Well, I know now that despite Tehanu being labelled ‘The Last Earthsea Book’, the quartet has now become a quintet, or perhaps a quin-and-a-half-tet, with a book of short stories. However, I read a collection comprising four books, so I’ll review those first four now. Let me say from the start that I’m keen to track down and read the others.
The first three books in the series were written between the late sixties and mid seventies, the fourth in 1990. There is a distinct difference in styles and thematic interest observable after this isthmus, but the quartet also coheres in an interesting way, most obviously in the fact that the books alternate between overtly masculine and feminine emphases.
The Wizard of Earthsea is first, and shows that fantasy really hasn’t changed much since the sixties, and if anything, there’s more of the prototypical fantasy adventure novel here than in Tolkien’s books. Le Guin apparently saw the figure of the wizard so often presented as a mysterious old man in fantasy stories that she wanted to write the story of where one came from. So the book tells the thin story of Ged, who discovers his magical potential in childhood, becomes an apprentice mage then a student at a school for magic. His competitive pride releases a dark force, which he then spends the rest of the novel fighting against. My problem with this novel is that Le Guin uses a very dry style that brings to mind an old storyteller sitting at a campfire relating a brisk tale for an audience. The detail is scarce, there are lots of little references to what legends say to give a veneer of realism, and all the characters are thus kept at a distance. So while we get a very compelling image of the world of Earthsea, where magic is controlled by words and (refreshingly) not everyone is a beautiful Caucasian, it’s hard to care about Ged or his extremely artificial quest against a magical McGuffin.
The Tombs of Atuan is better. It’s title is very cheesy, but surprisingly, the story is not. A very slow set-up describes a small, isolated holy shrine where one young priestess grows up knowing nothing but the rituals she is constrained to by birthright, and slowly begins to explore the underground labyrinth there, where great treasures are hidden. Until Ged comes along looking for one. The book works because of its realism and detail, because of the absolute completeness of the tiny encapsulated world bound by centuries of tradition Le Guin constructs around Tenar, the priestess. Unfortunately, the book is rather too short or perhaps too lacking in plot ideas, making it feel like it’s all a set-up, even as the abrupt, rather lazy ending slots into place. One thing that struck me, though, was how Ged appeared and did not immediately win the day with his amazing powers. Indeed, he was rather useless. I was slightly disappointed at first, hoping for some powerful display, but the fact that something a little different was done was perhaps better – I confess to having mixed feelings on that point! Of course, we’re later told that all his power is being used to keep himself defended, but the bathos of his first appearance is something that I will certainly always remember.
Best by far of the four books is The Farthest Shore, which Goro Miyazaki is adapting into Gedo Senki. Ged takes a young noble on a quest to find out why all magic is beginning to fail. The plot is weak, but the book is hugely enjoyable because of the relationship between Ged and Arren. Arren’s hero-worship, disillusionment and final restoration of trust are very obvious plot elements, but it’s done so well, and so sweetly, that it was compulsive reading. The plot is a fairly loose one, a simple case of getting to the enemy and then beating him, but some of the setpieces are wonderful. Oddly, it’s the most sexualised of the books: Arren seems prone to getting naked at every opportunity.
Finally was Tehanu, a bit of an odd book. Ged has lost his power. Tenar is living as a farmer’s widow, her children having grown up and left home. She has adopted a little girl horribly deformed by an abusive family (I think that if I take issue with anything in the movie, it’ll be how they’re portraying Therru, as a pretty, very moe young teenager with a fetching pink mark for a scar, but I’m sure I’ll just think of her as a wholly different character). The book essentially deals with Tenar trying to protect the girl, and to come to terms with her life and the patriarchal, prejudiced world around her, as well as Ged trying to become a normal person, and experience sexuality for the first time (it seems wizards cannot). It is certainly a more mature look at the Earthsea world than its predecessors, but really, very little happens, the whole thing feels entirely inconsequential, and the showdown at the end really had very little to do with anything. Interesting for its change in tone, and a good experiment, but totally lacking anything memorable or compulsive in story terms, which is what was needed to make the bold change work.
Overall, one of the better fantasy series I’ve read in recent years; I shall be happy to read the rest – eventually!
Tuesday 21 December 2010
A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve
It seems to happen to every author who writes adventure stories for young adults; what begins as a silly, frivolous series written with tongue firmly in cheek becomes, with the addition of the catalyst known as ‘success’, something very self-important, epic and serious. This can result in some real trainwrecks of misguided overambitious last novels, but Philip Reeve just barely manages to escape this pitfall.
This bloated novel, almost as fat as a Harry Potter doorstop, is that last of Philip Reeves’ charming Hungry City Chronicles, and despite its scale remains frivolous enough to avoid looking like self-parody. The Stalker Fang is still alive, and now she has the codes to awaken the orbital superweapon ODIN. Meanwhile, there are signs of life in the old wreck of London, Tom Natsworthy’s old town. He and his daughter Wren want to go and see if there might have been survivors, but for that, they will have to enter into Green Storm territory, where despite a truce, the inhabitants of moving cities are not welcome.
With three books’ worth of backstory, this is certainly not for the uninitiated, but there’s much to recommend the previous stories, and I feel it’s quite a shame Reeve isn’t getting more attention than he already is. His daft wit, extremely well-realised but also totally bizarre future setting, his love of classic boys’ adventure storytelling and his talent for occasionally spicing a descriptive passage with a metaphor that he beautifully extends that little bit further than expected are all admirable, and you’ll find few books more fun than this one, or more evocative and cinematic in the telling.
The major flaw of the book, however, is its mess of a plot. Reeve uses the classic weak storyline approach of having half a dozen different plotlines overlapping at the same time, with far too many characters becoming the focus of attention for just a few pages before disappearing again while the others have their turns. The action is kept fast-paced by this constant switching, but without much to really capture the interest in any of them, it all starts to get a bit dull, and the characters become more expositional vehicles than people in their own rights. Some bad decisions also lead to characters like Fishcake who begin in very interesting situations and have some of the book’s best emotional development barely appearing, while Theo, who was just totally flat and uninteresting and seems to have been included mostly because Reeve was fetishising the idea of having a mixed-race romantic couple in his books, spends chapters and chapters getting into irrelevant scrapes and ultimately being of no consequence whatsoever. The climax of the action is anything but climactic, and everything seems to fizzle out as Reeve realises he’s gone on for over 50 chapters. Some secondary characters get killed off for no reason but to look heroic, characters who should have strong bonds barely seem to think about one another, comic relief characters get far more attention in far more contrived ways than I would have expected from Reeve, who genuinely did surprise me in some of the previous books, and only a highly cheesy but also extremely beautiful final passage saves the whole ending from being a sad implosion of bathos.
But that final passage really did lift my spirits, and reminded me of the deeper undercurrents of thought running through the series beneath the adrenaline rush. A highly enjoyable YA sci-fi series, quintessentially British and always a lot of fun. My gripes about characters making metaphors with knowledge they almost certainly wouldn’t have, cultural homogeny, silly names and a degree of smugness remain, but they’re outweighed by the sheer sugar-rush of exuberance the books unleash.
This bloated novel, almost as fat as a Harry Potter doorstop, is that last of Philip Reeves’ charming Hungry City Chronicles, and despite its scale remains frivolous enough to avoid looking like self-parody. The Stalker Fang is still alive, and now she has the codes to awaken the orbital superweapon ODIN. Meanwhile, there are signs of life in the old wreck of London, Tom Natsworthy’s old town. He and his daughter Wren want to go and see if there might have been survivors, but for that, they will have to enter into Green Storm territory, where despite a truce, the inhabitants of moving cities are not welcome.
With three books’ worth of backstory, this is certainly not for the uninitiated, but there’s much to recommend the previous stories, and I feel it’s quite a shame Reeve isn’t getting more attention than he already is. His daft wit, extremely well-realised but also totally bizarre future setting, his love of classic boys’ adventure storytelling and his talent for occasionally spicing a descriptive passage with a metaphor that he beautifully extends that little bit further than expected are all admirable, and you’ll find few books more fun than this one, or more evocative and cinematic in the telling.
