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A review by duffypratt
Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille by Steven Brust
4.0
A group of folk musicians find themselves in a bar. The city the bar is in gets nuked, but somehow the bar jumps to another city in another time and place in the galaxy. Sometime later, the new city is nuked again. Who is doing this, and why? And what does it have to do with great cooking, traditional music, the Grateful Dead, and dysfunctional romantic relationships? That's what Cowboy Feng's is about, and fortunately for me, almost all of Brust's bizarre obsessions align fairly nicely with mine, so I thought this was alot of fun. The fact that Brust weaves all of this into a traditional Western plot only makes it better.
I will call foul on a couple of points. At one point he talks about a computer program falling back into Bach's seventh sonata after failing at an improvisation in G. There is no such thing. Also, he writes brilliantly about what it's like to play in a quasi-improvisational band, but he is not quite so good when he tries to give detail about guitar or banjo playing. Drums are his thing, and I had the distinct impression at times that he was in a bit over his head when trying to describe other instruments. His writing about food is first rate. There's a description here of making scrambled eggs that had me wanting to go to Feng's and get in on the Breakfast. And then there's the ending, which didn't work for me. It wrapped things up nicely, but I didn't buy it.The revelation of Feng didn't work for me. I thought the idea was great, but I didn't buy that this guy from the future had such feelings of longing and loss for a long dead Earth that he barely knew. If that was all, I might be OK, but I also didn't buy his knowledge of lots and lots of long dead traditional Earth music. The music is so central to the character, and I just don't see how it worked, how Feng, as Billy, could know all the music that he did. So the end felt like a cheat to me, and almost spoiled what I otherwise thought was a very fun book.
This book is only the second non-Dragaera book I've read of Brust's, and even here I'm not so sure. It's entirely possible that this book is, in Brust's twisted mind, a very ancient history of Dragaera, and that Feng's people ultimately go on to found the Dragaeran world. But that's pure speculation on my part. I like to think that Brust has been working, all along, on a very, very big picture for the world that he created.
It's been a while since I have read any Brust, and I had sort of forgotten how much fun he can be.
I will call foul on a couple of points. At one point he talks about a computer program falling back into Bach's seventh sonata after failing at an improvisation in G. There is no such thing. Also, he writes brilliantly about what it's like to play in a quasi-improvisational band, but he is not quite so good when he tries to give detail about guitar or banjo playing. Drums are his thing, and I had the distinct impression at times that he was in a bit over his head when trying to describe other instruments. His writing about food is first rate. There's a description here of making scrambled eggs that had me wanting to go to Feng's and get in on the Breakfast. And then there's the ending, which didn't work for me. It wrapped things up nicely, but I didn't buy it.
This book is only the second non-Dragaera book I've read of Brust's, and even here I'm not so sure. It's entirely possible that this book is, in Brust's twisted mind, a very ancient history of Dragaera, and that Feng's people ultimately go on to found the Dragaeran world. But that's pure speculation on my part. I like to think that Brust has been working, all along, on a very, very big picture for the world that he created.
It's been a while since I have read any Brust, and I had sort of forgotten how much fun he can be.