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1st January 2025 …  Subject:  The Bookman Histories by Lavie Tidhar

Let me start with a ramble into my studio. I’m an artist and my painting studio is important to me. I have just gone upstairs to measure and it is so small, just 10 ft x 8 ft. The ceiling has marks of water damage and old mends in one corner where, for many years, roof leaks have been coming through, and indeed, the latest incursion was only a month ago. The pine floorboards are from when this structure was built, and gaps between the boards are sometimes of considerable width so debris from almost two hundred years has been filtering down into the space underneath. The studio bed has inches of boards under one corner to make the bed horizontal because the floor has a very pronounced slope. I could set out more details to demonstrate the shabbiness of the containing structure, but nevertheless this little room has become the perfect studio for me. I used to rent special places in London, large they were, first in Wapping Wall, and then in Hackney. But how fine to work where you live. You can look, first thing in the morning, at what you did the previous day. And you can get on with a bit of work perhaps before breakfast. But I haven’t yet said why I love this room so much. Not only can I paint in there, but it’s got a working library of books neatly shelved on two walls. Paintings and books. That is my world. And next door, is John’s workspace, just three steps away, where the books are more perfectly set out. I can wander in and fetch, for instance, another Louise Erdrich novel. I have just finished Shadow Tag. It was published in 2010. Now I am about to read Future Home of the Living God, 2017. Both first editions. I love to read a book that way because you are seeing the published work as the author first saw it. Yes, Louise Erdrich is one of my current favourite authors and I’ll want to talk about her some time. But there are others. I’m very fond of Lavie Tidhar for instance. I like everything of his that I’ve read, and then suddenly one of his very early books came to mind because there it was, at eye level, on one of my shelves: The Bookman Histories, published by Angry Robot with a wonderful collaged cover by John Coulthart.

This was just a few months ago. I started the first of the three, The Bookman, and I was immediately struck by the enthusiasm of a young writer throwing everything he could at this Victorian Steampunk story. Lavie spoke Hebrew as his first language but when he was a teenager living in South Africa, he read all the English books he could find. Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, H G Wells, Shakespeare, Bram Stoker. And they are all here, mixed in wonderfully. And what about that early moment when we have mention of a terrorist organisation, “Persons from Porlock”? I laughed out loud at that, but have noticed since that some of my quite young friends didn’t get the Samuel Taylor Coleridge reference. And then there’s Irene Adler, Head of Scotland Yard. The Prime Minister is Moriarty. And Isabella Beeton with her Book of Household Management is in there, too. The story whizzes along at great speed into its various moves, with this as the background: Queen Victoria is a lizard. The lizards had been monarchs since the time of Henry V11. It was the time of Vespucci’s ill fated journey to that one special island – and in one single night reality had changed. The king and queen had disappeared and Les Lézards were there in their stead. On page 819 we have this note about their reign, “whale hunting was punishable by death across the Lizardine Empire. Like human slavery, it belonged to the days before the coming of the Lizardine race.”  Whales are a deep thrum note running through the three novels. Whales inhabit the River Thames, and they sing.

There is one character from a cast of thousands that I single out. I love Aramis. Yes we have a touch of Aramis from The Three Musketeers, but here Aramis is perhaps one of the most special automatons made by de Vaucanson. We first see Aramis as the young chef on board the clipper, Nautilus, and we see him fighting against armed men with just his body skills, kicking in Kung fu style. On page 201 there is an interesting exchange between Orphan and Aramis. Orphan wants to know where Aramis fits into the power plays, is he in with the Bookman?  Aramis laughed. “Can I not be of my own party?” He said. “Am I a machine to be used and owned?”/ “Aren’t you?”/ “If am one, Orphan, what then of you?”/ The eyes that regarded him were knowing and amused./ “I won’t be a pawn.”/ “Indeed.”/ “What do you want with me?” / “I wanted you to come to this island, Orphan. This island that sits like a guard to the other island that you seek. There are not always only two sides to every battle. Sometimes there is a third path, least used, and the hardest. My kind… has need of peace, not war. We were born at the intersection of human and other, of flesh and machines. I remember when the earth was young, Orphan.” … And then very soon we are back in the twists and turns of immediate plot and that section ends with an almost dying Orphan being held in the arms of Jules Verne. There is more and then more. It’s a wonderful set of three books.