The fourth of the Ice and Fire books was the first one I didn’t read excitedly, or with any great desire to pick up again once I’d put it down. By this point the series was selling enough to top the New York Times bestsellers list, even without help of the excellent HBO series, but it would be a further six years before book 5 would come out.
And, as I found out at the end of this book, A Dance with Dragons is really this book, part 2. Even though the last one was big enough to need splitting into two for these shores, apparently that idea did not agree with Martin’s plans at all, so he wrote this book to focus on events in King’s Landing – with a few other strands thrown in – while the next will deal with Dany, Stannis, Bran and the rest.
I’m not sure whether it was because once the split happened this book needed padding or because Martin just has plans that require a lot of set-up here, but it really felt as though he decided to just tread water with this book. Far too much is given over to dull new (or previously peripheral) characters like the Krakens and the Dornish, without whom the central story would thus far be no different at all. Neither Jaime nor Cersei interest me all that much, and Samwell’s chapters are always very, very slow. This left only Brienne and a few chapters with the Stark daughters to spice up an otherwise turgid volume. The prose remains slightly painful, and there was one horrible attempt to make Cersei use some British vernacular that Martin got totally wrong – which I don’t believe was a printing error. I don’t mind there being Americanisms in a medieval England-style fantasy world – after all, it is a fantasy world – and the likes of ‘I wrote him’ I can happily let slide, but trying to have an English tone and getting it wrong ('He had bloody well think again') is in the realm of terrible fanfic. At least Martin has moved beyond using ‘merlon’ and ‘whicker’ every few pages, though.
After the fascinating cliffhangers of the last book, this was a real let-down. The hideous figure from the end of A Storm of Swords doesn’t even show up again until near the end of this one, the most interesting characters Tyrion, Bran and Dany are barely mentioned, and to add injury to it all, looking now at the Wikipedia, I see this is where Martin had intended there to be the time-skip I’ve been hoping for since the end of the first book, but he’s put it off because otherwise the next one would be all flashbacks.
It struck me at the end of the book, where Martin all but apologises to his readers for this, that while I’ve seen he can write great characters, great twists and great bits of political machination, I have no evidence at all that he can write a good, solid story with a powerful ending. Now I fear what the rest of the books will give us. Time to read something else for a bit.
Thursday 8 December 2011
Thursday 6 October 2011
The Subtle Knife
If I were to be unkind, I could summarise The Subtle Knife really quite adequately by simply saying, ‘Some people go some places – and this boy finds a knife’. Because that is basically all that happens. No wonder I didn’t remember anything about it from the first time I’d read it! Yes, Lyra was very sweet, even if she seemed to be regressing rather than growing up, and yes, it’s good to see a wound that actually bothers someone properly in a children’s book, but it really wasn’t especially interesting.
And to be honest, the links to Paradise Lost and the story of the Fall, as well as almost all the cod-philosophical musings on Dark Matter and puberty are inelegant and really rather arbitrary.
Still, it’s better than almost any children’s literature out there, and I had a pretty enjoyable read. I’m not going to complain.
And to be honest, the links to Paradise Lost and the story of the Fall, as well as almost all the cod-philosophical musings on Dark Matter and puberty are inelegant and really rather arbitrary.
Still, it’s better than almost any children’s literature out there, and I had a pretty enjoyable read. I’m not going to complain.
Lolita
It took far longer than it should have done, but I’ve come to the end of Lolita, truly amongst the best books of all time. Nabokov’s prose is a tour de force throughout, and consistently beautiful – while in many places opaque. The story itself is functional and well-crafted, with only enough actual events for a short story so firmly fixed by foreshadowing, by allusions, by the intricate detail in which such events are unfolded, that the prose and the study of Humbert Humbert’s psychological state take centre-stage – and enchant and mesmerise the audience.
Before I go on, I’d just like to mention as an aside that I know about all the hullabaloo in Europe over a prior Lolita, a short story by a German writer with a plot remarkably similar to Nabokov’s The Enchanter, itself the short story that would later be fleshed out into Lolita. I care not if Nabokov refused to credit his source because he so hated Nazi sympathisers, or if he simply absorbed the story and (buzzword: cryptomnesia) later it trickled out of that vast lake in his head with all the freshness of our own second- (or sixth-) hand water, or even if it was just another work of McFate, which would no doubt appeal to Nabokov greatly. Frankly, it’s the style that is important here, and neither name nor story are great works of original thought.
Now, onto the book proper: a real masterpiece of vocabulary, eloquence and cynicism. Our narrator is Humbert Humbert, a monster, true, but a seductive one.
Humbert’s faults are many and extreme: he is a murderer, a wife-beater, a solipsist; he is entirely ignorant of the emotions and desires of other people. He is hideously selfish, for all his protestations. He treats Lo horrifically. I could blame his actions on a society that has backed him into a corner, made him a pariah, but he is simultaneously a hideous human being. He never loves Lolita, because he always puts his own desires first, desperate and ardent as they are.
When Lolita seduces him, almost a game, I would find it difficult to label him a rapist, despite legal terminology. But in continuing to abuse her, paying her like a whore, listening to her cry herself to sleep: his morals are challenged, but he can’t resist. He is weak, and ultimately destroys more lives than Lolita’s. Humbert isn’t a monster because he is a paedophile. Humbert is a monster because he is a selfish, blind fool, and mistakes lust for love. Lolita has her flaws, but she is after all a child, and her primary role-model is just as deceptive as she, and what Humbert does to her is unforgivable. But falling in love with a nymphet, in and of itself, is not.