The major flaw of the book, however, is its mess of a plot. Reeve uses the classic weak storyline approach of having half a dozen different plotlines overlapping at the same time, with far too many characters becoming the focus of attention for just a few pages before disappearing again while the others have their turns. The action is kept fast-paced by this constant switching, but without much to really capture the interest in any of them, it all starts to get a bit dull, and the characters become more expositional vehicles than people in their own rights. Some bad decisions also lead to characters like Fishcake who begin in very interesting situations and have some of the book’s best emotional development barely appearing, while Theo, who was just totally flat and uninteresting and seems to have been included mostly because Reeve was fetishising the idea of having a mixed-race romantic couple in his books, spends chapters and chapters getting into irrelevant scrapes and ultimately being of no consequence whatsoever. The climax of the action is anything but climactic, and everything seems to fizzle out as Reeve realises he’s gone on for over 50 chapters. Some secondary characters get killed off for no reason but to look heroic, characters who should have strong bonds barely seem to think about one another, comic relief characters get far more attention in far more contrived ways than I would have expected from Reeve, who genuinely did surprise me in some of the previous books, and only a highly cheesy but also extremely beautiful final passage saves the whole ending from being a sad implosion of bathos.
But that final passage really did lift my spirits, and reminded me of the deeper undercurrents of thought running through the series beneath the adrenaline rush. A highly enjoyable YA sci-fi series, quintessentially British and always a lot of fun. My gripes about characters making metaphors with knowledge they almost certainly wouldn’t have, cultural homogeny, silly names and a degree of smugness remain, but they’re outweighed by the sheer sugar-rush of exuberance the books unleash.
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
On the same day that I finished Reading Lolita in Tehran, I had noticed a small leaflet pasted to the clear plastic of the bus-stop outside my home, a short walk from London’s Central Mosque. It called for Muslims to join a protest outside 10 Downing Street against the West’s gross misrepresentation of Islam in the media, in the attack on the faith that has stemmed from the hysterical reaction to the actions of extremists. And it’s undeniable that now must be a hard time to be a Muslim in a Western country. Knowing this, I had to wonder about a book that has spent a remarkable length of time in the New York Times’ bestsellers list, which has at its core a scathing critique of the Islamic regime in Iran by one who lived through its worst excesses. The book, Nafisi’s memoirs of life in Tehran when the revolution came, of being forced to unwillingly don the veil of Islam, yet of defying the regime and setting up a little study group in her own home to read forbidden books of Western decadence by writers like Nabokov, Fitzgerald and Jane Austen, is undeniably fascinating and undeniably a sincere and honest reflection of Nafisi’s impression of life under a brutal and misguided regime, but would I even be reading it if not for the current climate of fear and suspicion around Islam? If not for America’s defensive need to know that the lifestyle of its citizens is so much better than that of the countries of the Middle East?
Perhaps not, but then I should consider myself lucky, for if not for the sensationalistic aspects surrounding this book’s release, I would perhaps never have heard of it. And I must state that it was primarily the reference to Nabokov, perhaps my favourite writer of all time, in the title that drew me to the memoir, rather than its setting.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is essentially built up of two parts. One part is the story of Nafisi’s life, of her time teaching in a university during a period when student ideology suffocated nuance of artistic interpretation, forcing most of her students to either brand anything from the West that features flawed characters as decadent imperialist propaganda, or to rally against this opinion and veer in the other direction, to a time when the revolutionaries have gained power and morality squads are permitted to arrest and flog any woman who lets her hair show, who laughs too loudly. The other part is her literary criticism of Western writers, in particular Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen, all of whom get a section that centres on their writing. Nafisi is quick to apply the lessons these writers can tell us to her own situation – for example, the monstrous Islamic Republic becomes equated with Nabokov’s ‘dragon’ Humbert Humbert, the female citizens with Lolita: like the young victim, they are captured, made to embody an image that exists only in the mind of one who does not fully understand them.
However, because of the predominance of such comparisons, readers looking for close reading are likely to be disappointed. Nafisi is a consummate academic, living and breathing the words of writers past and present, but this is not an academic work. Nothing she says about Lolita or Invitation to a Beheading is anything beyond superficial, anything that shows any deeper understanding that can be gleaned from a cursory read. But perhaps simplification is necessary when the audience is not necessarily familiar with the subject.
While it is not necessary, it’s a good idea to read the work of the above-mentioned writers before dipping into Nafisi’s world. For example, The Great Gatsby is one of those books I’ve long intended to read, but never have. While Nafisi contextualises everything she says so that her points were coherent, there will be few surprises left for me when I come to read the book.
Essentially, Nafisi’s work is structured around these writers because that is such a great part of who she is. She is an academic and a teacher of English Literature, to the extent that everything is coloured by the pigments of the novels she reads. The real story here is of her life, of how she lived through the oppression of a regime she did not agree with, until she finally left for America ten years ago, just as the power of the Ayatollahs was waning. But all great memoirs are built out of the characters of their creators, and as well as a wilful, generous, brave and slightly winsome woman who writes in a simple and journalistic prose that is easily understood and peppered with bits of imagery so obvious that the platitudes actually become quite sweet, Nafisi is a great lover of literature, so necessarily that love must be represented in her novel. A remarkable work, over and above suggestions of it being a propaganda tool, a spyhole through which voyeuristic Westerners can peer to assure themselves of their own supremacy, it is an honest and straightforward sketch of a life lived in a terrifying but fascinating time, one that any reader will almost certainly find rewarding – and encourage you to dig out the trusty old Henry James volumes from the bottom of that pile of unread books, too!
Perhaps not, but then I should consider myself lucky, for if not for the sensationalistic aspects surrounding this book’s release, I would perhaps never have heard of it. And I must state that it was primarily the reference to Nabokov, perhaps my favourite writer of all time, in the title that drew me to the memoir, rather than its setting.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is essentially built up of two parts. One part is the story of Nafisi’s life, of her time teaching in a university during a period when student ideology suffocated nuance of artistic interpretation, forcing most of her students to either brand anything from the West that features flawed characters as decadent imperialist propaganda, or to rally against this opinion and veer in the other direction, to a time when the revolutionaries have gained power and morality squads are permitted to arrest and flog any woman who lets her hair show, who laughs too loudly. The other part is her literary criticism of Western writers, in particular Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen, all of whom get a section that centres on their writing. Nafisi is quick to apply the lessons these writers can tell us to her own situation – for example, the monstrous Islamic Republic becomes equated with Nabokov’s ‘dragon’ Humbert Humbert, the female citizens with Lolita: like the young victim, they are captured, made to embody an image that exists only in the mind of one who does not fully understand them.
However, because of the predominance of such comparisons, readers looking for close reading are likely to be disappointed. Nafisi is a consummate academic, living and breathing the words of writers past and present, but this is not an academic work. Nothing she says about Lolita or Invitation to a Beheading is anything beyond superficial, anything that shows any deeper understanding that can be gleaned from a cursory read. But perhaps simplification is necessary when the audience is not necessarily familiar with the subject.
While it is not necessary, it’s a good idea to read the work of the above-mentioned writers before dipping into Nafisi’s world. For example, The Great Gatsby is one of those books I’ve long intended to read, but never have. While Nafisi contextualises everything she says so that her points were coherent, there will be few surprises left for me when I come to read the book.
Essentially, Nafisi’s work is structured around these writers because that is such a great part of who she is. She is an academic and a teacher of English Literature, to the extent that everything is coloured by the pigments of the novels she reads. The real story here is of her life, of how she lived through the oppression of a regime she did not agree with, until she finally left for America ten years ago, just as the power of the Ayatollahs was waning. But all great memoirs are built out of the characters of their creators, and as well as a wilful, generous, brave and slightly winsome woman who writes in a simple and journalistic prose that is easily understood and peppered with bits of imagery so obvious that the platitudes actually become quite sweet, Nafisi is a great lover of literature, so necessarily that love must be represented in her novel. A remarkable work, over and above suggestions of it being a propaganda tool, a spyhole through which voyeuristic Westerners can peer to assure themselves of their own supremacy, it is an honest and straightforward sketch of a life lived in a terrifying but fascinating time, one that any reader will almost certainly find rewarding – and encourage you to dig out the trusty old Henry James volumes from the bottom of that pile of unread books, too!
