Chris reviewed Redrobe by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
None
4 stars
You can almost see Jon Courtney Grimwood's influences processing in redRobe. From the following Pratchettian dialogue on p. 85:
'"Just another traumatised 'fugee tortured and blinded in Joan's service...''
Axl looked at the Cardinal. ''But I'm not...'' And then as the guards came in, he stopped talking.'We cut immediately to a tacoseller off the Plaza de Armas whose name surely must be Garrotte-Myself DeBler.
"Next to the small cart, stood its owner shovelling fried mince .. into a tortilla roll, using his filthy fingers. ... The meat looked obscene and smelt of gristle and fat and yet even that was better than the oversweet smell of the onions that went on next."Then there's the Colt gun that talks back, a Banksian AI if ever I read of one. It also, like Banks's Lazy Gun, has a moral sense, and won't for example let assassin Axl Borja gun down …
You can almost see Jon Courtney Grimwood's influences processing in redRobe. From the following Pratchettian dialogue on p. 85:
'"Just another traumatised 'fugee tortured and blinded in Joan's service...''
Axl looked at the Cardinal. ''But I'm not...'' And then as the guards came in, he stopped talking.'We cut immediately to a tacoseller off the Plaza de Armas whose name surely must be Garrotte-Myself DeBler.
"Next to the small cart, stood its owner shovelling fried mince .. into a tortilla roll, using his filthy fingers. ... The meat looked obscene and smelt of gristle and fat and yet even that was better than the oversweet smell of the onions that went on next."Then there's the Colt gun that talks back, a Banksian AI if ever I read of one. It also, like Banks's Lazy Gun, has a moral sense, and won't for example let assassin Axl Borja gun down a voodoo priest. It simply turns itself off when he wants to fire it.And a straight-up use of urban legends; the soon-to-be-late gangster Sanchez steals people's kidneys, after which they wake up in an ice bath with a message on the wall saying 'call the emergency services'. Straight off a recent Fortean Times cover.RedRobe is however a very fastpaced and entertaining read, a SF thriller where - as in some of his previous work - Grimwood answers accusations of 'you can't get there from here' by setting it in the future of a parallel world where history diverges from our own somewhere in the mid-19th century. Religious orders are big in it (but why does Father Sylvester kill himself on p.65 when (a) he's dying anyway and (b) suicide is a mortal sin? Just for a gruesome scene I expect). Axl's surname Borja is the Catalan spelling of Borgia (yes, those Borgias).