• …
  • About
  • Vampire Month Alumni
  • World Book Night

Lurking Musings

~ Musings of a newly published writer

Lurking Musings

Tag Archives: Egypt

[Review] The Rings of Anubis by E. Catherine Tobler

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Archaeology, E. Catherine Tobler, Egypt, Indiana Jones, Rings of Anubis, Steampunk


Published in 2013 by: Masque Books 

Released as a duology – two ebooks:

Book One: Gold and Glass

Book Two: Silver and Steam

Eleanor Folley is the daughter of an archaeologist who is working on her father’s ‘Niknackatarium’ at the Exposition Universalle in Paris in 1889 when her dark past catches up with her. She is approached by Agent Virgil Mallory, a member of a secretive organisation with suspicious motives known as Mistral who are interested in her past association with Christian Hubert, a roguish archaeologist more in the mould of Indiana Jones than her academic father, and also in a set of rings known as the Rings of Anubis that are linked to her dead Egyptian mother. Eleanor is recruited into Mistral as a consultant and there then ensues a fun romp across a Victorian Steampunk world in search of the rings. On the way there are complications galore and intrigue enough to keep the cast of variable characters busy throughout.

Of course, there is the inevitable love triangle which seems unavoidable in stories where the primary character is female. The one here is entertaining as it involves both the rogueish Hubert – the blast from the past who the main character never trusted then and certainly doesn’t now – and the stiff and proper Agent Mallory – whose overly formal demeanour disguises some interesting flaws and dark secrets, of which his opium addiction is only a minor one. The triangle is also suitably kept in the background rather than being the focus of the story as it becomes very clear that Eleanor’s true love is actually Egypt itself and, in particular,  her quest to find out what happened to her mother and how it ties in with the rings of Anubis. This drive, along with her being a slightly older heroine than normal at 30 years old and having a dubious past, serve to make her a very interesting character who manages to be strong and feminine without resorting to unrealistic clichés. This allows her to carry the book and makes all her responses realistic and believable.

There are a number of flaws in this work, the main one being that it is sometimes hard to remember that Virgil Mallory is supposed to be French. He comes across so perfectly as the typical stiff backed English gentleman throughout the book that when you meet his vineyard owning French family there is a bit of a dissonance. Not a major one, just a brief ‘Oh yes, he’s French’ moment which temporarily shakes you from the story. The other is the tendency for flashbacks which come from several different time points from several different character point of views. This means you have to pay attention to the titles of the chapters in order to work out which year is which and as there are so many switches it can some times be difficult to work out what is happening. However, the back stories are compelling enough to make this effort worthwhile.

Something that is not a flaw but can be better described as an oddity is the arrangement of the story into a duology. It is common enough to find trilogies in genre fiction (ever since Tolkien’s publishers decided Lord of the Rings should be divided into three books it has almost become compulsory for fantasy and SF authors to release trilogies) but duologies are rare indeed and I am not quite sure why it was done in this case. At the end of book one there is no real sense of an appropriate cut off point – no resolution with the promise of more to come, no major cliffhanger that might leave you wanting to find out what happens next. The book just ends then picks up straight away at the start of book two as if all you had done was turn the page to the next chapter. Had this been a physical book I might have said that the publishers had set a page number limit for optimum printing costs and perhaps this was the case – using the same format for paperback and ebook. However, in cases like this I feel it is better to write two distinct books – give the readers a resolution or a cliffhanger and therefore a strong reason to buy book two – rather than simply cut it at approximately the right number of pages.

Overall this is a very well executed Steampunk adventure story that combines enough differences in society and technology from the real world Victorian period to be unique while maintaining enough of the fashions, manners and mores of the time. The touch of supernatural elements is also well done, with two major reveals – Mallory’s big secret and the secret of the Rings – demonstrating the presence of such things in this world and therefore riffing off some elements of Urban Fantasy and transplanting them into a Steampunk setting. The few flaws are more than adequately overcome by the many merits, including the strong characters and the intrigues of the Mistral organisation which contribute to making what should be a relatively easy task – finding and recovering the lost rings of Anubis – far more complicated.

I would definitely consider reading any future works by Tobler on the basis of this strong debut.

[AW Blog chain post] Seven

11 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Absolute Write, Colossus, Egypt, Greece, Mausoleum at Helicarnassus, pharos of alexandria, Photography, Rhodes, Seven, Seven Wonders, Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, The Colossus of Rhodes, The Great Pyramid of Giza, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, The Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Turkey


The number seven has a lot connected to it: Virtues, Sins, Samurai, Sages (in both Greece and China), Dwarves and Brides (with an equal number of brothers to accompany them). There were also seven Kings of Rome and equally seven emperors not to mention Shakespeare’s ages of man, Gaiman’s Endless, Tolkien’s Valar (and stones and stars and Dwarf kings, but only one White tree) and Martin’s Kingdoms of Westeros… At one point there were also seven Doctors in Doctor Who but recently they seem to have acquired some more from somewhere. We could also talk about Seven of Nine, Blakes Seven or the fact that 7 inches is the diameter of a 45rpm gramaphone record…

One of the Seven Sages of Greece – Cleobulus of Lindos, one time Tyrant of Lindos

But what I want to talk about is none of these. I actually want to talk about one thing I have missed from that list above…

Yeah, ok, I have missed a lot from that list because 7 is a very common number in a lot of things. However, I missed one thing that is obvious and probably should not require you to check the same wikipedia page I have been looking at to know about it. What I want to talk about are the seven wonders of the ancient world.

