Bear, Elizabeth. Whiskey & Water

The sequel to Bear's Blood and Iron-- a book that was occasionally a little like watching two strangers play three-dimensional chess. Fascinating, but not always easy to understand, or to invest with emotional meaning. This book is more like when you've been at the chess tournament for a while, have begun to absorb the rules, and have chatted with both players in between games. Much easier to understand, both intellectually and emotionally.

But it's still three-dimensional chess. We've got Hell, with Lucifer and other various devils; the Prometheans, who want to keep the power of Faerie bound; Matthew, ex-Promethean, a wounded man of divided loyalties; Faerie, and its queen; Heaven, and the angel Michael; oh, and Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan playwright (late of Prometheus, Faerie, and Hell). And a loose band of humans who could've almost come straight from a Charles DeLint novel. All these groups and people have their own allegiances and motives, personal, political, and metaphysical.

The most interesting thing about this novel, to me, is that it has a number of things that ordinarily would push all my buttons and make me go squee. Like sexy devils! And sexy angels! And sexy Kit Marlowe! And cute gothy people! And then-- it turns around and stays too honest and dark and brutal to actually make me go squee. It's not even the turned-up melodrama of everybody dying beautiful tragic deaths; it's something quieter than that, and harsher in its own way. But this is so much a book about stories and lies (all stories are true, we hear again and again; but all stories are lies almost by definition; the most powerful magic is the magic of deception, which is the same thing as the power to control one's own stories...). And so the book's delicate balance between tragic/gorgeous/seductive and brutal is Just. Perfect. In fact, it rather exactly mirrors what one of the characters goes through...

It's not a book without flaws. In particular, it's so dense that I couldn't read it quickly, but it also requires so much memory that I couldn't read it slowly without losing track of my threads. Bear doesn't just require you to put two and two together; she requires you to put two and x together, where x is a detail you hopefully remember from a hundred pages back. So there were plot developments where I had to say, "Okay, I buy it, if you say so." But it would be silly of me to blame the book for being too smart for me, wouldn't it?