Horrific, Horrible as he is, I see more of myself in him than I would like to, but then, it is difficult not to look at Hum the Hummer and see Nabokov the trickster staring back at you. This is perhaps the most important thing to note in the book – despite the slight imposed ignorance, Humbert (as well as Quilty, and, I’m increasingly suspecting, ALL Nabokov’s protagonists) simply IS Nabokov. Filtered, perhaps, distorted, maybe – but nonetheless Nabokov. I would have taken objection to Lolita’s dialogue, if not for the certainty that Nabokov spoke in just such a way.
Humbert and Quilty’s games centre impossibly on Nabokov’s literary knowledge (though to an extent, his references are ‘canon’, particularly those that are in French). The allusions are thick and often nigh-on invisible – so how cruel to insert the occasional fabricated quote or imagined reference! Always wanting to appear one step ahead of even the most educated reader, Nabokov never lets us forget it is HE who is writing the novel, HE who inserts Vivian Darkbloom (his anagrammatised alter-ego) and countless other little references, HE whose butterflies, unidentifiable to Humbert, flutter into view where no other writer would have turned their minds. This is my concern: Nabokov is a genius, a master craftsman, a wonderful artist – but he appears limited to himself, his own interests, his own obsessions, which happily coincide with Humbert’s (though I couldn’t say the same of ‘pederosis’; who knows?), and Pnin’s, and Van’s, and Kinbote’s.
An artist must be a chameleon. A writer must be prepared to take risks, to adopt another creature’s skin, even if that creature is a snake, and not just lie inside but amalgamate, assimilate, learn to BE a snake – or a bird – or a butterfly.
Humbert is surrounded by flimsiness, which he observes with an aloof eye and rebukes with a sarcastic tongue. It works beautifully for Lolita, and Humbert, which makes a masterpiece. But whether it can work for an entire body of work I am less sure.
Before I go on, I’d just like to mention as an aside that I know about all the hullabaloo in Europe over a prior Lolita, a short story by a German writer with a plot remarkably similar to Nabokov’s The Enchanter, itself the short story that would later be fleshed out into Lolita. I care not if Nabokov refused to credit his source because he so hated Nazi sympathisers, or if he simply absorbed the story and (buzzword: cryptomnesia) later it trickled out of that vast lake in his head with all the freshness of our own second- (or sixth-) hand water, or even if it was just another work of McFate, which would no doubt appeal to Nabokov greatly. Frankly, it’s the style that is important here, and neither name nor story are great works of original thought.
Now, onto the book proper: a real masterpiece of vocabulary, eloquence and cynicism. Our narrator is Humbert Humbert, a monster, true, but a seductive one.
Humbert’s faults are many and extreme: he is a murderer, a wife-beater, a solipsist; he is entirely ignorant of the emotions and desires of other people. He is hideously selfish, for all his protestations. He treats Lo horrifically. I could blame his actions on a society that has backed him into a corner, made him a pariah, but he is simultaneously a hideous human being. He never loves Lolita, because he always puts his own desires first, desperate and ardent as they are.
When Lolita seduces him, almost a game, I would find it difficult to label him a rapist, despite legal terminology. But in continuing to abuse her, paying her like a whore, listening to her cry herself to sleep: his morals are challenged, but he can’t resist. He is weak, and ultimately destroys more lives than Lolita’s. Humbert isn’t a monster because he is a paedophile. Humbert is a monster because he is a selfish, blind fool, and mistakes lust for love. Lolita has her flaws, but she is after all a child, and her primary role-model is just as deceptive as she, and what Humbert does to her is unforgivable. But falling in love with a nymphet, in and of itself, is not.
Horrific, Horrible as he is, I see more of myself in him than I would like to, but then, it is difficult not to look at Hum the Hummer and see Nabokov the trickster staring back at you. This is perhaps the most important thing to note in the book – despite the slight imposed ignorance, Humbert (as well as Quilty, and, I’m increasingly suspecting, ALL Nabokov’s protagonists) simply IS Nabokov. Filtered, perhaps, distorted, maybe – but nonetheless Nabokov. I would have taken objection to Lolita’s dialogue, if not for the certainty that Nabokov spoke in just such a way.
Humbert and Quilty’s games centre impossibly on Nabokov’s literary knowledge (though to an extent, his references are ‘canon’, particularly those that are in French). The allusions are thick and often nigh-on invisible – so how cruel to insert the occasional fabricated quote or imagined reference! Always wanting to appear one step ahead of even the most educated reader, Nabokov never lets us forget it is HE who is writing the novel, HE who inserts Vivian Darkbloom (his anagrammatised alter-ego) and countless other little references, HE whose butterflies, unidentifiable to Humbert, flutter into view where no other writer would have turned their minds. This is my concern: Nabokov is a genius, a master craftsman, a wonderful artist – but he appears limited to himself, his own interests, his own obsessions, which happily coincide with Humbert’s (though I couldn’t say the same of ‘pederosis’; who knows?), and Pnin’s, and Van’s, and Kinbote’s.
