather felt like someone else had ghost-written it for her. I am bummed to observe that the next installment in the long-running Amelia Peabody series, which has been near and dear to my heart for ages on end, really rather feels the same way. Not only were all the familiar characters just flat, flat, flat, not only was most of the on-screen activity just a lot of conversation reacting to the few suspenseful bits of the story, but there were also a couple of mistakes in the prose that historically I've trusted Peters to just not do.
Spelling "intelligence" with three l's was one example. But the one that jolted me harder out of the story was this. If you've been reading the Amelia Peabodies, you know that all the novels from about halfway through the series onward alternate between first-person POV for Amelia and third-person for her son Ramses. In this book, in one of the Ramses sections, I found a sentence where suddenly the paragraph was talking about "our expedition" doing this and that... as if somehow Peters had forgotten that she was in a Ramses section rather than an Amelia one.
Either of those errors are certainly things I could see any writer doing--even the very best ones. And maybe I'm just more sensitive to screwups like that in text, maybe the copyeditor just happened to miss those when the book was being edited... but. Between these two little screwups and the overall flatness of the prose, it just really made the book not feel like Peters at all.
So what was this book about? Mostly, it was about Howard Carter discovering King Tut's tomb--and how the Emersons were on the sidelines of it without really being involved in that dig at all. While I do appreciate how Peters arranges things to respect actual history and keep them out of the direct limelight with those goings on, it also made for kind of frustrating reading--since you only really got to see the wonders of what was in that tomb in brief and scattered glimpses. Which really, really diminished the dramatic impact. The other plotline, involving conspiracies and coup and assassination attempts, suffered from the same problem as in The Serpent on the Crown. We see very little actual action involved with this plot, and a whole lot of Emerson Clan As Talking Heads Having Endless Councils of War. There are way too many councils, and just not enough war, as it were.
Now, all these things said, there are several things here that also make me cut the book some slack. For one thing, Peters is now 80 years old, and that's a venerable age indeed to still be writing, especially working on your eighteenth book in a long-running, best-selling series (not to mention HOLY CRAP, eighteenth book, how on earth do you keep the series lively after so many installments?). For another, Amelia herself as well as her husband are aging; the first Amelia book was set way back in 1884, and this one's in 1922. For a third, the Emerson Clan is definitely a clan by this point in the timeline, with not only Amelia and Emerson, but also Walter and Evelyn, Ramses and Nefret and their twins, the adopted girl Sennia, Ramses' best bud David and his wife Lia (Walter and Evelyn's daughter). So all in all I kind of can't blame Peters for the shift over to more domestic plots... but damn, I miss the days when Amelia and Emerson were still young and vigorous, and Ramses was getting old enough to be an active force as well.
Last but not least it is worth mentioning that according to things I've read, Peters has announced that she won't write any more Amelia Peabodies after the 1922 discovery of King Tut's tomb... though it is unclear whether this means "no more Amelia Peabodies at all" or just "no more set chronologically after 1922". The ending of this one, given this, is rather sweet and aww-inducing and a nice note on which to go out. But I'll have to admit that if Peters is losing the luster off her writing--or if, as I suspect, she's actually got a ghost writer now because she's just old--then yeah, it's time to stop.
So all things considered, I think I have to give this book two and a half stars, vs. maybe four for the Amelia Peabodies as a whole. I don't know if I'll re-read this one, but I'll definitely have to give it another shot, maybe next time I do a complete pass through the series.
Spelling "intelligence" with three l's was one example. But the one that jolted me harder out of the story was this. If you've been reading the Amelia Peabodies, you know that all the novels from about halfway through the series onward alternate between first-person POV for Amelia and third-person for her son Ramses. In this book, in one of the Ramses sections, I found a sentence where suddenly the paragraph was talking about "our expedition" doing this and that... as if somehow Peters had forgotten that she was in a Ramses section rather than an Amelia one.
Either of those errors are certainly things I could see any writer doing--even the very best ones. And maybe I'm just more sensitive to screwups like that in text, maybe the copyeditor just happened to miss those when the book was being edited... but. Between these two little screwups and the overall flatness of the prose, it just really made the book not feel like Peters at all.
So what was this book about? Mostly, it was about Howard Carter discovering King Tut's tomb--and how the Emersons were on the sidelines of it without really being involved in that dig at all. While I do appreciate how Peters arranges things to respect actual history and keep them out of the direct limelight with those goings on, it also made for kind of frustrating reading--since you only really got to see the wonders of what was in that tomb in brief and scattered glimpses. Which really, really diminished the dramatic impact. The other plotline, involving conspiracies and coup and assassination attempts, suffered from the same problem as in The Serpent on the Crown. We see very little actual action involved with this plot, and a whole lot of Emerson Clan As Talking Heads Having Endless Councils of War. There are way too many councils, and just not enough war, as it were.
Now, all these things said, there are several things here that also make me cut the book some slack. For one thing, Peters is now 80 years old, and that's a venerable age indeed to still be writing, especially working on your eighteenth book in a long-running, best-selling series (not to mention HOLY CRAP, eighteenth book, how on earth do you keep the series lively after so many installments?). For another, Amelia herself as well as her husband are aging; the first Amelia book was set way back in 1884, and this one's in 1922. For a third, the Emerson Clan is definitely a clan by this point in the timeline, with not only Amelia and Emerson, but also Walter and Evelyn, Ramses and Nefret and their twins, the adopted girl Sennia, Ramses' best bud David and his wife Lia (Walter and Evelyn's daughter). So all in all I kind of can't blame Peters for the shift over to more domestic plots... but damn, I miss the days when Amelia and Emerson were still young and vigorous, and Ramses was getting old enough to be an active force as well.
Last but not least it is worth mentioning that according to things I've read, Peters has announced that she won't write any more Amelia Peabodies after the 1922 discovery of King Tut's tomb... though it is unclear whether this means "no more Amelia Peabodies at all" or just "no more set chronologically after 1922". The ending of this one, given this, is rather sweet and aww-inducing and a nice note on which to go out. But I'll have to admit that if Peters is losing the luster off her writing--or if, as I suspect, she's actually got a ghost writer now because she's just old--then yeah, it's time to stop.
So all things considered, I think I have to give this book two and a half stars, vs. maybe four for the Amelia Peabodies as a whole. I don't know if I'll re-read this one, but I'll definitely have to give it another shot, maybe next time I do a complete pass through the series.