Review - Beauty is a Witch

Earlier this year I reviewed a short military science fantasy story, "As Black As Hell", by the multi-talented John Lambshead of John's Toy Soldiers. I finished up with this line:

... here is a story that rewards slow, deep reflection, even if it can also be read as fast, shallow fun.

I've just read John's latest, "Beauty is a Witch", which is better described as urban fantasy; it's clear the same is true. It's set in the London of John's Commission, and is a dark, but jaunty journey through an underworld, an otherworld and the omnipresent shadows of our world. The story has just been published in the Baen anthology The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge, and there are excerpts at John's blog, here.

The central character is ostensibly Rosalynne, a sharply-dressed and sharp witch, but also very much London, and East London in particular.

Given what for me were the key themes of "As Black As Hell", power relationships in history and a supposedly post-colonial and post-class society, it should be no surprise location is so central here too. Power relationships are also explored, this time between men and women.

For as its full title suggests, The Wild Side is intended to be "urban fantasy and an erotic edge", with these the instructions given the authors by the editor, Mark L. Van Name.

Erotica is of course a highly subjective thing, and so whether or not they were in the case of "Beauty is a Witch" is something I can answer only for myself. I'll say there's more sexual desire on show than sex, and that desire is rarely reciprocated. And the issue of reciprocation is a key element of the challenge of the story.

The East End of London, or certain understandings of it, permeates the story. "Beauty is a Witch" can be divided into two parts, the events in a reimagining of the notorious - and real - pub The Blind Beggar, and a flight through a dangerous, nightmarish otherworld inspired by imagery from Dickens or Hogarth, the landscape of Jack the Ripper, but one that seemed for me run through with a more mediaeval mood.

That mediaeval might come from the nature of John's Commission universe, possibly also from the influence of Shakespeare; "Beauty is a witch" is one of his lines, and he was a character referred to in "As Black As Hell". The Commission universe is a place where the fantastical is real, the Commission itself being a government organisation which engages with the supernatural and even uses it, with a vampiric creature - Karla - a major character. It's also a hard place, brutal, even cruel, regardless of the humour.

Those certain understandings of the East End fit then, but perhaps differently than we might expect, perhaps not by a conscious choice, but as a result of the influence, if not the hold, interpretations of the East End have on the popular imagination in the UK. A thought on the nature of origins is also reflected in the story itself: "Great works of art caused their own shadows in the otherworld, or maybe it was the other way round."

For a sense of how this comes together, here's part of the opening scene:

George Cornell was a powerful, heavy-set man, who would never have been considered handsome. He might have been sexy, in a thuggish sort of way, but for the ragged bullet hole in his forehead. He flickered slightly, outline blurring.

And a little later in that scene:

"Has that fat poufter been in tonight?" Cornell asked. 

"Not yet, George," said Henry. 

Rosalynne ignored the exchange. Eidolons tended to go around short loops. It was dangerous to interact too closely with one. You could get inserted into their pocket of reality. 

Ronnie Kray, the fat poufter in question, had unsurprisingly taken great exception to being described as such and had expressed his displeasure with a Mauser nine millimetre parabellum. This all happened in the Blind Beggar, one rainy night way back in the sixties.

This is where we learn Rosalynne's nature, as a witch and a rather abrasive character, and here she is seemingly threatened with burning. Things don't get much better, with her soon after being harrassed by both a top-hatted 'gentleman' and a gargoyle and hunted by the pair of Karla and her bonded master, Jameson, the leading characters in "As Black As Hell". We learn little of who she is, or her motivations and never quite get to like her, despite her being pitted against the inhuman or inhumane, whether a pursuing demon or a state agency that may have the power to fix a trial. There is some play on her possibly being a wronged party, and the underdog, but it's half-hearted:

It wasn’t fair! Everyone had it in for her. All she was trying to do was earn a pound or two. Why wouldn’t they all just leave her alone?

The chase that follows runs through a hostile landscape of brutality and grime, which Rosalynne attempts to escape at every turn in the only way she knows, or is allowed, through her magic. The use of the magic itself is shown, with the creation of certain spells described, and other magical aspects of the setting hold the interest too; the nature of a demonic tattoo is arguably critical to an understanding of the whole thing.

The writing itself is again fast-paced, only occasionally interrupted by explanation or slowed down by the detail of a certain arrangement, although there are moments in which an action or spoken passage seems odd. John writes action scenes well, and the battle with Karla struck me as The Matrix bullet time-like.

The East End is also a natural habitat for the comic, exaggerated dramatic style of controlled violence used in the two of John's stories I've read, but again this is something with which much UK drama seems to be infused. It was suited to the more military outing of "As Black As Hell", and the East London underworld makes another good context. Here's an example in the suddenly quiet pub:

The man took a flat silver case from a breast pocket, nonchalantly pulled out a cigarette, and tapped the end on the case. His eyes swept the occupants of the bar. Rosalynne shrank back into her alcove, her apprehension turning to outright fear. He lit the cigarette in direct contravention of the United Kingdom’s health and safety laws. No one protested.

There's plenty more grounding in the contemporary UK too, with mention of a run on "Newcastle Rock", the gargoyle wolf-whistling "like a white-van driver" and a quote from The Fast Show. The disarmingly eccentric makes it in too, with a policeman given the line: “You don’t have the computer skills to hack into a sausage roll let alone a bank.”

On the surface the story looks to end with Rosalynne getting her comeuppance, ugly as it is, but here is where the real haziness comes in, and the story demands we look at something John refers to in his notes:

East London is now home to gleaming towers of chrome and glass, the largest financial centre in the world. They still gamble there, but now with trillions of dollars rather than a handful of gold sovereigns. The girls still ply the oldest trade, but the modern belle de jours charge three hundred pounds an hour and the cost of a luxury hotel room and taxi. It’s a far cry from the penny knee trembler in a dirty alley. Cocaine has replaced gin as life’s little helper. Criminals still flourish but they use computers rather than razors.

How you feel about the closing, and the story as a whole, will likely depend on how you feel about those belles du jours. Are they prey, or predator, neither, or both? John gives us Rosalynne's thinking, which is the realisation that as prey she may have a power over her predator, of sorts, and may be able to use him for her own ends:

It remained to be seen who owned whom.

But this comes after the realisation she has no choice, and as a character she is shown as mercenary; quite why we know not. The complication is the fact that she is also shown to enjoy the predations, seemingly as a result of the magic involved, that tattoo.

A writer might tell us there's no view on show, that it's just the facts, or observation of them, but a writer does choose the words he or she uses, and where the story begins and ends. I choose to take this story as suggesting a certain adaptation, that we are capable of rationalising the bad things that happen to us, and passing that bad on to others in turn, almost as a currency; that because the world can be seen as a rough place - in "Beauty is a Witch" it really is - that roughness is natural, even good.

This is self-reinforcing. Maybe it's fitting Rosalynne has so little backstory here. For this way of thinking we need to know only what is, not what was or what could be.

The Shakespeare quote that opens it all summarises this interpretation:

Beauty is a witch, against whose charms faith melteth into blood.

Whatever we think of Shakespeare, we should listen closely to John. This story is more than Rosalynne's "traditional two-fingered English salute before resuming her flight."

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