Majestrum (Night Shade Books, August 2006, 235pp, ISBN 978-1597800891) is the first novel by Canadian Matthew Hughes to feature his freelance discriminator Henghis Hapthorn. Together with his creator, Hapthorne took his bow in the 2004 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with the novelet "Mastermindless."
Since then Hughes has become a regular contributor to F&SF, and Hapthorn one of the most popular characters together with his integrator, an AI that serves as Watson to Hapthorne's Holmes.
Henghis Hapthorn
At the novel's opening Hapthorn's integrator has been turned into a small, furry cross between a cat and an ape that dines extensively on rare fruits, much to the horror of the logical, orderly-minded Hapthorn.
Worse the protagonist has a squatter in his own skull:
the intuitive part of my psyche that I had always referred to my "insight," and that had resided in the back corridors of my mind, had emerged as a fully formed persona--a sort of alternate Henghis Hapthorn. (p6)
Hapthorn's alter ego becomes both help and irritation when the Wodehouse-ian Lord Afre hires Hapthorn to investigate the antecedents of his daughter's new companion, a young man of 'indeterminate circumstances.'
Hapthorn accepts the commission expecting it to allow him to investigate his changing universe, but finds himself drawn into an an eons old plot, even as he establishes that Afre's daughter is the victim of a cruel plot to publicly humiliate her.
As soon as one job is completed, Hapthorn is summoned by the Archon, the supreme ruler of Old Earth to investigate a possible plot against him. On first reading, Majestrum has a very episodic feel, but what looks at first as if there are two completely separate cases turn out to be linked by an indecipherable magical book uncovered by alternate-Hapthorn, and a plot to recall a long vanished power whose very name, "Majestrum" arouses a profound physical reaction:
I had experienced a sharp frisson, as if a strong electrical charge had shot through my body. (p80)
Jack Vance
Hughes is often compared to Jack Vance due to the colorful nature of his society, his character's and place's convoluted names and the dry wit of his prose, a comparison he has deliberately cultivated through his use of 'the penultimate age of Old Earth,' setting his universe up as a prequel to Vance's The Dying Earth.
But such superficial similarities mask that Hughes is a better plotter; sometimes Vance's novels peter out, as if the author has grown bored with them and can't be bothered to properly resolve the story's conflict. In the case of Majestrum, Hughes has merged Vance's style to a genuine mystery worthy of Conan Doyle.
By not muddying his prose with (sometimes recursive) footnotes as Vance has been prone to do, Hughes is at times a considerably more readable writer. What remains to be seen is whether Hughes is able to, or indeed interested in establishing his own clear identity as a writer, by stepping out of Vance's long shadow.
In the meantime, Majestrum is an entertaining and eminently readable novel.
Colin Harvey - Author six novels, and editor of four anthologies; professional reviewer since 2003, including six years at Strange Horizons. Member of ...