An artist must be a chameleon. A writer must be prepared to take risks, to adopt another creature’s skin, even if that creature is a snake, and not just lie inside but amalgamate, assimilate, learn to BE a snake – or a bird – or a butterfly.
Humbert is surrounded by flimsiness, which he observes with an aloof eye and rebukes with a sarcastic tongue. It works beautifully for Lolita, and Humbert, which makes a masterpiece. But whether it can work for an entire body of work I am less sure.
Pnin
Nabokov’s Pnin is only a very short book – ideal reading for a rainy, cheerless day…and I would recommend it to anyone, because bringing about smiles of both laughter and wistfulness is a sure sign of success.
Yes, Pnin has greatly impressed me – and because it was such a success, it’s buoyed up my estimation of all the rest of Nabokov’s work, too. To be silly and florid, all I had seen was a flat landscape, with beautiful flora but no undulation, but now I perceive in his talent great hills and valleys, and I am greatly relieved – my faith restored!
Because Pnin is very funny. Nabokov has made me laugh before, of course – I laughed when I read Lolita at 15 or 16 at Humbert’s wicked abuse of sleeping pills on Charlotte (before his far more wicked and chilling planned abuse of them later). It made me giggle to read how Humbert ‘had put the radio at full blast […] had blazed in her face an olisbos-like flashlight […] had pushed her, pinched her, prodded her’ and still she would not wake, until he kisses her, whereupon she ‘awakened at once, as fresh and strong as an octopus (I barely escaped).’ It makes me giggle now. But Pnin’s humour is very different. It is sweet, and endearing, and his character is almost bereft of darkness. As Nabokov himself wrote, writing Pnin was a ‘brief sunny escape from [Lolita’s] intolerable spell’. Indeed, Pnin is strangely interwoven with that work, written at the same time, and both helping to promote its deliciously sensual sister (when Pnin was serialised) and being bourn along in her contrails (after Lolita finally became a great success). They are so different that finally I unreservedly admire Nabokov and his art. This is the chameleonic quality I hoped for, and there is much to admire – and envy – in these two works, especially when side-by-side.
A collection of short stories or sketches more than a novel, Pnin is entirely character-driven. I expected Timofey Pnin (himself) to be a stereotyped, flat character like so many of Nabokov’s comic creations – but he is not. Nabokov puts himself in the story as a narrator (which I don’t think causes any great problems – the narrator-Nabokov is just a character, no different from any other historical figure placed in fiction; he just happens to be being written by himself), but it is clear that however much Pnin is created from observation, he is also created from deep familiarity – and he is by no means stupid; he simply has little English, which makes him seem less intelligent than he is.
Indeed, I saw a lot of myself in Pnin. I found him a far more sympathetic character than I had expected. His awkward affection towards his ‘son’ (and that awful moment where he thinks he has broken his beautiful gift from him), the way he goes on being utterly devoted to Liza despite knowing that she is only manipulating him, hurting him – that I understand, and for it, and for his countless other hapless, endearing traits, I really warmed to Tim Pnin, and the little world briefly built about him.
Yes, Pnin has greatly impressed me – and because it was such a success, it’s buoyed up my estimation of all the rest of Nabokov’s work, too. To be silly and florid, all I had seen was a flat landscape, with beautiful flora but no undulation, but now I perceive in his talent great hills and valleys, and I am greatly relieved – my faith restored!
Because Pnin is very funny. Nabokov has made me laugh before, of course – I laughed when I read Lolita at 15 or 16 at Humbert’s wicked abuse of sleeping pills on Charlotte (before his far more wicked and chilling planned abuse of them later). It made me giggle to read how Humbert ‘had put the radio at full blast […] had blazed in her face an olisbos-like flashlight […] had pushed her, pinched her, prodded her’ and still she would not wake, until he kisses her, whereupon she ‘awakened at once, as fresh and strong as an octopus (I barely escaped).’ It makes me giggle now. But Pnin’s humour is very different. It is sweet, and endearing, and his character is almost bereft of darkness. As Nabokov himself wrote, writing Pnin was a ‘brief sunny escape from [Lolita’s] intolerable spell’. Indeed, Pnin is strangely interwoven with that work, written at the same time, and both helping to promote its deliciously sensual sister (when Pnin was serialised) and being bourn along in her contrails (after Lolita finally became a great success). They are so different that finally I unreservedly admire Nabokov and his art. This is the chameleonic quality I hoped for, and there is much to admire – and envy – in these two works, especially when side-by-side.
A collection of short stories or sketches more than a novel, Pnin is entirely character-driven. I expected Timofey Pnin (himself) to be a stereotyped, flat character like so many of Nabokov’s comic creations – but he is not. Nabokov puts himself in the story as a narrator (which I don’t think causes any great problems – the narrator-Nabokov is just a character, no different from any other historical figure placed in fiction; he just happens to be being written by himself), but it is clear that however much Pnin is created from observation, he is also created from deep familiarity – and he is by no means stupid; he simply has little English, which makes him seem less intelligent than he is.
Indeed, I saw a lot of myself in Pnin. I found him a far more sympathetic character than I had expected. His awkward affection towards his ‘son’ (and that awful moment where he thinks he has broken his beautiful gift from him), the way he goes on being utterly devoted to Liza despite knowing that she is only manipulating him, hurting him – that I understand, and for it, and for his countless other hapless, endearing traits, I really warmed to Tim Pnin, and the little world briefly built about him.