I’ve always been fascinated by these, ever since hearing about them at primary school. Things so grand and over the top that their reputations have lasted thousands of years. Of course, I am sure you all know the names of the seven ancient wonders, but just in case here is the list:

The Great Pyramid at Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Helicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse (or Pharos) of Alexandria.

It is interesting to note that two of them are graves (the pyramid and the mausoleum), two of them are examples of great feats of engineering for the time (the Hanging Gardens and the Lighthouse) and another two are of religious significance (the temple of Artemis and the Statue of Zeus). The odd one out is the Colossus of Rhodes which is a statue of a Titan which might therefore be considered ‘religious’ but is a bit of a weird one and could also probably count as a ‘feat of engineering’* You could therefore argue that the wonders were indicative of the interests of the cultures in those periods.

In my life, I have visited the sites of three of these monuments. I went to the outskirts of Cairo to visit the Pyramids on my Honeymoon and while I did not go into the Great Pyramid itself because of the massive queues, I did see it and went into one of the lesser ones. Quite a humbling and frightening experience – small, cramped tunnels, the ever present sensation of all those tonnes of rock above and around you. Even if you are not claustrophobic you begin to get a feel for what it is like to be claustrophobic. If you are claustrophobic, I suggest you think more than twice before going in. I also visited the island of Rhodes a few years back and saw the pillars on the mouth of the harbour of Rhodes Old Town which are supposed to indicate where the two legs of the Colossus were as they stradded the bay. I have also been to Turkey and wandered around the ruins of Ephesus, including the Temple of Artemis that was there.

One of the two monuments on Rhodes harbour indicating the possible positions of the feet of the colossus.

Of the four I have not visited, at least one is probably not accessible at this time, being in the middle of what was until recently a warzone, and may well have been a legend rather than something that actually existed**. Of the remaining three, I have seen some of the statues that were purported to come from the Mausoleum in the British Museum and there are fragments of the temple of Zeus in the Louvre, which I have also visited though apparently nothing remains of the statue which was the true Wonder***. Finally, the site of lighthouse, the island off Alexandria known as the Pharos, is still there though the lighthouse itself was finally destroyed by an earthquake in the 15th century. Maybe one day I will manage to visit the sites of these. You could argue that it is a shame that these great feats of architecture were allowed to fall into ruin. However, you could also say that it is a testement to the skills of those builders that even fragments of some of them still exist today never mind almost complete structures of one of them.

*Of course, they are all feats of engineering because of their sheer scale…. but the Pharos and Hanging Gardens are examples of someone applying a scientific principle – the use of light in navigation and the use of irrigation to turn a desert into a garden – to a practical use.

** If they didn’t, then the walls of Babylon almost certainly did and apparently also qualify for Wonder status

*** There are varying stories about the fate of the statue. Some claim Caligula ordered it beheaded and replaced with his own head, others that it was lost in a fire either at the temple itself (in 425AD) or in Constantinople in 475AD.

Yes, this is a blogchain post and that means consequences if you do not follow through and read all the other entries in the chain. This month’s comedy punishment is to be buried under 200 tonnes of masonry in a desert somewhere. So that is something for you all to look forward to enjoying…

Participants and posts:
orion_mk3 – http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post)
Ralph Pines – http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
bmadsen – http://hospitaloflife.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post)
writingismypassion – http://charityfaye.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s
post)

pyrosama – http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
areteus – https://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s
post)
randi.lee – http://emotionalnovel.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s
post)
BBBurke – http://www.awritersprogression.com/ (link to this month’s
post)
BigWords – http://bigwords88.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s
post)
meowzbark – http://erlessard.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s
post)
SuzanneSeese – http://www.viewofsue.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s
post)
AFord – http://writeword.blog.com/ (link to this month’s
post)
Kricket – http://kricketwrites.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s
post)

Twitter Updates

  • Interview: Gillian Polack #SFF #fiction #amwriting dalascelles.co.uk/2021/01/19/int… 2 days ago
  • Blending the Con dalascelles.co.uk/2021/01/19/ble… 2 days ago
  • The Elementals: Russell A Smith interview. #knoxpublishing #theelementals dalascelles.co.uk/2021/01/06/the… 2 weeks ago
  • New Year Dog dalascelles.co.uk/2020/12/31/new… 3 weeks ago
  • The Elementals: Heather Young Nicols interview #kindle #knoxpublishing dalascelles.co.uk/2020/12/15/the… 1 month ago
Follow @areteus

Like me on Facebook

Like me on Facebook

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join the Lurkers

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 2,000 other followers

Recent Posts

  • Interview: Gillian Polack
  • Blending the Con
  • The Elementals: Russell A Smith interview.
  • New Year Dog
  • The Elementals: Heather Young Nicols interview

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy