R. A. MacAvoy

A fun and engaging short novel that didn't go where I expected it to. The opening chapter focuses on the somewhat elderly Martha Macnamara and her tea with a fellow resident in her San Francisco hotel, Mayland Long, aka Oolong, aka the black dragon of the title. It's all very calm and zen. Then, instead of My Dinner with Andre, Martha is kidnapped and the story becomes an action adventure as Mayland seeks to rescue her and her daughter, whose lapse into computer crime, has led to some likely fatal consequences. By computer, we're talking the very early pre-IBM pre-Microsoft pre-Apple days, when CPM and S-100 roamed the earth, and Dr Dobbs and Byte were the monthly reads of the counter-culture. There's enough rom-com/rom-drama here that I'm surprised it has never been filmed.

Recommended.… (meer)

Having read several of the author's books before and been disappointed by one or two, I was pleasantly surprised by this one which I thoroughly enjoyed. It takes the form of a series of letters by a man who is telling the story of his younger self to a friend, who we gradually realise is a King and later, exactly who it is.

Nazhuret grows up in a boy's school which takes only those of a certain social standing and yet he has no clue as to his parentage. His fees are paid by an uncle he doesn't know, who at one point fails to pay for a whole year so that Nazhuret has to work as school servant role. When the fees are subsquently paid, he receives a year's wage. The bright spot in his existence when he is around 12 years old is a friendship with the daughter of a local Duke, but she suddenly disappears and rumours circulate that her father has killed her, or that she has been sent away pregnant.

Nazhuret is a surprisingly sunny boy considering that some of his experiences at school, especially being sexual abused by at least one of the masters, wouldn't seem to lend him a phlegmatic disposition. He gradually becomes a fixture of the school and takes on an unpaid teaching role, but eventually the school decides to pay someone and his only choice is either to be recruited into the army of the duke who may have killed his daughter or to abscond. He does the latter and meets a mysterious character in a building on the outskirts of town: an encounter that will shape the whole of his life. For this man will teach him, among other things, to become a trained killer and an optician.

I won't say any more about the plot but I loved the oblique style of narrative and the characters, especially Arlin, an old acquaintance from school days who turns up at opportune moments and is, among other things, a card sharp and an expert with horses, knife throwing and rapier fighting, plus other larger than life people such as King Rudof and Nazhuret's mentor. Nazuret himself is interesting: he views himself as horribly ugly but it gradually becomes clear that he resembles the people who live in another country who are traditional enemies of the land where he lives. Even horses are well developed as personalities, especially Arlin's horse, Sabia. There are some good twists in the story also. So a well deserved 5 stars.… (meer)