Book Review: Naked Guide
Cynthia Ward’s The Adventure of the Naked Guide is the third novel in her steampunk series “Bloodthirsty Agent”, a tetralogy of the adventures of Lucy Harker, a spy, an adventuress, and a dhampir. I have not read the first two books, The Adventure of the Incognita Countess and The Adventure of the Dux Bellorum, but to understand this book it’s more important to be familiar with the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells. and Ian Fleming than Cynthia Ward.
This book will not be to everyone’s tastes, but I liked it. Lucy Harker (here be spoilers) is the biological daughter of Wilhelmina Harker and Count Dracula, and the stepdaughter of Mycroft Holmes (who as M, is head of the British secret service). His stepdaughter is one of his agents. She is also LGBTQ, although in WWI, when this book takes place, that acronym was not yet in use. Lucy refers to her own sexual orientation as “degenerate,” according to the customs and mores of her native culture. “ The wise men of civilisation — Ellis and Freud and Krafft-Ebing and many others — have scrutinised the sex drive with the impartial eye of science. They’ve proven the desire for one’s own sex is a degeneration from ancestral health — a congenital defect to be conquered or suppressed.” She also finds the inhabitants of Pellucidar have very different ideas on sexuality than Ellis, Freud, and Krafft-Ebing; different ideas than ERB mentioned or explained.
I was delighted when I learned this book was a direct sequel to The Mad King, my favorite ERB adventure. However, ’tis also a sequel to the Pellucidar novels, which I don’t remember well. As I’ve mentioned in previous Medium posts, my memory is not what it was.
In addition to adventure, Lucy going into the Hollow Earth to rescue her abducted mother — there is also religious philosophy. Are vampires truly soulless? What is a soul? What does it do? “ Vampires have emotion and share our ability to choose between good and evil,” Lucy tells her mother when her mother meets her lover, the Countess Carmilla Karnstein. Also political philosophy — the ethics of nationalism, national secrecy, establishing empires, and what is necessary to protect and preserve those empires.
M, as any James Bond fan knows, must occasionally not act as becomes an English gentleman, in order to serve the British Empire.
“The story of empire is like the story of religion. It sanctions everything.”
“As long as Britain believes the story of empire,” she [Countess Carmilla]says, “British atrocities are inevitable.”
While this novella is not of the caliber of Lois McMaster Bujold, if you like the politics and religion in her Five Gods and Vorkosigan novels, you might find Cynthia Ward’s Adventure of the Naked Guide readable. I certainly did.
