Pavane

Rating:
Summary: Not Wholly Unspectacular
Review: "Pavane" is a collection of six intertwined, character-driven short stories, followed by a "coda" which fundamentally challenges any sense you may have been able to make of what you've read up to that point. Set in an alternate reality in which England was defeated by Spain in 1588, Science has been ruthlessly suppressed by an all-powerful Catholic Church. The odd thing about this book is that you can't help wondering, upon looking blearily up from the last page, whether perhaps the church actually was acting in mankind's best interest by engineering this suppression... The characters here are very three-dimensional, and very compelling. You will find yourself, well, strangely absorbed by the ebb and flow of the fortunes of the Firm of Strange, which tale loosely forms the backstory and background of these curiously interwoven stories.

Wow... what a book. "Pavane" is not your usual "alternate history" book. To say too much about why this is the case would be a spoiler, but just be prepared for some odd twists near the end. I enjoyed the story called "The Lady Margaret," which poetically limns a savagely twisted love triangle, quite a bit. "Brother John," about an artist-monk whose life is wildly changed by what he sees at the Inquisition, is incredibly powerful, although as a story I think it has a few flaws. The latter part of the book is mostly concerned with the machinations and amoral politickings of a group of lords and ladies, which as an American I suppose I found mostly to be just depressing. Anyway, here you will find powerful elements of fantasy, incredible imagery, and a haunting, grim writing style. The author once made his living illustrating graphic novels, and this shows through in a myriad of ways. One has an overpowering sense that the writer could SEE everything that happens in these stories before he wrote them, and just sat down one day to describe what he saw. In short -- great visuals. Also, there is more tense, desperate grimness packed into each page than most people who are not citizens of Bangladesh are faced with in an entire lifetime. Not that that's necessarily a compliment -- I just want prospective readers to be prepared. I also want to say, for anyone who is new to this genre, to try searching the internet for sites that have the word "Uchronia" somewhere in their text -- you may be pleasantly surprised.

I must say it again -- this book is really a far cry from your usual alternate history novel. The genre, at its best, is typically characterized by an almost painfully cerebral gaming out of the possible concatenated changes which may have accrued if a particular pivotal moment in history had gone... differently. "Pavane," however, scarcely ever reminds the reader of the painstakingly scrupulous attention to historical detail which went into the making of "Fatherland" or "Guns of the South." This book gets by almost purely, (and quite successfully, I must say) on ATMOSPHERE -- brooding, dark, and grim. If that's your cup of tea, then by all means please read "Pavane."

Rating:
Summary: Not Wholly Unspectacular
Review: "Pavane" is a collection of six intertwined, character-driven short stories, followed by a "coda" which fundamentally challenges any sense you may have been able to make of what you've read up to that point. Set in an alternate reality in which England was defeated by Spain in 1588, Science has been ruthlessly suppressed by an all-powerful Catholic Church. The odd thing about this book is that you can't help wondering, upon looking blearily up from the last page, whether perhaps the church actually was acting in mankind's best interest by engineering this suppression... The characters here are very three-dimensional, and very compelling. You will find yourself, well, strangely absorbed by the ebb and flow of the fortunes of the Firm of Strange, which tale loosely forms the backstory and background of these curiously interwoven stories.

Wow... what a book. "Pavane" is not your usual "alternate history" book. To say too much about why this is the case would be a spoiler, but just be prepared for some odd twists near the end. I enjoyed the story called "The Lady Margaret," which poetically limns a savagely twisted love triangle, quite a bit. "Brother John," about an artist-monk whose life is wildly changed by what he sees at the Inquisition, is incredibly powerful, although as a story I think it has a few flaws. The latter part of the book is mostly concerned with the machinations and amoral politickings of a group of lords and ladies, which as an American I suppose I found mostly to be just depressing. Anyway, here you will find powerful elements of fantasy, incredible imagery, and a haunting, grim writing style. The author once made his living illustrating graphic novels, and this shows through in a myriad of ways. One has an overpowering sense that the writer could SEE everything that happens in these stories before he wrote them, and just sat down one day to describe what he saw. In short -- great visuals. Also, there is more tense, desperate grimness packed into each page than most people who are not citizens of Bangladesh are faced with in an entire lifetime. Not that that's necessarily a compliment -- I just want prospective readers to be prepared. I also want to say, for anyone who is new to this genre, to try searching the internet for sites that have the word "Uchronia" somewhere in their text -- you may be pleasantly surprised.

I must say it again -- this book is really a far cry from your usual alternate history novel. The genre, at its best, is typically characterized by an almost painfully cerebral gaming out of the possible concatenated changes which may have accrued if a particular pivotal moment in history had gone... differently. "Pavane," however, scarcely ever reminds the reader of the painstakingly scrupulous attention to historical detail which went into the making of "Fatherland" or "Guns of the South." This book gets by almost purely, (and quite successfully, I must say) on ATMOSPHERE -- brooding, dark, and grim. If that's your cup of tea, then by all means please read "Pavane."