Dom Casmurro by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
While I confess to being almost totally ignorant of literature written in Portuguese, despite taking some pride in being fairly widely-read, I can at least place a large portion on the blame on the Western canon, and take a modicum of vindication from the fact that I’ve now read one of Brazil’s most famous books, Dom Casmurro, and placed it very high on my list of favourite ever novels. It’s most certainly in my top ten, somewhere.
What is most incredible about Machado de Assis’s charming little story is that it was first published in 1899, but – only in very small part thanks to a sprightly translation – reads like the most modern of novels. I don’t just mean it has a colloquial style; its short chapters, flawed and fascinating narrator and constant playful digressions are a long way ahead of their time. This book needs to find its way into global consciousness, because it deserves it.
The story is simple, indeed, plays off certain genre expectations and predictable developments in a very postmodern way. A boy called Bento is destined to be a priest, but a childhood sweetheart gets in the way, and the two young lovebirds, along with one of Bento’s friends from the Seminary, form various plans to release Bentinho from an ecclesiastical life. Finally he is released and marries the girl, Capitu, and they grow up and raise a family. All is well until Bento begins to notice that his son looks less like him and rather more like his best friend…
Machado de Assis is a supremely competent writer, his references to Shakespeare and Tacitus showing his learning while his willingness to mock his own poetic ideas keep him grounded and entirely unpretentious. He follows the slightest tangents and purposefully makes Bento scatterbrained, telling readers that the current chapter really should have been before the last one, that he wrote a certain word but then crossed it out, that he has to pick up the pace because he’s running out of paper. Subtly, much more subtly even than in Pale Fire, we come to realise that despite Bento’s apparent self-belief, he also claims not to have the best memory, and the things he’s expecting us to believe aren’t really backed up by anything more than his personal impressions and convictions; however, since his whimsical ways are so endearing, a kind of familiarity with Bento can come into being that has its peer with very few narrators, and that makes his interactions with the son he grows to fear and despise all the more shocking.
Machado de Assis’ other books are now most definitely on my reading list.
What is most incredible about Machado de Assis’s charming little story is that it was first published in 1899, but – only in very small part thanks to a sprightly translation – reads like the most modern of novels. I don’t just mean it has a colloquial style; its short chapters, flawed and fascinating narrator and constant playful digressions are a long way ahead of their time. This book needs to find its way into global consciousness, because it deserves it.
The story is simple, indeed, plays off certain genre expectations and predictable developments in a very postmodern way. A boy called Bento is destined to be a priest, but a childhood sweetheart gets in the way, and the two young lovebirds, along with one of Bento’s friends from the Seminary, form various plans to release Bentinho from an ecclesiastical life. Finally he is released and marries the girl, Capitu, and they grow up and raise a family. All is well until Bento begins to notice that his son looks less like him and rather more like his best friend…
Machado de Assis is a supremely competent writer, his references to Shakespeare and Tacitus showing his learning while his willingness to mock his own poetic ideas keep him grounded and entirely unpretentious. He follows the slightest tangents and purposefully makes Bento scatterbrained, telling readers that the current chapter really should have been before the last one, that he wrote a certain word but then crossed it out, that he has to pick up the pace because he’s running out of paper. Subtly, much more subtly even than in Pale Fire, we come to realise that despite Bento’s apparent self-belief, he also claims not to have the best memory, and the things he’s expecting us to believe aren’t really backed up by anything more than his personal impressions and convictions; however, since his whimsical ways are so endearing, a kind of familiarity with Bento can come into being that has its peer with very few narrators, and that makes his interactions with the son he grows to fear and despise all the more shocking.
Machado de Assis’ other books are now most definitely on my reading list.
The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud
This well-hyped kids’ book was actually better than I expected it to be. I would definitely call it good, though certainly not great, and a long way from the best of its kind. The hook of the story is its irreverent tone, starring and being largely narrated by Bartimaeus, a sarcastic and sharp-tongued Djinni forced by a magical contract to serve a naive young master. It’s a well-written tale and an undeniably good hook, but the book falls just a little short of fulfilling its potential.
The plot is straightforward, ordinary and somewhat unsatisfying. Hung around a typical McGuffin plot, it has three parts – stealing the McGuffin, having it taken back and then interrupting the plan that the McGuffin is instrumental in executing. Very typical stuff, and it’s a little irksome that really, the climax could have happened at just about any point in the book and been more or less exactly the same. Everything leading up to it was just build-up, and despite a tacked-on part about patience, our hero really hadn’t grown or changed in any way by then.
The world Stroud creates is solid, albeit not very imaginative. A steampunk-flavoured modern-day England governed by power-hungry magicians, it has a familiar magic system that’s based on the summoning of djinn and other demons from Middle-Eastern lore (though there’s one cat-and-mouse scene where you really wonder why the ‘cat’ doesn’t just summon some spirits), and the appealing prospect of demons who shape-shift. The introductory quotes will have you expecting a clever satire of Blair’s government, but that really extends no further than a magical parody of CCTV. Our young hero Nathaniel has enough flaws to make him seem human, but remains so oblivious to them that it’s hard to think we’re actually supposed to like him, or care about his fate.
Given that it’s the details that really sell this book, though, I find a few niggling annoyances there. The two separate writing styles, the first-person narrative of Bartimaeus and the third-person story from the point of view of Nathaniel, are unsettled at first. There are glib jokes in Bartimaeus’ style in Nathaniel’s story and the supposedly first-person viewpoint shifts into omniscient mode (how does Bartimaeus know what’s happened when he’s ‘long gone’?), though towards the end it all settles and coheres nicely as Stroud defaults to the typical adventure story this book is at heart. Bartimaeus just isn’t as funny as it seems he should be. Footnotes of course bring Terry Pratchett immediately to mind, and he just doesn’t deliver the same number of laughs with similar material, or make you care as much about his world, his characters or his satirical jabs, such as they are. Tiny slips like saying ‘Djinni’ when he means ‘Djinn’ can pass, but introducing the concept of visible planes by saying that those who operate on more than seven ‘are just showing off’, then later calling an eighth plane merely ‘hypothetical’ rankle. And I want the nitty-gritty. I want to know exactly what this summoning horn is, how it works, what it does, because I’m not sure if it’s just an instrument to bend a creature to a magician’s will, if it actually completes this summoning that needed four people, why it’s significant if it gets broken, etc, but it’s glossed over. And it does annoy me that we were teased with these children of the revolution, these magic-resistant upstarts, but their story is just left for the next book in the series. On the other hand, if they had been some kind of dues ex machina and tied everything up in a neat package, that may have been yet more contemptible. I just wish scenes with them in had seemed more complete, more rounded.
In the end, an enjoyable story and a nice, familiar magical world that ultimately comes across like a second-rate Pratchett, but still entertains. Sequels are not in any way must-reads, but I wouldn’t be averse. Not up there with Pullman, Nicholson, Reeve or even Rowling, but far above Colfer or Nix. About the same as Snicket, I’d say!
The plot is straightforward, ordinary and somewhat unsatisfying. Hung around a typical McGuffin plot, it has three parts – stealing the McGuffin, having it taken back and then interrupting the plan that the McGuffin is instrumental in executing. Very typical stuff, and it’s a little irksome that really, the climax could have happened at just about any point in the book and been more or less exactly the same. Everything leading up to it was just build-up, and despite a tacked-on part about patience, our hero really hadn’t grown or changed in any way by then.
The world Stroud creates is solid, albeit not very imaginative. A steampunk-flavoured modern-day England governed by power-hungry magicians, it has a familiar magic system that’s based on the summoning of djinn and other demons from Middle-Eastern lore (though there’s one cat-and-mouse scene where you really wonder why the ‘cat’ doesn’t just summon some spirits), and the appealing prospect of demons who shape-shift. The introductory quotes will have you expecting a clever satire of Blair’s government, but that really extends no further than a magical parody of CCTV. Our young hero Nathaniel has enough flaws to make him seem human, but remains so oblivious to them that it’s hard to think we’re actually supposed to like him, or care about his fate.
