Daniel Silva, Reliquary, Time and the Gods

I've been picking out kindle books to take on vacation, and one of the frustrating things is that if you want to start a new series, the first book(s) are not always kindle-ized. So I got out Daniel Silva's first two Gabriel Allon books from the library, as well as Reliquary, the sequel to Relic (which I wrote about in my previous entry).

Reliquary was a total dud. The only good thing was that I didn't take it on vacation and find out that I couldn't get through it.

The two Gabriel Allon books were decent espionage/suspense novels, although reviews unfairly seem to hype Silva as the next le Carre. I think that does Silva a disservice, aside from the fact that he's not as skillful a writer as le Carre -- he's not really working in the same territory. Le Carre writes about people with a fairly ordinary skillset; they may be good at languages, or very clever, but they can't single-handedly infiltrate a heavily-guarded compound or kill 4 people with their bare hands. Silva is writing about a skilled assassin.

I was going to write that le Carre is more realistic, but I'm not sure that's the case. There are certainly some small number of very skilled operatives out there, and Silva's actual plots are not of the over-the-top save the world variety, especially in The English Assassin. Silva is working more in Frederick Forsyth or Len Deighton's territories, and he's a very skilled practitioner in that area.

I also finished Time and the Gods, one of the first books I picked up for the kindle. It's by Lord Dunsany, and contains more stories in his Pegana mythos (although "mythos" sounds very grand and unified, and these stories are not really unified). In general, I'm quite a Dunsany fan -- I like The King of Elfland's Daughter, loved The Charwoman's Shadow, and mostly like his short stories. But these stories were very much of one note -- the gods are at best malignly neglectful, but if you choose to defy them or claim they don't exist, they'll punish you. A few of the stories are witty -- his description of famine as a creature that drinks all of the water from the soil and the air, for example, was really memorable. But as a whole, I found it too repetitive.