A Non-Tom Holt Tom Holt Novel

Something unexpected tonight: I finished reading a Tom Holt book that didn't read like many of the other Tom Holt books I've read.

While there was a love story - seems common to his stories, even if the lovers are numpties - there was none of the following:

1. An uncannily capable hero.

2. An uncannily capable hero who should have been a fish out of water but who instead adapted remarkably well to the circumstances.

3, A television reporter keen on getting the big story but generally there to flit around like a ninny.

4. Any mention of Dounreay Nuclear Power Station.

Those elements are as common as the letter E in all the other Tom Holt books I've read, but were absent in The Portable Door. Which made the story that much more enjoyable.

Paul and Sophie are the numpty loser central characters, hired by an old, mysterious firm to do what appears to be useless busywork that would make the Terrible Trivium from The Phantom Tollbooth blush.

As they stumble through organizing spreadsheets and scrying photos for bauxite deposits, they soon learn the secrets of the firm they work for and their putative powers that will probably remain putative.

The story's a slow burn; the eponymous portable door doesn't make an appearance until halfway through the book, and doesn't get used until there are only about a hundred pages left. True to form, it's used numptily.

The climax of the story spools out quickly, which was fantastic for a Tom Holt novel.

The copy I had, early on, had the naughty words crossed out, but as I kept reading the censoring disappeared, probably a sign that a former owner gave up on the story. I could do without the words myself, but I liked the story (I'm kind of a numpty myself).

Nailed It

Tom Holt, nailing the width and breadth of male relationships in two meaty paragraphs 

From his novel "The Portable Door."

The text:

In a way, it felt though all his adult life -- ever since he'd realised that girls weren't irrelevant alien creatures who only cared about inane trifles like hair-toggles and glittery nail varnish (instead of vitally important things, such as making balsa-wood aeroplanes and painting 1/72 scale model soldiers) but were in fact beautiful, terrifying creatures who never seemed to notice he was there -- all his life, he'd been pulling and heaving at a door that led into an enchanted garden, and quite suddenly he'd noticed that in face it opened inwards and all he had to do was push gently with the tips of his fingers.

That said, he hadn't got a clue what he was supposed to do next. Presumably at some point he was going to have to say something toe-curlingly embarrassing, and if that went okay there'd be kissing, and, well, stuff like that. Obviously he was all for that, just as he'd always really fancied owning a big yacht and sailing it single-handed to New Zealand. Now that he was at least part of the way along, he had the unpleasant feeling that his yacht was an open boat, and he was adrift in it in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On the other hand, he assured himself -- after all, it couldn't be too difficult, could it? He considered his relatives; Uncle Trevor and Cousin Darren and Cousin Lorna's husband Eric, men with the personal charm of dustbins and just enough intelligence between the three of them to power a traffic light, and yet they'd all contrived to attract, woo, bed, and marry females, often not in that order. If they could do it, so could a lawnmower or an answering machine or a tin-opener or a small rock, and so, by implication, could he. In theory.

Tom Holt: Absurdity of the Ordinary

Just finished reading Tom Holt’s “The Better Mousetrap.” Here’s what I see:

Lots of the ordinary. But juxtaposed enough with the extraordinary that we look at the absurdity of the ordinary in our own lives and say, “Yeah, if I could get rid of that, I could write my own novels (or slay dragons, or figure out why I keep getting dead).”



One of Holt’s great successes is to show how sometimes we let the ordinary and mundane fill up our lives when we could be having greater adventures, whether we have one of the three known Portable Doors or not.

Other writers do this too, of course. I think to Douglas Adams and Arthur Dent being the great maker of sandwiches, of course, among many other things Adams does. It’s a common fantasy or science fiction trope, and just about everyone from JRR Tolkien and JK Rowling and Ray Bradbury do it to some extent, some with more success than others.

My favorite example of this leans toward the conversation Mr. Halloway and Mr. Dark have in front of the cigar store in “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” where Dark is intent on finding Will and Jim but Halloway succeeds in throwing him off the trail by loudly bragging up the twenty-five cent cigar he’s just purchased at the cigar store. The cigar smoke is just the beginning of his methodic madness to blind the Dust Witch to the location of the boys, and it’s done not in a deliberate, sequential manner, but by chance and inspiration.

But Holt, I think does something a bit different with it. I’m still trying to pin down exactly what, but here are a few samples that stood out to me in “The Better Mousetrap”:

(I write a bit more about this scene in my previous Tom Holt post.)

The Door opened again in the back wall of a Marks & Spencers in west London, and Frank stepped out, looking unusually grave. Putting out a fire, saving several lives and many millions of pounds: morceau de gateau. Now he was going to have to do something really difficult and scary. He was going to try and buy a shirt.

Holt goes on for more than a page as Frank attempts to buy a shirt, fretting he’ll end up looking like a waiter in whatever he picks out – something Emily confirms when next they meet, on their way into more mortal peril.

Then there’s this, where Emily faces the greatest of perils:

That’s, um, fascinating. Does the dream also record how Emily Spitzer manages to kill the greatest dragon of all time armed only with a mobile phone and a roll of peppermints?

Of course.

Well?

The dream also ordains: Don’t spoon-feed the lazy cow, make her figure it out for herself.

Ah. The dream sounds suspiciously like my mother.