Given that it’s the details that really sell this book, though, I find a few niggling annoyances there. The two separate writing styles, the first-person narrative of Bartimaeus and the third-person story from the point of view of Nathaniel, are unsettled at first. There are glib jokes in Bartimaeus’ style in Nathaniel’s story and the supposedly first-person viewpoint shifts into omniscient mode (how does Bartimaeus know what’s happened when he’s ‘long gone’?), though towards the end it all settles and coheres nicely as Stroud defaults to the typical adventure story this book is at heart. Bartimaeus just isn’t as funny as it seems he should be. Footnotes of course bring Terry Pratchett immediately to mind, and he just doesn’t deliver the same number of laughs with similar material, or make you care as much about his world, his characters or his satirical jabs, such as they are. Tiny slips like saying ‘Djinni’ when he means ‘Djinn’ can pass, but introducing the concept of visible planes by saying that those who operate on more than seven ‘are just showing off’, then later calling an eighth plane merely ‘hypothetical’ rankle. And I want the nitty-gritty. I want to know exactly what this summoning horn is, how it works, what it does, because I’m not sure if it’s just an instrument to bend a creature to a magician’s will, if it actually completes this summoning that needed four people, why it’s significant if it gets broken, etc, but it’s glossed over. And it does annoy me that we were teased with these children of the revolution, these magic-resistant upstarts, but their story is just left for the next book in the series. On the other hand, if they had been some kind of dues ex machina and tied everything up in a neat package, that may have been yet more contemptible. I just wish scenes with them in had seemed more complete, more rounded.
In the end, an enjoyable story and a nice, familiar magical world that ultimately comes across like a second-rate Pratchett, but still entertains. Sequels are not in any way must-reads, but I wouldn’t be averse. Not up there with Pullman, Nicholson, Reeve or even Rowling, but far above Colfer or Nix. About the same as Snicket, I’d say!
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
I finally got around to finishing The Kite Runner, one of the more popular novels of the past decade. Ultimately, while I certainly would not deny that it has strengths, I was also dissatisfied, for I felt it fell short of expectations, both those established by the press and word-of-mouth and those I formed myself as I read, and I feel that while it was a good little diversion, it is by no means a literary novel.
The story works well: a privileged young boy grows up in Afghanistan, best friends with the servant boy whose loyalty and devotion are unconditional; no matter how far young Amir pushes him, Hassan will always put others first and it tends to be Amir who ends up feeling guilty, contrasting his own nature with one so selfless, and worrying that his father compares the two boys and he fares badly, reflected in such pure light. One day when they are flying kites, Amir witnesses something terrible, and his guilt at doing nothing to stop it shapes the rest of his life. Finally, as an adult, he is given the chance to return to the country he was forced to flee when the Taliban seized power to find redemption.
There are moments of real excellence here: what Amir witnesses won’t be foreseen by many, and comes as quite a shock, and the way little Amir reacts with simple cowardice and turns his guilt into spite is extremely well-crafted, at once reprehensible and entirely understandable. The final chapter is also great, avoiding predictability and cliché. The middle act, Amir’s life in America, which I imagine was where a lot of people got bored and stopped reading, had some well-observed vignettes about relationships between father and son and about young love, and was the most mature part of the novel. The trouble was the lack of consistency: this part felt like it belonged in something more sophisticated.
The trouble is that we get too much that, in all frankness, is hopelessly cheesy. The book is portrayed as a hard-hitting, literary take on life for Afghans and a stunning coming-of-age story. Okay, I could swallow the way Kabul under the Taliban was portrayed, the suffering of the people, the brutality of public executions and the desperation of people who are only trying to be charitable. But when we have long blonde hair coming tumbling out of a turban during a dramatic fistfight with lives on the line, old faces from a childhood just happening to show up at the right times and last-minute rescues by little slingshot aces…it just doesn’t belong with the rest. There’s too much of the soap opera here, the suicide attempts and the standing up to drunken soldiers and managing to overcome them, and runaways and preternatural kite-running powers – it drags the whole thing down, sad to say.
And the style doesn’t sit well with me. Some of the blurb claims Hosseini’s to be a very original voice, but that’s far from my impression. His style smacks of writing groups, of safe options and stylistic flourishes that are drawn right out of pulp, like repetitions of things like ‘I fade out’ at the end of passages when the narrator dips in and out of consciousness, or omissions of expected punctuation. It’s very light fare, more page-turner than classic, which is fine except that he occasionally reaches for something more impressive and doesn’t quite get there, and his subject would have suited a more sophisticated style, especially when he introduces his less believable plot elements.
In addition, there’s an unpleasant taste in the mouth, thinking about why this is so popular. It fits so well into political agendas in America that it makes me uncomfortable. It assuages white liberal guilt about the Middle East by making people feel they now know what is occurring in one part of it, while at the same time conforming with occidental ideologies, allowing the West to pat its own back for opposing those nasty fundamentalist child-molesters and murderers. It’s the same problem as with Reading Lolita in Tehran: you know the writer is being honest and the sentiments are genuine, but with such a neat packaging of a very complex problem that aligns so neatly with the idea that Western democracies are havens to all while the Islam brings with it terror and death, I can’t help but fear that this only convinces readers to stay insulated in their little left-leaning world while never having to challenge any of their preconceptions, indeed having prejudices confirms. Amir’s views on religion change considerably, but always they are shallow, obvious, unconvincing. Truthfully, I feel manipulated.
Worth reading and I will also try A Thousand Splendid Suns, but I cannot recommend this highly.
The story works well: a privileged young boy grows up in Afghanistan, best friends with the servant boy whose loyalty and devotion are unconditional; no matter how far young Amir pushes him, Hassan will always put others first and it tends to be Amir who ends up feeling guilty, contrasting his own nature with one so selfless, and worrying that his father compares the two boys and he fares badly, reflected in such pure light. One day when they are flying kites, Amir witnesses something terrible, and his guilt at doing nothing to stop it shapes the rest of his life. Finally, as an adult, he is given the chance to return to the country he was forced to flee when the Taliban seized power to find redemption.
There are moments of real excellence here: what Amir witnesses won’t be foreseen by many, and comes as quite a shock, and the way little Amir reacts with simple cowardice and turns his guilt into spite is extremely well-crafted, at once reprehensible and entirely understandable. The final chapter is also great, avoiding predictability and cliché. The middle act, Amir’s life in America, which I imagine was where a lot of people got bored and stopped reading, had some well-observed vignettes about relationships between father and son and about young love, and was the most mature part of the novel. The trouble was the lack of consistency: this part felt like it belonged in something more sophisticated.
The trouble is that we get too much that, in all frankness, is hopelessly cheesy. The book is portrayed as a hard-hitting, literary take on life for Afghans and a stunning coming-of-age story. Okay, I could swallow the way Kabul under the Taliban was portrayed, the suffering of the people, the brutality of public executions and the desperation of people who are only trying to be charitable. But when we have long blonde hair coming tumbling out of a turban during a dramatic fistfight with lives on the line, old faces from a childhood just happening to show up at the right times and last-minute rescues by little slingshot aces…it just doesn’t belong with the rest. There’s too much of the soap opera here, the suicide attempts and the standing up to drunken soldiers and managing to overcome them, and runaways and preternatural kite-running powers – it drags the whole thing down, sad to say.
And the style doesn’t sit well with me. Some of the blurb claims Hosseini’s to be a very original voice, but that’s far from my impression. His style smacks of writing groups, of safe options and stylistic flourishes that are drawn right out of pulp, like repetitions of things like ‘I fade out’ at the end of passages when the narrator dips in and out of consciousness, or omissions of expected punctuation. It’s very light fare, more page-turner than classic, which is fine except that he occasionally reaches for something more impressive and doesn’t quite get there, and his subject would have suited a more sophisticated style, especially when he introduces his less believable plot elements.
In addition, there’s an unpleasant taste in the mouth, thinking about why this is so popular. It fits so well into political agendas in America that it makes me uncomfortable. It assuages white liberal guilt about the Middle East by making people feel they now know what is occurring in one part of it, while at the same time conforming with occidental ideologies, allowing the West to pat its own back for opposing those nasty fundamentalist child-molesters and murderers. It’s the same problem as with Reading Lolita in Tehran: you know the writer is being honest and the sentiments are genuine, but with such a neat packaging of a very complex problem that aligns so neatly with the idea that Western democracies are havens to all while the Islam brings with it terror and death, I can’t help but fear that this only convinces readers to stay insulated in their little left-leaning world while never having to challenge any of their preconceptions, indeed having prejudices confirms. Amir’s views on religion change considerably, but always they are shallow, obvious, unconvincing. Truthfully, I feel manipulated.