Wednesday 5 October 2011
The Da Vinci Code
(P528): Please tell me the Teacher isn’t going to be Teabing…
(P532): Oh god…
(P533): Yes…yes, he is.
Those are the notes I scrawled to myself as I read some of the latter chapters of The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. Now that I’ve had a little time to look up some of the references I wasn’t sure about and find out some of the true history behind the organisations described, I think it’s high time to put down some of my thoughts on this minor publishing phenomenon, since I finished it a little while back, now.
It was an entertaining little page-turner, no better or worse written than the average children’s book, and if it inspires some interest in art and religious history (both areas of great fascination for me since I was a small boy – a much smaller boy than I am now, I mean!), then that is surely something positive. However, the book is also an extremely frustrating one.
Firstly, we have to fully accept that the characters are all incredibly stupid. Harvard Professors, Police Chiefs and professional cryptographers alike are idiots. Not only are they incapable of detecting a blindingly obvious anagram like ‘O Draconian Devil’ beside a mimicry of the Vitruvian Man, but they quite fail to notice what is blatantly mirror-writing for several pages. Even worse, a man who keeps the most important secret in the world encodes his ‘cryptex’ with the name of his own granddaughter! That’s not good encryption practice, now, is it? This would all be much more forgivable if Dan Brown did not insist on having his idiotic characters marvelling at how terribly clever all this is at every new revelation.
As you can tell from my little notes, I figured out who the ‘bad guy’ was going to be a few pages before he was revealed. I hoped it wouldn’t be him, and the French accent threw me off the scent for a while, but his pulling rank, and his blatant ‘last-person-you’d-suspect’ status made it inevitable – and rather underwhelming. Not only this, but I wish Brown had bothered to do some research into English speech. Sure, he throws in some todgers, some crisps, but really – no Brit refers to university as ‘school’, and these Anglophile French would be very unlikely to say anyone has got ‘mad’ instead of ‘angry’. Add to this a tea obsession and some very melodramatic bad-guy ‘monologuing’ (as they put it in ‘The Incredibles’) and we have a very British bad guy. Seems very old-fashioned in such an à la mode piece, full of exophoric references to Smart Cars and suchlike. Perfect for the zeitgeist; I doubt it will endure.
What kind of name is ‘Teabing’, anyway? That’s NOT a good anagram for ‘Baigent’!
The countless inaccuracies in the background to the story are barely worth mentioning. It’s a work of fiction, after all. But when Brown begins the novel with a big heading, ‘FACTS’, and then brings up the Priory of Sion, his taking ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ as apparently his only source makes him look like a fool. It’s not hard to find out who Pierre Plantard really was, or what an easily-dismissed piece of esoteric fluff his Priory really is. Worse than that, though, is his treatment of Da Vinci and the story of Christ.
I was surprised, in a book called ‘The Da Vinci Code’, to see so few mentions of Da Vinci himself, and so little reflection on his paintings. And to say that Paul in The Last Supper must be Magdelene because he’s got no beard is nonsense. After all, Paul was often painted as quite feminine and beardless by contemporary artists – as in The Last Supper of Ghirlandaio.
Brown also seems to neglect to mention that Gnosticism, while supporting his ideas on Christ as an ordinary human in many texts, also contain far more evidence for Christ being seen as a super-powered deity than the canonical Gospels do – as in The Acts of Thomas, which I remember reading in part in year 10 at school. His claims that the Counsel of Nicene heavy-handedly censored everything that they disliked in writings about Jesus, on values that were totally new, are also easily dismissed when we see how similar the Muratorian Fragment’s list of gospels is to the one established at Nicene, which it predates by a century or more, if I remember correctly.
Still, the book is a fun one, a good momentary distraction. I would just hate to think that some gullible people might believe what they read there. It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s fanciful The Portrait of Mr. W.H., where fabricated evidence is playfully used to identify Shakespeare’s male lover, only not so charming and having rather more ideas above its station. Brown’s work is entertaining, but a frustration.
(P532): Oh god…
(P533): Yes…yes, he is.
Those are the notes I scrawled to myself as I read some of the latter chapters of The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. Now that I’ve had a little time to look up some of the references I wasn’t sure about and find out some of the true history behind the organisations described, I think it’s high time to put down some of my thoughts on this minor publishing phenomenon, since I finished it a little while back, now.
It was an entertaining little page-turner, no better or worse written than the average children’s book, and if it inspires some interest in art and religious history (both areas of great fascination for me since I was a small boy – a much smaller boy than I am now, I mean!), then that is surely something positive. However, the book is also an extremely frustrating one.
Firstly, we have to fully accept that the characters are all incredibly stupid. Harvard Professors, Police Chiefs and professional cryptographers alike are idiots. Not only are they incapable of detecting a blindingly obvious anagram like ‘O Draconian Devil’ beside a mimicry of the Vitruvian Man, but they quite fail to notice what is blatantly mirror-writing for several pages. Even worse, a man who keeps the most important secret in the world encodes his ‘cryptex’ with the name of his own granddaughter! That’s not good encryption practice, now, is it? This would all be much more forgivable if Dan Brown did not insist on having his idiotic characters marvelling at how terribly clever all this is at every new revelation.