Rating:
Summary: Stylistically strong, thematically incoherent
Review: *Pavane* has some beautifully realized "chapters" in its presentation of linked short stories, and I found myself increasingly drawn into the world it portrayed. As other reviewers have suggested, however, its mixing of fantasy elements with an alternate history premise doesn't work all that well, and is often simply confusing. And the conclusion provided in its "Coda" comes close to wrecking the book. The sudden, and ultimately unconvincing, reversal of practically everything that has gone before undercuts what hard-earned coherence Roberts has managed to create. It is an extremely artificial attempt to generate ambiguity, and since it too becomes mixed up with the "mystical" strands of the plot the final effect is close to a complete shambles. This is unfortunate since the various parts of the text, with a few exceptions, were quite strong until its ending. For a considerably more successful reconciliation of mysticism and alternate history read Philip K. Dick's *The Man in the High Castle.*

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic rather than fantasy. File under 'great'.
Review: Anthony Burgess sent me to this one, though that wouldn't be recommendation enough for everyone - it was one of his selection of 99 best postwar novels (worth reading in itself) and one of the few that I hadn't at least heard of. Hard to describe without falling back on cliches - for Pavane, they seem strangely apt and unavoidable. Resonant: there is a far distant corner of my mind which is forever Pavane and scenes float into my mind at the strangest times. Elliptical - it takes a single notion: that the Reformation had never happened and that Catholicism had continued to dominate Western society and politics - and uses it as springboard from which to explore ideas about communication, science, humanity and life. It certainly breaks out of its category - science enters into it, although more in the form of anti-science, and though fantastic, it's too firmly grounded to count as fantasy. This perhaps makes it sound dry or fey - it's neither. A book that flips our own world on its head while somehow shedding new light on it. Just read it ! (Bob Machin,Stirling,Scotland

Rating:
Summary: Pavanne
Review: As an avid reader of Alternative History, I think Keith Roberts's Pavanne falls far short of its potential. The individual stories are uneven, although beautifully written. (I think I would have appreciated the book more had I understood that they were originally published separately as short stories.) My favorite was "The Signaller," which faintly resembles the use of semaphores in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of the stories are starkly anti-Catholic, while on the other hand one of the stories appears to justify the Inquisition. It is this unevenness that makes the book as a whole of considerably less interest than the individual stories. One of the aspects of Alternative History that makes it so interesting is that the alternative scenario appears so plausible. Unfortunately, that is not the case with Roberts's novel, despite an impressive literary style.

Rating:
Summary: Corfe Castle is just as he said it is.
Review: I first read PAVANE while in the Army, in Frankfurt, Germany. I finished the last 15 pages while waiting for dinner with an English friend. When she found what I was reading, she told me there really is a Corfe Castle. Our next trip to England, I drove down the Purbeck Hills, and "knew" it was just around the next hill; and it was!! Just like the epilogue: coming home to a place I'd never been before. I wanted to use it as alternate history in an SF course several years ago, and found it out of print. Maybe now it's back, I can use it next time.

Rating:
Summary: This story has haunted me for over 25 years
Review: I first read this work in 1970 and have never forgotten it unlike innumerable others I've read. Though this book will be classified as science fiction, this story transcends such limiting appelations. A beautiful set of seemingly unrelated stories based on an intelligent and plausible historical premise with fully developed characters and a very believable setting. In the end come they come together in a conclusion which having read it seems at once inevitable yet not one which I could have predicted. I lost my copy of this book years ago and have searched for another since to no avail. I was stunned to find it here in an apparently new printing. Del

Rating:
Summary: Poor
Review: I was very eager to read this novel after reading numerous wonderful reviews about it in magazines and online, so when I finally bought it I was quite disappointed. Although a very dense and intricate novel, it was ultimately very boring. Even individually, the "measures" barely stood up alone as short stories, and together made a poor body of work. The "twist" in the Coda makes one wonder whether the preceding stories were a waste of time. Yes, worldbuilding is fun in science fiction, but it does not necessarily make a good novel. I am not surprised that this novel has not achieved a higher status or circulation. It doesn't even have a cult fiction quality to it. Go read something else.

Rating:
Summary: very strong on atmosphere, very weak on plot
Review: I'm usually a sucker for alternate-history novels, and this one is a classic in the field, but I found myself less and less interested in it the more I read it. The first few chapters are quite strong at setting the stage, but after that, though the book is very strong on atmosphere and descriptive plotting, it's extremely thin on plot. This is not "lean" writing by any stretch, I would term it much closer to "rococo".

Rating:
Summary: An eerie, but beautiful, book
Review: In case you were wondering, a "pavane" is a stately dance in elaborate clothing, and this book is contructed like such a dance: six measures and a coda, each one a separate, but tenuously connected, story. It's an alternate history of the world in which Queen Elizabeth I is assassinated in 1588, and the Spanish Armada conquers England. For hundreds of years after that date, the Roman Church rules most of the world with a somewhat iron hand, keeping to a minimum the progress of science and inventions. Throughout the book you wonder about the rationale of the Church leaders for this stance, until everything (sort of) is made clear in the Coda. The writing is quite lyrical at times, and even though a reader might wish for more information about the world the author created, enough is given to enable you to understand what is happening, even if you don't quite know what's going on (if that sounds like a contradiction, it certainly is, but you have to read the book to understand what I mean). If you enjoy "alternate history" works, I think you will like this book very much.