Worth reading and I will also try A Thousand Splendid Suns, but I cannot recommend this highly.
Wednesday 1 December 2010
Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where I first became aware of Terry Pratchett – sorry, SIR Terry these days. The truth is it was with my brother’s copy of Only You Can Save Mankind, and him chuckling over the captain having no choice but to say ‘You are severely reprimanded’; I remember at age 8 or so not understanding at all what he found so amusing. I read the book, but ‘Terry Pratchett’ was just a name, and I still knew nothing of Discworld. When I was ten, I was going through a period of loving Marvel Comics, and in an attempt to steer me back towards the literary, as well as her own favourites, Mum bought me a graphic novel of The Hobbit – which was bundled with the excellent comic adaptation of Mort. This fired the imagination, and I borrowed my first Discworld novel – Men at Arms – and proceeded to devour every single Pratchett book ever written, including the more obscure – and often terrible – books: Strata; The Unadulterated Cat and Eric, for example. Well…except for the maps and plays.
Pratchett remains a favourite author, and of course my heart goes out to him whenever I hear about his Alzheimer’s. Some of his books I can reread again and again and always love. On the other hand, I’ve not been particularly enamoured of any Discworld book: Monstrous Regiment was an entire rather dull book for the sake of one joke obvious from the start; the Lipwig books, about introducing familiar institutions from our world into that of the Disc, satisfy but feel like formulaic rehashes of books like Guards! Guards! and Moving Pictures; Thud! ultimately meandered without a strong plot or ending, and even the Tiffany Aching books don’t quite live up to their promise.
So I wasn’t expecting much of Unseen Academicals, in which football takes centre-stage. From the looks of the cover it would be another Rincewind book, with the staff of the Unseen University bumbling about and probably foiling some contrived magical disaster. So it was quite pleasing to discover that I was completely wrong about that. Because while football is a large chunk of this book, it is only one piece, and the much large slice of the, uh, pie is taken by Glenda, probably my favourite Discworld character to be introduced since Otto – and far less silly.
The UU discovers that it is required by ancient statute to play a game of football, which is a rather terrifying and anarchic game. So they set about reforming it into something playable. Hopelessly out-of-touch with the working people, though, they need help, and those roped into doing so end up being the workers of the night kitchen, including Trevor Likely, the son of a famed old-style footballer who has vowed never to play, headstrong everywoman Glenda and her beautiful but thick best friend Julia, plus the rather peculiar Mr. Nutt, who looks like a big goblin but speaks like an orator.
Nutt is the key character to the piece, his innate abilities facilitating much of the action and also saying a few things about prejudice. Trev and Jules provide the romance, cheesy uplifting moments and more or less for the sole purpose of some Posh and Becks references, allow for a fun side-plot about fashion and celebrity that also introduces some great new characters. But Glenda is the real protagonist of the story, a plain and dumpy girl who isn’t too smart but nonetheless has great insight and determination and generally can sort out the world just by seeing the way it truly works. She’s a character it’s very easy to sympathise with, and it’s very hard not to be on her side.
I was fully prepared to think that Unseen Academicals was where Pterry jumped the shark. But in fact, even though there is no great crisis, nor any evil to overcome, the novel turns out to be perhaps the most mature and intelligent of recent months. Well worth reading!
Sunday 28 November 2010
Calvin and Hobbes: The Complete Collection
Calvin and Hobbes was not a comic I grew up with. It was not that it had no impact on my life – when I was young I used to do fun little voice acting jobs at a recording studio, and one of them was voicing Calvin in my best attempt at an American accent – but it was never syndicated in any of the newspapers in the house, and besides, I was more inclined to read ‘The Bash Street Kids’ or ‘Minnie the Minx’ in my copy of rather brainless The Beano.
As I begun to read comics online, though, more and more of my favourite writers professed their debt to Bill Watterson, and making little references to the world of the hyperactive six-year-old and the tiger only he can see. So it finally became convenient to read The Complete Collection – something I must buy for myself – so I worked my way through all the thousands of strips that make up Calvin and Hobbes, at once a daunting task and nothing like enough.
Calvin is a headstrong, selfish and rambunctious six-year-old living in the suburban United States. The comic’s key ingredient is the way that Calvin gets lost in his fantasies and daydreams, believing them utterly until he is jerked back to reality, usually by a parent or teacher. Thus, he might believe himself transformed into a vicious dinosaur, or the brave adventurer Spaceman Spiff, or my particular favourite, a hardboiled pulp-noir detective spouting terrible but ingenious pun after pun. And of course, his favourite toy, a stuffed tiger bigger than he is, comes to life as his reasonable, often sharply sarcastic, and occasionally dangerous foil Hobbes.
What makes Calvin and Hobbes so perfect is the way that it sets its boundaries very definitely with a series of settings that become familiar: the living room, the bed, the bathroom, the garden, the school and the great outdoors. Calvin has the same teacher throughout, interacts properly with only two other kids (the girl from his neighbourhood and the school bully) and has no relatives but an uncle who comes for one visit and never appears again. Themes recur again and again: in winter, Calvin wants to hit little Suzie with a snowball, sled downhill very fast, make disturbing and hilarious snowmen and behave himself for Santa despite his mischievous nature. When the weather is better he sets up stalls selling things nobody wants but him, takes Hobbes to his treehouse for a meeting of his anti-girls club G.R.O.S.S., and torments his father by calling him at work to make him jealous of the freedom a six-year-old gets. At school, he subverts his projects and gets poor grades, longs to escape, torments Suzie with gruesome reports of what is in his lunch and tries to avoid being beaten up by the bully while still getting in smart remarks.
Deviations from these patterns are few, but provide interesting diversions, such as when there is a burglary, or when the family go on holiday. Strips centred on the parents also develop two very interesting and instantly recognisable characters. But it is the range that Watterson gets into the familiar patterns that astonishes, and marks his genius. Calvin himself is complex, constrained in a school that expects him to conform but highly literate and capable of satirising, for example, academia. It was extremely hard to get him just right, a loud, annoying brat who wants the world to revolve around him, likes causing others pain and serves as a representation of the problems of his media-obsessed, demanding and sheltered generation – and yet is extremely likeable. But it works, because we get to know him and how sweet he really is. His plots to get Suzie backfire more often than not, he shows moments of great affection towards Hobbes in particular, he apologises when put in the wrong and some people bring out his more vulnerable side, especially his babysitter. Strips where he almost wrecks his parents’ car, where he’s scared of burglars taking Hobbes and where he simply admires the beauty of nature are amongst the best.
I think my favourite strip, though, is a simple one from a Sunday (Sunday strips being longer and coloured) in which Calvin’s mother chases and tickles him to tire him out, but ends up exhausted herself. With almost no dialogue, using characters who mostly yell at one another, Watterson perfectly captures the love between parent and child.
There’s no substitute for reading the comic strips, though. They really are worth anybody’s time. Superb writing.
Thursday 28 October 2010
Nation, by Terry Pratchett
While it’s been a good long while since Johnny and the Bomb, I always like to see Pterry taking a break from the Discworld to write a book in our own world. Only You Can Defend Mankind was my first Pratchett book, and remains a favourite, and Good Omens is of course one of his classics, in collaboration with Neil Gaiman. So I found the prospect of Nation, seemingly a little more mature than his other work for kids, quite exciting.
I must confess, though, I’ve been disappointed. Nation tells the story of a little inhabited island devastated by a wave. Only one boy, who was rowing back to shore after a coming-of-age ceremony, survives, and finds everyone he knows is dead. But he is not alone on the island. The wave also brought a great schooner into the midst of the forest, and on board was one survivor, a prim little white girl called Ermintrude.
What starts out seeming like a bit of a Walkabout set-up soon changes tone when other survivors from nearby islands appear, and a small community emerges. And what follows is generally slow, predictable and not very original. The strength of the harrowing scenes of Mau dealing with his dead kinsmen doesn’t sit well beside the initial characterisation of Ermintrude/Daphne, who is just too ridiculously naïve and idiotic to be sympathetic. In a book like Larklight that sort of characterisation works, because it’s consistent with its world. Nation soon abandons that angle and Daphne far too quickly becomes a completely different person.