Dealing with dragons, well, Bilbo can tell us how that works out. Maybe not the time to fret about feeling poorly treated by your mother. But there you are again, grounded in reality as the character talks to an actual dragon in the darkness.

We’re clearly in a fantasy world, but a world so anchored in our own we can almost imagine ourselves making these same Choose Your Own Adventure Choices, only getting muddled when things go badly and we find ourselves facing one of those “deadly” situations we encounter in real life and think are so terrible to behold.

Maybe that’s what Holt does right with the absurdity of the ordinary.

More ideas for my own novel. Chuck Jones is right. Fill your head with ideas, lest nothing ever come out of it, if I can paraphrase the man.

Just one funny thing on this book. A Goodreads reviewer commented on the number of grammatical errors in the novel. I didn’t see any, but I wasn’t looking for them. But I did note whomever wrote the blurb on the back probably wrote the blurb for other Tom Holt novels in rapid succession, as Jane, one of Holt’s other characters, shows up on the back cover but not in the book, where the role of Jane is adequately filled by Emily Spitzer.

The Better Mousetrap, Part One

A week or so ago, I offered the following backhanded gallantry toward Tom Holt’s “The Better Mousetrap,” though I did leave the title of the book a mystery:

I said this after reading (and re-reading, and enjoying) “Flying Dutch” and “Who’s Afraid of Beowulf,” thinking the former was better but lamenting with each read how similar the two novels were.

Nevertheless, when I saw “The Better Mousetrap” at the local thrift store, I scooped it up because I knew I liked Holt enough to give him a fourth try (the other is “Blonde Bombshell,” which was okay).

But “Mousetrap” is growing on me.

I’m learning more about Holt as I go. He’s almost as prolific as Terry Pratchett, to whom he’s compared. But he writes a different kind of novel – less silly, just as thoughtful.

But why am I writing about “Mousetrap” now?

Because of this:

Character Frank Carpenter is off on an impossible mission – picking out a shirt to wear on a date. As a fashion-ignorant individual, I thought the scene clever. And it’s a great way to show character – not in the derring-do of preventing deaths at the behest of an insurance company that doesn’t want to pay out, but at an ordinary task that’s just as daunting, viz:

[S]ome of these shirts were right and some of them were wrong, and he had no idea of how the rules worked. All he knew was that if you got it right, you looked a million dollars and lovely women melted into your arms alike an ice cream on a hot day, and if you got it wrong, children pointed at you in the street. It was, he couldn’t help thinking, a bit like the other incomprehensible scary thing, the one he was buying the shirt for [a date with Emily, a woman whose life he has saved at least three times]. Finding the right one, having the wit to know it when he found it, keeping it, looking after it properly, never letting it go. Washing it occasionally. Ironing. Life is so much easier, of course, if you never bother.

Make your characters relatable, even if they’re magical or clever or both, far beyond the ken of your readers, and the readers will beat a path to your door, or at least to your books in the thrift shop with the hope that maybe in the future they’ll pay full price for one of your novels.

So now, one more thing to do in my own novels . . .

Who's Afraid of Beowulf?

I was, perhaps, a little unkind to Tom Holt and “Who’s Afraid of Beowulf” a week or so ago on Facebook when I posted the following:

I would like to retract part of what I said. Because first of all the Dounreay site in Scotland was not a nuclear power station, but rather two stations, one used to develop fast breeder reactors and the other for submarine reactor testing. Second of all, because Dounreay didn’t appear all that much in “Who’s Afraid of Beowulf.”

The rest, well, it pretty much stands.

Although I liked WAOB more than I thought I would. Or at least I think I do.

I do know I like this passage:

"I wish you all didn’t have to go,” [Hildy] said. “There’s so much you haven’t seen, so much you could do. We need you in the twentieth century.”

“I doubt it,” said Arvarodd. “There aren’t any more wolves to kill or sorcerers to be overthrown, and I think we’d just cause a lot of confusion.”

“Let’s face it,” said Brynjolf, “if it hadn’t been for you, Vel-Hilda, I don’t know what would have happened.”

Hildy blushed. “I didn’t do much,” she said.

“No one ever does,” said Arvarodd, smiling. “What are the deeds of heroes, except a few frightened people doing the best they can in the circumstances? Sigurd had no trouble at all killing the dragon; it was a very old dragon, and its eyesight was starting to do./ If he’d waited another couple of weeks, it would have died of old age.”

“Or take Beowulf,” said Brynjolf. “Weedy little bloke, got sand kicked in his face on the beach as often as not. But he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It’s not who you are that matters, it’s what you do.”

“No said Arvarodd, “you’re wrong there. It’s not what you do, it’s who you are.”

With its mixed up, relativist moral, this passage sums up the book for me.

I know fantasy requires a good suspension of belief. This book required a bit too much suspension. It’s hard to believe a group of people could pop out of the ground after 1,200 years and adapt to society so quickly. Holt addresses this problem in “Flying Dutch” by having his immortals really live in that time, revisiting society once every seven years. This hapless group of Vikings didn’t have that luxury. And it’s probably a good thing, as the Evil Genius sorcerer mentioned here could have wiped them out easily, except when it came down to it, he didn’t want to. He just wanted to play a board game.

So no big battles. Not even any real psych9ological battles. The opposing sides meet, clack swords a few times, and then, well, they all go to Valhalla. I mean, it’s okay, but not really all that satisfying.