As you can tell from my little notes, I figured out who the ‘bad guy’ was going to be a few pages before he was revealed. I hoped it wouldn’t be him, and the French accent threw me off the scent for a while, but his pulling rank, and his blatant ‘last-person-you’d-suspect’ status made it inevitable – and rather underwhelming. Not only this, but I wish Brown had bothered to do some research into English speech. Sure, he throws in some todgers, some crisps, but really – no Brit refers to university as ‘school’, and these Anglophile French would be very unlikely to say anyone has got ‘mad’ instead of ‘angry’. Add to this a tea obsession and some very melodramatic bad-guy ‘monologuing’ (as they put it in ‘The Incredibles’) and we have a very British bad guy. Seems very old-fashioned in such an à la mode piece, full of exophoric references to Smart Cars and suchlike. Perfect for the zeitgeist; I doubt it will endure.
What kind of name is ‘Teabing’, anyway? That’s NOT a good anagram for ‘Baigent’!
The countless inaccuracies in the background to the story are barely worth mentioning. It’s a work of fiction, after all. But when Brown begins the novel with a big heading, ‘FACTS’, and then brings up the Priory of Sion, his taking ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ as apparently his only source makes him look like a fool. It’s not hard to find out who Pierre Plantard really was, or what an easily-dismissed piece of esoteric fluff his Priory really is. Worse than that, though, is his treatment of Da Vinci and the story of Christ.
I was surprised, in a book called ‘The Da Vinci Code’, to see so few mentions of Da Vinci himself, and so little reflection on his paintings. And to say that Paul in The Last Supper must be Magdelene because he’s got no beard is nonsense. After all, Paul was often painted as quite feminine and beardless by contemporary artists – as in The Last Supper of Ghirlandaio.
Brown also seems to neglect to mention that Gnosticism, while supporting his ideas on Christ as an ordinary human in many texts, also contain far more evidence for Christ being seen as a super-powered deity than the canonical Gospels do – as in The Acts of Thomas, which I remember reading in part in year 10 at school. His claims that the Counsel of Nicene heavy-handedly censored everything that they disliked in writings about Jesus, on values that were totally new, are also easily dismissed when we see how similar the Muratorian Fragment’s list of gospels is to the one established at Nicene, which it predates by a century or more, if I remember correctly.
Still, the book is a fun one, a good momentary distraction. I would just hate to think that some gullible people might believe what they read there. It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s fanciful The Portrait of Mr. W.H., where fabricated evidence is playfully used to identify Shakespeare’s male lover, only not so charming and having rather more ideas above its station. Brown’s work is entertaining, but a frustration.
Persians
Aeschylus’ Persians is not a famous play, with no great, memorable archetypes, and is unusual in having subject matter concerning recent events rather than mythology, but it’s one of the best Greek plays I’ve yet read. Around two and a half thousand years ago (astonishing to think of texts surviving so very long), Aeschylus fought in a battle against the Persians at Salamis (no, AT Salamis, not with salamis!), where according to popular legend, young Sophocles was in the chorus for the victory song, and Euripides was being born.
The play concerns not the victorious Greeks but the defeated Persians. A messenger brings news of King Xerxes’ crushing defeat, his mother weeps and summons the spirit of her husband, who warns against going against Greece, for it is protected by gods, and also cautions mortals not to be vain or proud. Xerxes appears in tatters, and with the chorus, weeps for his dead countrymen.
For a soldier who fought against these people, writing for an audience who must have lost family and friends in the battle, the sympathy and respect for the enemy is astonishing. In an age where we are so used to propaganda and the dehumanising of enemies, such respect and empathy for enemies seems remarkably noble and admirable.
Wilfred Owen’s sympathy for his foe in ‘Strange Meeting’ is powerful for it seeming to be a great exception. But for such an attitude to be the norm, and for a popular play to be written expressing the sadness of the enemy’s situation, with no possible way that the writing could be interpreted as mocking, or designed to make the audience jeer at the defeated mourners, really appeals to me. There is much to learn from ancient attitudes.
The play concerns not the victorious Greeks but the defeated Persians. A messenger brings news of King Xerxes’ crushing defeat, his mother weeps and summons the spirit of her husband, who warns against going against Greece, for it is protected by gods, and also cautions mortals not to be vain or proud. Xerxes appears in tatters, and with the chorus, weeps for his dead countrymen.
For a soldier who fought against these people, writing for an audience who must have lost family and friends in the battle, the sympathy and respect for the enemy is astonishing. In an age where we are so used to propaganda and the dehumanising of enemies, such respect and empathy for enemies seems remarkably noble and admirable.
Wilfred Owen’s sympathy for his foe in ‘Strange Meeting’ is powerful for it seeming to be a great exception. But for such an attitude to be the norm, and for a popular play to be written expressing the sadness of the enemy’s situation, with no possible way that the writing could be interpreted as mocking, or designed to make the audience jeer at the defeated mourners, really appeals to me. There is much to learn from ancient attitudes.