Learning a completely new language happens unbelievably quickly and intermediary characters who can speak both English and the native tongue seem like a cop-out after the set-up. I’d understand this for the need to tell a story, but too much of the book is just treading water, creating inconsequential little crises and then solving them in a way that rather lacks tension. The discovery in the cave smacks of the hollow apologetic wishy-washy attitude of a sensitive leftist trying to exorcise his guilt but still coming out with mighty whitey clichés out of the earholes, and the little twist at the end is so obvious from the opening scenes that Pterry even throws it away and writes as though he no longer wants it to be a twist, but accepts any reader must have seen it coming, which comes over as surprisingly clumsy, not at all what I expect from such an accomplished and self-aware writer.
Nation may have been taken up as a worthy sort of a novel, highly lauded and adapted at the National, but I doubt it will stand as one of Pratchett’s classics, and found it to be too flawed and directionless, too bereft of characters I could truly care about rather than just feeling I ought to sympathise with, for me to really enjoy it. A shame!
I must confess, though, I’ve been disappointed. Nation tells the story of a little inhabited island devastated by a wave. Only one boy, who was rowing back to shore after a coming-of-age ceremony, survives, and finds everyone he knows is dead. But he is not alone on the island. The wave also brought a great schooner into the midst of the forest, and on board was one survivor, a prim little white girl called Ermintrude.
What starts out seeming like a bit of a Walkabout set-up soon changes tone when other survivors from nearby islands appear, and a small community emerges. And what follows is generally slow, predictable and not very original. The strength of the harrowing scenes of Mau dealing with his dead kinsmen doesn’t sit well beside the initial characterisation of Ermintrude/Daphne, who is just too ridiculously naïve and idiotic to be sympathetic. In a book like Larklight that sort of characterisation works, because it’s consistent with its world. Nation soon abandons that angle and Daphne far too quickly becomes a completely different person.
Learning a completely new language happens unbelievably quickly and intermediary characters who can speak both English and the native tongue seem like a cop-out after the set-up. I’d understand this for the need to tell a story, but too much of the book is just treading water, creating inconsequential little crises and then solving them in a way that rather lacks tension. The discovery in the cave smacks of the hollow apologetic wishy-washy attitude of a sensitive leftist trying to exorcise his guilt but still coming out with mighty whitey clichés out of the earholes, and the little twist at the end is so obvious from the opening scenes that Pterry even throws it away and writes as though he no longer wants it to be a twist, but accepts any reader must have seen it coming, which comes over as surprisingly clumsy, not at all what I expect from such an accomplished and self-aware writer.
Nation may have been taken up as a worthy sort of a novel, highly lauded and adapted at the National, but I doubt it will stand as one of Pratchett’s classics, and found it to be too flawed and directionless, too bereft of characters I could truly care about rather than just feeling I ought to sympathise with, for me to really enjoy it. A shame!
Friday 1 October 2010
Le comte de Monte Cristo/The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexander Dumas
Tonight, I reached the end of a long road, that of reading The Count of Monte Cristo, one of those fat tomes that tend to daunt potential readers with preconceptions of weighty, challenging literary epics – but they forget that many classics survive because they are popular, indeed populist, and mid-19th-Century French readers wanted escapism and thrills as much as any other audience. The book is long because it was most lucrative to make a page-turner last for a long time. I would feel no compunction for comparing it not only to Dickens but to the lengthy comics and manga series that end with weekly cliffhangers, although Monte Cristo at least has a complete and evidently pre-planned storyline.
I don’t know why I feel I’ve known this story since childhood. I think perhaps I had an abridged version, or Mum sat me in front of some film adaptation, since it’s one of her favourite stories. But any book I would have had to have invested this much time in reading I would have remembered. (I remember reading Oliver Twist at 10 or 11, Roots at 12, Shogun at 14 etc.) Either way, thanks to anime adaptation Gankutsuou I was very familiar with the general thrust of the plot, but could not have been prepared for the sense of fun, the open embrace of melodrama and gothic overtones of Dumas’ work.
The greatest revenge story ever told, Edmond Dantes’ revenge for his false imprisonment on three members of high Parisian society, works superbly because even if every detail isn’t quite believable (potions to simulate death, horses that can be induced to run wild on time), and even if the melodrama gets a little excessive at times (twice Dumas undermines the impact of the most climactic points in the story, once by having Monte Cristo dragged up and down stairs when he’s supposed to be having a big confrontation, and once with the superb lines, ‘His eyes seemed to burn with a devouring fire. He leaped towards a dressing room’, which I can’t imagine being any less farcical in the original French), Dumas is writing about the present time, about contemporary fears and mores, and the way Monte Cristo exacts revenge, through wealth and the influence it buys in society, is utterly believable, and keeps our attention like a snake hypnotising its prey with its simple grace, its danger and the inevitability of what is going to happen as events take their course.
Amusingly, the editor of my Wordsworth Classics edition was quite a character, pointing out with Kinbotian glee every mistake the translator has made, and also as many of Dumas’ as he could spot. It doesn’t take one long, especially with such assistance, to see that Dumas didn’t care much for small details and wrote with great speed for a voracious audience who wanted only more drama, more thrills, more admirable verbal sparring within the constraints of polite 19th-Century society, and this exuberance is not at all diminished by time and distance. Enormous fun. It may be less sophisticated, nuanced, eloquent and moving than the near-contemporary Les Misérables, but it’s much more exciting, and with more of a playful sense of what in this day and age we term, ‘Cool’ – the invalid Noirtier who despite being able only to blink can still influence all those around him, the excitement of bandit kidnappings and courtroom showdowns (though another ‘too silly’ moment comes when the guilty simply cannot lie to save themselves, so powerful is TRUTH and JUSTICE), and of course the Count himself, who we see mostly through the eyes of others, and certainly leaves his impression.
Through the introduction, I learned with interest that Dumas had intended to open the story in Rome, where Gankutsuou begins, and have Dantès’ story as flashback, only for his collaborator Auguste Maquet, who it seems came up with more of the story than Dumas did, to suggest starting from the beginning. It was a wise choice in a serial novel, where much time can be taken to flesh out a character, to start there and build up our sympathy for Dantès, just as it was wise for Gankutsuou to start where it did for more dramatic tension in an anime series. Indeed, Gankutsuou did admittedly colour some of my reading for a time, making me more predisposed to the spoilt, snobbish, moustachioed Albert than perhaps I should have been, since in the anime, he has become the focus of the story, a very sweet, innocent, impressionable boy who hero-worships, in keeping with the anime’s wish to amplify all homoerotic undertones. For the same reason I expected Franz to be more prominent, since the anime makes his friendship with Albert seem more than simple affection between friends, and laughed when I realised that Beppo is described for one line in the book, but since he’s a boy that looks like a girl, Gonzo had to make a full character out of him! As the book went on, though, the colour added by the anime faded. Some faces were exactly aligned with those I imaged (Villefort) while others couldn’t be further from those of the book (Maximilian, Eugénie) – but suited their altered characters. The adaptation is a very loose one, with so much added melodrama that even the original book seems restrained by comparison, but a superb adaptation and an excellent companion piece.
I don’t know why I feel I’ve known this story since childhood. I think perhaps I had an abridged version, or Mum sat me in front of some film adaptation, since it’s one of her favourite stories. But any book I would have had to have invested this much time in reading I would have remembered. (I remember reading Oliver Twist at 10 or 11, Roots at 12, Shogun at 14 etc.) Either way, thanks to anime adaptation Gankutsuou I was very familiar with the general thrust of the plot, but could not have been prepared for the sense of fun, the open embrace of melodrama and gothic overtones of Dumas’ work.
The greatest revenge story ever told, Edmond Dantes’ revenge for his false imprisonment on three members of high Parisian society, works superbly because even if every detail isn’t quite believable (potions to simulate death, horses that can be induced to run wild on time), and even if the melodrama gets a little excessive at times (twice Dumas undermines the impact of the most climactic points in the story, once by having Monte Cristo dragged up and down stairs when he’s supposed to be having a big confrontation, and once with the superb lines, ‘His eyes seemed to burn with a devouring fire. He leaped towards a dressing room’, which I can’t imagine being any less farcical in the original French), Dumas is writing about the present time, about contemporary fears and mores, and the way Monte Cristo exacts revenge, through wealth and the influence it buys in society, is utterly believable, and keeps our attention like a snake hypnotising its prey with its simple grace, its danger and the inevitability of what is going to happen as events take their course.
