Subject: Review: Shade and Shadow

From: [email-masked] (Kevin Lauderdale)
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 1996 20:54:57 GMT

Shade and Shadow by Francine G. Woodbury
		Review Copyright 1996 Kevin Lauderdale

The scene: Oxford University, present day.  The department of ... Magic.
Francine G. Woodbury's SHADE AND SHADOW takes all the charm and ferocity of
the academic setting and twists it through the rabbit hole by giving us a
world where magic not only exists, but where it is an academic discipline.
It's something you study, do research into, and for which you have teaching
assistants.  There are classes in Comparative and Practical Magic.  There
are Assistant Professors of Magic, and if you're lucky, a magician friend
might put an anti-traffic-accident spell on your car.

Raoul Smythe is an Assistant Professor of Magic, who finds himself the under
suspicion in the murder of his department chair.  While the police
investigate, he is put on administrative leave, freeing him up to conduct an
investigation of his own, assisted by his best friend, reporter Max Bolton.

In fiction, the best way to explore any sort of society is through a
mystery.  If you have a mystery, you have a legitimate need for someone -- a
detective, busy-body, or, as in this case, a prime suspect working against
time -- to go many places and see many types of people and ask questions.
Woodbury makes good use of this convention and seamlessly brings magic into
the rest of the world as know it.  Despite what the cover says, this is not,
strictly speaking, a "fantasy" novel.  There are no elves in Woodbury's
Oxford.  There are however, punk rockers, cleaning ladies, and real estate
agents.

	"It's a Teutonic druid ceremony," an administrator tells Raoul of
	 the memorial they're attending, "so remember, no cold iron."

Like the best alternate history, you cannot help but feel that, yes, this
*is* what the world would be like if we had magic.  This is the world of THE
OXFORD BOOK OF COMMON SPELLS.  One of Raoul's colleagues' office looks like
every professor's office you've ever been in except that it has "plastic
models of the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Etruscan calves' livers used for
divination."

Woodbury elegantly explains how magic works in this society.  There are no
"As you know..." conversations.  Instead the structure of her world is
brought out naturalisticly in conversations with "lay people."  She presents
magic as being like music.  Some people are just born with the talent, like
Mozart, others attain it through hard work, and others just never gain the
ability.

Woodbury is equally graceful with mundane matters.  This is a murder mystery
that just happens to be set in an magic universe, not vice versa.  The magic
is well-woven into the story, but it doesn't have to be there.  For
Woodbury, magic isn't a literary crutch.  She knows how to plot and pace,
and she knows relationships.  Part of the story involves our hero starting a
relationship with the a young lady.  The subtleties and false-starts of new
romance are deftly portrayed.  Though this book isn't as long or detailed as
a P.D. James mystery, Woodbury is quite good at the same semblance of
verisimilitude.

Woodbury also knows the lingo.  Not everything is a "spell."  Woodbury has
geases and cantrips as well.  A whole generation of readers grew up playing
DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS, and they know the difference -- as does Woodbury.

This isn't just a single murder mystery.  There are mysteries within
mysteries.  I suppose then that it was inevitable that I would correctly
guess the solution to some of them.  That's a problem with this genre.  If
you show a gun above the fireplace mantle in act one, you must use it by the
end of act two.  We see this all the time in television and film, as well as
books.  If there's anything even slightly out of the ordinary, you can bet
that it will play an important part.  In consequence, several of SHADE AND
SHADOW's plot elements which are supposed to surprise us, instead telegraph
their purposes to us almost at their first appearance.  Granted, it's more
difficult to spot the out of place in an alternate universe, but it should
be impossible.  Any woman who feels sick to her stomach at the beginning of
a book will turn out to be pregnant by the end.  Only in Anne Perry's books
does a character have a cold, and the sneezing will NOT just happen to
distract the bad guy at a crucial moment allowing the hero to escape.
Francine Woodbury is no Anne Perry, but she's better than most at her... uh,
craft.

Kevin Lauderdale