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!
Thursday 28 October 2010
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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