Amusingly, the editor of my Wordsworth Classics edition was quite a character, pointing out with Kinbotian glee every mistake the translator has made, and also as many of Dumas’ as he could spot. It doesn’t take one long, especially with such assistance, to see that Dumas didn’t care much for small details and wrote with great speed for a voracious audience who wanted only more drama, more thrills, more admirable verbal sparring within the constraints of polite 19th-Century society, and this exuberance is not at all diminished by time and distance. Enormous fun. It may be less sophisticated, nuanced, eloquent and moving than the near-contemporary Les Misérables, but it’s much more exciting, and with more of a playful sense of what in this day and age we term, ‘Cool’ – the invalid Noirtier who despite being able only to blink can still influence all those around him, the excitement of bandit kidnappings and courtroom showdowns (though another ‘too silly’ moment comes when the guilty simply cannot lie to save themselves, so powerful is TRUTH and JUSTICE), and of course the Count himself, who we see mostly through the eyes of others, and certainly leaves his impression.
Through the introduction, I learned with interest that Dumas had intended to open the story in Rome, where Gankutsuou begins, and have Dantès’ story as flashback, only for his collaborator Auguste Maquet, who it seems came up with more of the story than Dumas did, to suggest starting from the beginning. It was a wise choice in a serial novel, where much time can be taken to flesh out a character, to start there and build up our sympathy for Dantès, just as it was wise for Gankutsuou to start where it did for more dramatic tension in an anime series. Indeed, Gankutsuou did admittedly colour some of my reading for a time, making me more predisposed to the spoilt, snobbish, moustachioed Albert than perhaps I should have been, since in the anime, he has become the focus of the story, a very sweet, innocent, impressionable boy who hero-worships, in keeping with the anime’s wish to amplify all homoerotic undertones. For the same reason I expected Franz to be more prominent, since the anime makes his friendship with Albert seem more than simple affection between friends, and laughed when I realised that Beppo is described for one line in the book, but since he’s a boy that looks like a girl, Gonzo had to make a full character out of him! As the book went on, though, the colour added by the anime faded. Some faces were exactly aligned with those I imaged (Villefort) while others couldn’t be further from those of the book (Maximilian, Eugénie) – but suited their altered characters. The adaptation is a very loose one, with so much added melodrama that even the original book seems restrained by comparison, but a superb adaptation and an excellent companion piece.
Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
The desire to take established characters and puppeteer them your own way has a long history – the Ancient Greeks told the same stories of their pantheon in many and varied ways, much of the Bible and several of the Gnostic Gospels are different takes on basic frameworks, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton put their own spins on popular yarns, and in the last century, there’s been a great market for (often trashy) sequels to classic stories, taking well-loved characters and putting them in a new setting. Despite the issues of copyright, there’s a huge boom in fanfiction writing on the internet, where a young writer’s narcissism can be satisfied almost instantly by peer reviews. Often, a clever online writer will take a myth or legend, a children’s classic or fairy story, and put it through a revisionist adult lens; on a grander scale, that is precisely what Maguire has done with Wicked.
Thanks mostly to the monstrous success of the movie, almost every Western child knows the story of The Wizard of Oz, and young Dorothy’s fortuitous, slightly random victory over the Wicked Witch of the West. And the world of Oz is familiar as a simplistic fairytale country, with broad characters, fantastical creatures and the kind of mildly scary peril that a young Kansas girl can get out of through luck or the help of friendly creatures. So Maguire uproots it all, makes the world a very real, very adult place with socio-political tensions, candid sex, anarchy and government-sanctioned torture. In this setting, he tells the story of that Wicked Witch, here named Elphaba (after L. Frank Baum), making her a prickly but sympathetic central character while showing us how she came to be where she was when she crosses path with the young girl from another world.
It’s a very nice concept, and the concept is what makes the book a success, I feel. I suspect it’s the kind of book far fewer people have finished than begun, and rather fear going to see the musical, knowing that it would be a painfully sanitised version of this very adult book – and cringe when I hear The Vinkus has been whitewashed to make Fiyero a more saleable leading man. And while I respect Maguire for his integrity in making this book about witches, magic and flying monkeys a serious, weighty and provocative piece (though whoever sanctioned ‘reading group material’ at the end of the book, where we are matter-of-factly informed Wicked is ‘an epic, treading similar ground as Greek and Shakespearean Tragedies’ or suchlike, needs a slap and a literary education, despite my own allusions to them above), with a detailed and very human character study at its centre, I do find myself questioning whether or not it had to be quite so dull.
We begin with Elphaba’s birth, child of a pious clergyman and a bored wife. Elphaba comes out green, and shocks everyone with strange behaviour, while a new man in the life of the parents inevitably sparks the warming flame of adultery. A moderately interesting family drama, ultimately totally unsatisfying. Then come Elphaba’s university years, full of irritatingly pretentious discourse as Elphaba becomes a supporter of the rights of sapient Animals, debates the purpose of society with the air-headed good-witch-to-be, Galinda, and religion with her devout sister Nessarose. She rebels against authority, and nothing much happens. Her adult life as an anarchist is more interesting, but cut short to leave a central event mysterious. After that, she meanders about fretting about her past, proving a thorn in the side of the Wizard by doing little more then existing far from the Emerald City with a tacked-on birthright, until the crucial moment comes – Dorothy arrives. All this build-up – does it pay off?
Well, sadly, no. The worst part of the book is its climax. It’s almost as if Maguire has lost interest. Only the most essential concessions are made to the original scenario, and the final scenes are undercut by extremely lame underplayed humour (Liir, Elphaba’s son, falls over trying to look stately, the senile old nanny starts eating a candle thinking it’s cheese), until finally the Witch grows violent in a most unconvincing way.
Ultimately, it feels like the very hook of the concept, that it’s a re-imagining of Oz, seems like an encumbrance, and doesn’t quite work. Elphaba is a good character, changeable and logical enough to be believed in, but she doesn’t tie in enough with the original flat character for it to make sense, and nor are her actions enough like those we know from the movie or the original book. Oz isn’t Oz, it’s just got a Yellow Brick Road and a Wizard ruling it. Yes, perhaps that’s the point of a re-imagining, but it more or less feels like this should have been an entirely different story, and has only latched on to Oz to make itself more accessible (admittedly a marketing trick that worked), which makes the whole concept hollow and brittle.
Also, I had problems with Maguire’s prose style. The man is a very gifted writer, and some of his extended images are absolutely beautiful, but occasionally, along come comparisons that just bewilder. How does an emotion simmer like dust in a sunbeam? I know that he was trying to obscure the colour of the magic slippers because Baum fans want them silver and the movie’s devotees are expecting ruby, but to answer that by just lobbing random colour-based similes at us (‘They sparkled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood, and thorny stars’ – erm, how’s that, then?) is just confusing. And I found myself pausing, the mood broken, at certain choices of word; it’s well and good (and appreciated, for I was impressed!) flexing your vocabulary muscles with words like ‘verdigrisian’, and yes, it’s daft to argue about the language of a magical world, but should there really be words of markedly, recently French derivation, or German, or Native American, in Oz? It just takes you out of the moment to wonder about it, and that annoyed me. Would the inhabitants of this simple kingdom really know what an aquarium looks like?
Minor quibbles, but minor quibbles add up, and without a really gripping story, with a constant feeling of the story dragging, lack of substance unable to support its weightiness, and with too many details purposely left unsaid for the sake of mystery, I fear that this is an experiment that didn’t work.
Sad, though, that Maguire will most likely be remembered for the musical, not for his skill as a writer.
Jango by William Nicholson
It must be hard to write a successful fantasy trilogy for the YA market, then to write another without rehashing any of your old ideas. William Nicholson has avoided this conundrum by just openly repeating himself. His Wind On Fire trilogy started with a book about young teenagers repressed by their education system going out on a quest of their own, and then a book about a conquering army being thwarted. And now he’s followed Seeker, about a boy escaping the repressive education system his schoolteacher father has condemned him to, with Jango, which is about thwarting a conquering army.
However, while I’ve several times stated my admiration of Slaves of the Mastery, Jango is but a poor imitation. Everything seems derived from that book, yet is nowhere near as satisfying.
