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!
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