Prometheus Unbound
Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound is a very exciting and fast-paced play, for one within the confines of Greek theatrical tradition. Hephaestus, with Zeus’ pushy mouthpiece Might, chain Prometheus to a rock in the mountains of Scythia at the edge of the world. When they leave, Prometheus rages about the injustice of his situation. The first of many visitors in this barren land arrives – in fact, a whole group of them (the chorus): the Daughters of Ocean. Prometheus tells them about his situation – a powerful Titan who helped Zeus gain power by telling him to topple Kronos by guile and not strength, he (like Eve) has been punished for disobeying orders and giving knowledge to mankind. He is proud and defiant, and it is later hinted that this has been exacerbated by his belligerence, and that submitting to Zeus would mean an end to his suffering. However, he will not hear of it, no matter how Ocean reasons with him. Zeus is a selfish tyrant and Prometheus will never acquiesce – and besides, he can see what will happen, and knows the secret of Zeus’ downfall.
After Ocean leaves, Io wanders on, still in the form of a cow, tortured by a Gadfly. She is another victim of cruel Zeus – he tried to seduce her, she refused, Hera was jealous anyway and transformed her. She and psychic Prometheus tell her story, Prometheus foretelling her journey to the Nile, where Zeus will swoop on her and she will bear his child. One of this child’s descendents will be Heracles, who of course is the one to finally free Prometheus. Io exits with a brilliantly unhinged final expression of the woe of the toil ahead of her. Prometheus’ next guest is Hermes, who comes with an ultimatum from Zeus – tell him the secret of his downfall or have his eagle peck at his innards every day.
Proud Prometheus patronises the sarcastic Hermes and sends him back to Olympus. The chorus, despite knowing that if they stay, they will get caught up in the splitting of the mountain that will signal the beginning of Prometheus’ punishment, stand by Prometheus’ side, supporting his decision and signalling their agreement that Zeus is a tyrant, his downfall much to be wished for.
Coo, try rearranging THAT sentence so that it doesn’t end with a preposition!
I believe that in mythology, Io WAS the lover of Zeus, and bore his child willingly when she was turned back into a human in Egypt. I believe that it was Zeus who turned her into a cow, trying to hide her from Hera, who wasn’t fooled. Hermes was the one who killed her guardian, many-eyed giant Argus (Nabokov’s favourite). Although of course all myths are malleable, I expect Aeschylus skimmed over the first details of Io’s story in order to make Zeus more culpable, and Io purer, therefore more of a victim.
After Ocean leaves, Io wanders on, still in the form of a cow, tortured by a Gadfly. She is another victim of cruel Zeus – he tried to seduce her, she refused, Hera was jealous anyway and transformed her. She and psychic Prometheus tell her story, Prometheus foretelling her journey to the Nile, where Zeus will swoop on her and she will bear his child. One of this child’s descendents will be Heracles, who of course is the one to finally free Prometheus. Io exits with a brilliantly unhinged final expression of the woe of the toil ahead of her. Prometheus’ next guest is Hermes, who comes with an ultimatum from Zeus – tell him the secret of his downfall or have his eagle peck at his innards every day.
Proud Prometheus patronises the sarcastic Hermes and sends him back to Olympus. The chorus, despite knowing that if they stay, they will get caught up in the splitting of the mountain that will signal the beginning of Prometheus’ punishment, stand by Prometheus’ side, supporting his decision and signalling their agreement that Zeus is a tyrant, his downfall much to be wished for.
Coo, try rearranging THAT sentence so that it doesn’t end with a preposition!
I believe that in mythology, Io WAS the lover of Zeus, and bore his child willingly when she was turned back into a human in Egypt. I believe that it was Zeus who turned her into a cow, trying to hide her from Hera, who wasn’t fooled. Hermes was the one who killed her guardian, many-eyed giant Argus (Nabokov’s favourite). Although of course all myths are malleable, I expect Aeschylus skimmed over the first details of Io’s story in order to make Zeus more culpable, and Io purer, therefore more of a victim.
Women of Trachis
Sophocles’ Women of Trachis shows Heracles’ wife, Deianira, waiting for her husband’s triumphant return. However, she learns that he is bringing back a mistress, so sends Heracles a coat soaked in what she believes is love potion to keep him loyal. However, she was tricked by a centaur Heracles killed, and the potion is actually poison from the Hydra.
Hyllus (different from Hylas), Heracles’ son, comes and curses his mother, for the poison is causing Heracles great pain. Distraught, Deianira kills herself. Heracles is brought on and in agony, charges his son to burn him alive on a mountaintop, and marry the mistress who caused all this strife. Fearing his father’s curses, he agrees.
It’s certainly a tragic play, and evokes pity both for misled Deianira, for suffering Heracles, despite all his philandering, and for Hyllus, who loses both his parents on one day.
Hyllus (different from Hylas), Heracles’ son, comes and curses his mother, for the poison is causing Heracles great pain. Distraught, Deianira kills herself. Heracles is brought on and in agony, charges his son to burn him alive on a mountaintop, and marry the mistress who caused all this strife. Fearing his father’s curses, he agrees.
It’s certainly a tragic play, and evokes pity both for misled Deianira, for suffering Heracles, despite all his philandering, and for Hyllus, who loses both his parents on one day.
Philoctetes
Sophocles’ Philoctetes was a good play. The titular character was the man who burned Heracles when he was in great agony, for which he was given the great hero’s legendary bow. However, he was later bitten by a snake in a temple and cursed to suffer great agony but never die. Because the wound wept noisome pus and Philoctetes was crying out in such pain, the Greeks abandoned him, only to discover a decade later that they needed Heracles’ bow in order to win the war against Troy.