After the events of the first book, Seeker, Morning Star and the Wildman are trainee Nomana – the super-powered Jedi rip-offs who seemed at least mysterious and powerful in the first book, but here have very little mystery, wisdom or conceptual strength. Meanwhile, the mighty warlord Amroth Jahan is bringing his army to Radiance, the empire that tried to destroy the Noma in book one, and with a new figurehead, is up to its old tricks – and has a ludicrous plan to bomb the island of the noma. At the same time, there is a totally extraneous sub-plot about a girl who grew up in a treetop kingdom trying to avoid being forced to marry one of the Jahan’s sons, and ultimately is of no consequence whatsoever. Yes, there was an extraneous sub-plot Slaves of the Mastery – Mumpo’s fight training – but that at least provided an exciting spectacle that added to the climax, and changed his character for the final book. I suppose Echo Kittle, treegirl, may be significant in book three, but there really needed to be something more to her here.
The plot is very weak. There’s another disappointing side-plot dealing with the overall enemies of the series, puppetmasters who are supposed to be creepy but really aren’t threatening or well-conceived at all, and are rather like the mystically-powered beings in The Wind On Fire – badly-sketched and too inhuman to really provoke any thought – and then one about the Wildman going back to his roots, with a totally tacked-on and underdeveloped love triangle appearing out of nowhere. Essentially, Nicholson needs a great many small plots overlapping to keep momentum going, and as well as the ones mentioned there are the stories of two sets of antagonists, neither very interesting, a vignette about what is blatantly Seeker’s eponymous future self, the fate of a very minor character from the first book, and the story of a mad professor whose suicide is so unconvincing and expedient that it really detracted from the final chapters – as if explosive urine, an appalling betrayal ‘twist’, the worst battle tactics ever, the most artificially added change in a father’s mindset ever conceived and powers not earned but simply used weren’t enough.
Jango wasn’t all bad. There are some great ideas – Echo swinging through the trees at the beginning, the idea that horses are totally unknown (though the idea that everyone is bowled over by their beauty becomes dubious, and calling them ‘Caspians’ seems odd – is there a Caspia in that world? Or was it a nod to Narnia?) and make a deep impression, and the way that not only the battle but its aftermath must be taken into consideration (a much better implementation of issues around the Iraq war than the suicide bombers of book one), for example. The first chapters promise much, even if little of it gets answered, and in the end the religious, socio-political and inter-personal ideas hinted at remain only broached, never explored.
And while Seeker, Morning Star and the Wildman aren’t as likeable or fully-realised as Kestrel and Bowman Hath, they’re not at all bad characters. Hard ones to really like, or truly empathise with, but certainly not overly annoying.
Jango wasn’t a great book. I’m starting to think Slaves of the Mastery was an anomaly, but it’s one I’m very glad happened, as it remains my favourite YA book of the last 15 years.
However, while I’ve several times stated my admiration of Slaves of the Mastery, Jango is but a poor imitation. Everything seems derived from that book, yet is nowhere near as satisfying.
After the events of the first book, Seeker, Morning Star and the Wildman are trainee Nomana – the super-powered Jedi rip-offs who seemed at least mysterious and powerful in the first book, but here have very little mystery, wisdom or conceptual strength. Meanwhile, the mighty warlord Amroth Jahan is bringing his army to Radiance, the empire that tried to destroy the Noma in book one, and with a new figurehead, is up to its old tricks – and has a ludicrous plan to bomb the island of the noma. At the same time, there is a totally extraneous sub-plot about a girl who grew up in a treetop kingdom trying to avoid being forced to marry one of the Jahan’s sons, and ultimately is of no consequence whatsoever. Yes, there was an extraneous sub-plot Slaves of the Mastery – Mumpo’s fight training – but that at least provided an exciting spectacle that added to the climax, and changed his character for the final book. I suppose Echo Kittle, treegirl, may be significant in book three, but there really needed to be something more to her here.
The plot is very weak. There’s another disappointing side-plot dealing with the overall enemies of the series, puppetmasters who are supposed to be creepy but really aren’t threatening or well-conceived at all, and are rather like the mystically-powered beings in The Wind On Fire – badly-sketched and too inhuman to really provoke any thought – and then one about the Wildman going back to his roots, with a totally tacked-on and underdeveloped love triangle appearing out of nowhere. Essentially, Nicholson needs a great many small plots overlapping to keep momentum going, and as well as the ones mentioned there are the stories of two sets of antagonists, neither very interesting, a vignette about what is blatantly Seeker’s eponymous future self, the fate of a very minor character from the first book, and the story of a mad professor whose suicide is so unconvincing and expedient that it really detracted from the final chapters – as if explosive urine, an appalling betrayal ‘twist’, the worst battle tactics ever, the most artificially added change in a father’s mindset ever conceived and powers not earned but simply used weren’t enough.
Jango wasn’t all bad. There are some great ideas – Echo swinging through the trees at the beginning, the idea that horses are totally unknown (though the idea that everyone is bowled over by their beauty becomes dubious, and calling them ‘Caspians’ seems odd – is there a Caspia in that world? Or was it a nod to Narnia?) and make a deep impression, and the way that not only the battle but its aftermath must be taken into consideration (a much better implementation of issues around the Iraq war than the suicide bombers of book one), for example. The first chapters promise much, even if little of it gets answered, and in the end the religious, socio-political and inter-personal ideas hinted at remain only broached, never explored.
And while Seeker, Morning Star and the Wildman aren’t as likeable or fully-realised as Kestrel and Bowman Hath, they’re not at all bad characters. Hard ones to really like, or truly empathise with, but certainly not overly annoying.
Jango wasn’t a great book. I’m starting to think Slaves of the Mastery was an anomaly, but it’s one I’m very glad happened, as it remains my favourite YA book of the last 15 years.
Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey
While there can be few works quite as remarkably of their time as these Confessions, but at the same time it’s a good reminder of the fact that even though zeitgeists, fashions and modes of expression can change hugely, people don’t change much at all. And I’m sure the quirky little work will serve to illustrate that point for many years to come.
I was surprised how little of the composition is actually concerned with opium, but then, the title promises only confessions, not necessarily on the subject that defines he who confesses. The bulk of the slim volume is an autobiography, with some short chapters at the end discussing the pains and pleasures of laudanum consumption, linked by a short admission that the two parts are linked only tenuously, the opium use of later years inextricably linked to the experiences of youth, they being both a cause for its use and having an effect on the vivid dreams that were its result.
But while some inkling of the mindset of an addict and a vivid impression of some aspects of life in England two centuries ago are inviting aspects of de Quincey’s work, what really fascinates is de Quincey himself, the way his stream-of-consciousness comes tumbling out in a way that makes Virginia Woolf’s prose look most affected, and the way he himself seems totally unaware of his idiosyncrasies. He admits he has less structured his narrative than ‘thought aloud’, and this is exactly right; he chases after tangents like a kitten after an unravelling ball of wool. We hear in great grandiloquent detail Quincey’s thoughts on the piano, and which Roman historian was his favourite, and bizarre episodes like the time a large swell of water in a canal required him and another pedestrian to run away, which he considered one of the only times it is permissible for a 19th-century gentleman to begin a conversation with a lady with whom he is not yet formally acquainted. But then when something really interesting comes along, like his time living in a squalid little flat with some horribly neglected little child, or when he befriends a young prostitute, the details get skipped over and we don’t hear nearly as much as we might like.
But then, that uneven sense of what is and is not important only adds to de Quincey’s perceived character – while his language is beautifully wrought and glazed in the conventions of his era, where broadness of vocabulary and sophistication of grammatical construction were prized, he dances about from subject to subject with a childlike charm that makes him very likeable. And his uneven relationship with his drug, his fear, his adoration, his feelings of being master and uncomprehending subject, make this aspect of him fascinating.
The dense language makes the slim little book quite hard to get through in casual sittings, being much better suited to an extended burst of concentration, and since the Wordsworth Classics edition I read (with the dubious choice of ‘The Death of Chatterton’ for its cover – I know that painting is often pointed to as more erotic than morbid, but he’s still dead and pretty, neither of which de Quincey was at the time!) had no annotations, I felt like a lot I might have learned would take more effort than it was worth to look up, which was a bit of a shame – though not enough for me to actually write them down and look them up. The experience of such a fine character as de Quincey, who proves fiction is often stranger than reality, is enough.
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