The great machintator Odysseus goes to find him, bringing along young Neoptolemos, Achilles’ son, to help with his plot. Neoptolemos is to win Philoctetes’ trust by saying he hates Odysseus (one on the ones who abandoned Philoctetes) and will take the stranded cripple home. Hugely grateful, Philoctetes trusts Neoptolemos and lets him hold the bow.
However, Achilles’ son is an honourable and honest young man, and hates having to lie, so finally admits his part in the deception. Odysseus storms on to intervene, but when Philoctetes gets his bow back, he runs off with his tail between his legs. The new companions decide to set off home, but then Heracles (now a god) appears ex machina to tell them to go to Troy and fight after all. Pure, virtuous Neoptolemos, whose conscience prevents him from following disseminating Odysseus’ advice, is a great character, and seeing him struggle with the dilemma obedience set against morality is both satisfying in its outcome and impressively modern.
The great machintator Odysseus goes to find him, bringing along young Neoptolemos, Achilles’ son, to help with his plot. Neoptolemos is to win Philoctetes’ trust by saying he hates Odysseus (one on the ones who abandoned Philoctetes) and will take the stranded cripple home. Hugely grateful, Philoctetes trusts Neoptolemos and lets him hold the bow.
However, Achilles’ son is an honourable and honest young man, and hates having to lie, so finally admits his part in the deception. Odysseus storms on to intervene, but when Philoctetes gets his bow back, he runs off with his tail between his legs. The new companions decide to set off home, but then Heracles (now a god) appears ex machina to tell them to go to Troy and fight after all. Pure, virtuous Neoptolemos, whose conscience prevents him from following disseminating Odysseus’ advice, is a great character, and seeing him struggle with the dilemma obedience set against morality is both satisfying in its outcome and impressively modern.
Cloud Atlas
a great read, and highly recommended. It was by no means perfect, but for something I picked up on a whim because it was a bestseller, it was excellently written, literary and good fun. Its only real problem is that it really is just six stories with only incidental connection. I think that David Mitchell could very well write a chameleonic masterpiece, but not until he has a great unifying idea, so this is not it. What I said before about it putting me in mind of a schoolboy doing all his best funny voices for his friends stands, but to be entertaining, those voices have to ring true. Mitchell’s impersonations are damn good, if not quite perfect (but impressionists are only fun when you can recognise the face behind the voice).
Metatextual playfulness and pastiche always give the rather irritating shield of putting the work above criticism (What is an intended flaw and what is a genuine one? Is a man who has never heard of Poker using an expression from that game a slip or a statement about how elements survive while the whole is lost? Is the Britishness of the invented manners of speaking in the sci-fi segments intentional? What does this mean?), but the different genres are all taken seriously enough to be entertaining in their own right. None of these stories would be particularly good alone, but the contrast between them gives the pleasure of showmanship to the display of versatility. A trick has limited satisfaction, though; what was missing was unity.
‘Six interlocking lives – one amazing adventure’ boasts the blurb. But the connections are extremely tenuous, and the appearances of each work in the next are contrived and could be allusions to anything, real or fictional, without the effect being changed one bit. Adam Ewing is a 19th-c diarist who describes his stay on the Chatham Islands and the plight of the Moriori natives while a conman doctor makes him sicker so that he pays for the cure.
This diary is read by the superbly arrogant and snobbish Frobisher, who goes to study under an august musician and soon lets his loins lead him into various inconveniences.
Frobisher’s letters are addressed to Sixsmith, who in his old age is a murder victim in the well-observed aping of pulpy thriller ‘Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery’, in which the eponymous journalist investigates corruption in a nuclear power plant in the 70s.
This thriller is sent to present-day publisher Timothy Cavendish, whose adventures are meant to be comedic but I found chilling (though rewarding in the end). I thought I’d imagined the similarity between this section and Nabokov’s writings, with its aloof, cantankerous narrator, literary allusions and instructions to cinematic directors, presuming I simply had Nabokov on the brain after my dissertation – but when Tim commands, ‘Speak, Memory!’, the allusion couldn’t be more direct (though Nabokov is not the only influence here). This homage, like the rest of Mitchell’s voices, is excellent, though of course not quite as inspired as its inspiration, as sparkling as that which sparked it, and I’m not sure Nabokov would have referred to such writers as Stevie Smith or J.D. Salinger, though Paddington Bear may well have held some appeal for him, too.
Cavendish’s life is made into a film, which is viewed by Sonmi~451, a mass-produced drone called a Fabricant from the not-so-distant future, where sinister consumerism holds the world in its corrupt grip.
This fabricant is then regarded as a god by the near-savage population of the final segment, where the civilised world has collapsed and a storyteller called Zachry tells his story about how he was host and guide for a visitor from a ship whose population had retained some of the old ‘Smart’ from before the ‘Fall’.
In other words, the connections don’t amount to a hill of beans and any crazy world you care to pick (‘Casablanca, Lars!’ I gleefully misquote).
There are other connections, frivolous and insignificant – a recurring birthmark, the ‘Cloud Atlas’ phrase, references to Nietzsche and especially the Will to Power – but really, drawing any connection between these would be as specious as saying there is great significance in the fact that the first and last tales both feature the buggery of little boys.
So with no message except perhaps that consumerism is bad in excess, and that racial equality is good (though some Scots beating up some English baddies can be a joyful thing), there is little to draw from this book. But that is not why it was written. It was written to be enjoyed, a playful and experimental piece of showmanship: art for art’s sake. In that, it is excellent, and is only very rarely dull or too self-indulgent. I loved it, though I sincerely hope that one day Mitchell will far out-do this and write something stylistically exemplary, playful AND significant.
The biggest lesson to learn is: every division for division’s sake can only push the onlooker one step further away.
Metatextual playfulness and pastiche always give the rather irritating shield of putting the work above criticism (What is an intended flaw and what is a genuine one? Is a man who has never heard of Poker using an expression from that game a slip or a statement about how elements survive while the whole is lost? Is the Britishness of the invented manners of speaking in the sci-fi segments intentional? What does this mean?), but the different genres are all taken seriously enough to be entertaining in their own right. None of these stories would be particularly good alone, but the contrast between them gives the pleasure of showmanship to the display of versatility. A trick has limited satisfaction, though; what was missing was unity.
‘Six interlocking lives – one amazing adventure’ boasts the blurb. But the connections are extremely tenuous, and the appearances of each work in the next are contrived and could be allusions to anything, real or fictional, without the effect being changed one bit. Adam Ewing is a 19th-c diarist who describes his stay on the Chatham Islands and the plight of the Moriori natives while a conman doctor makes him sicker so that he pays for the cure.
This diary is read by the superbly arrogant and snobbish Frobisher, who goes to study under an august musician and soon lets his loins lead him into various inconveniences.
Frobisher’s letters are addressed to Sixsmith, who in his old age is a murder victim in the well-observed aping of pulpy thriller ‘Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery’, in which the eponymous journalist investigates corruption in a nuclear power plant in the 70s.
This thriller is sent to present-day publisher Timothy Cavendish, whose adventures are meant to be comedic but I found chilling (though rewarding in the end). I thought I’d imagined the similarity between this section and Nabokov’s writings, with its aloof, cantankerous narrator, literary allusions and instructions to cinematic directors, presuming I simply had Nabokov on the brain after my dissertation – but when Tim commands, ‘Speak, Memory!’, the allusion couldn’t be more direct (though Nabokov is not the only influence here). This homage, like the rest of Mitchell’s voices, is excellent, though of course not quite as inspired as its inspiration, as sparkling as that which sparked it, and I’m not sure Nabokov would have referred to such writers as Stevie Smith or J.D. Salinger, though Paddington Bear may well have held some appeal for him, too.
Cavendish’s life is made into a film, which is viewed by Sonmi~451, a mass-produced drone called a Fabricant from the not-so-distant future, where sinister consumerism holds the world in its corrupt grip.
This fabricant is then regarded as a god by the near-savage population of the final segment, where the civilised world has collapsed and a storyteller called Zachry tells his story about how he was host and guide for a visitor from a ship whose population had retained some of the old ‘Smart’ from before the ‘Fall’.
In other words, the connections don’t amount to a hill of beans and any crazy world you care to pick (‘Casablanca, Lars!’ I gleefully misquote).
There are other connections, frivolous and insignificant – a recurring birthmark, the ‘Cloud Atlas’ phrase, references to Nietzsche and especially the Will to Power – but really, drawing any connection between these would be as specious as saying there is great significance in the fact that the first and last tales both feature the buggery of little boys.
So with no message except perhaps that consumerism is bad in excess, and that racial equality is good (though some Scots beating up some English baddies can be a joyful thing), there is little to draw from this book. But that is not why it was written. It was written to be enjoyed, a playful and experimental piece of showmanship: art for art’s sake. In that, it is excellent, and is only very rarely dull or too self-indulgent. I loved it, though I sincerely hope that one day Mitchell will far out-do this and write something stylistically exemplary, playful AND significant.
The biggest lesson to learn is: every division for division’s sake can only push the onlooker one step further away.
Midnight's Children
I finished re-reading Midnight’s Children. I really should have spend the time reading something else. It’s not the monumental work of literature so many profess it to be. It’s rather good, with a sophisticated but simple and playful narrative tone, some amusing circumstances and lashings of India, but I’m not sure it will endure. It’s just too specific, too limited, too personal. And I find magical realism quite tiresome, being neither one thing nor the other, and lacking the freedom of either. And to be honest, it all gets rather tiresome.
One thing I didn’t expect it to be is dated. But it is. Literature needs to move on, I feel, and I think the first step is cultural acceptance – which doesn’t mean writing lots of Eastern-influenced pseudo-esotericism (though admittedly I’m using that bandwagon as a hook in my attempts to get a literary agent – but it never influenced my writing, and my influences are the nicely mashed-up, non-specific works I’m propounding). It means not thinking that because something is influenced by another culture, it is mystical, superior and above editing. A good story is a good story, wherever and whenever it is set, by whomever it is told. Similarly, some books, like Midnight’s Children, are bloated and ponderous and in need of major cutting, even if they’re intertwined with the identity of a specific country.
Cultural acceptance is when we recognise the influences beneath the themes of a novel, absorb them, recognise them but do not dwell on them. If anything, pigeonholing Rushdie and any other writers from other cultures (including émigré Russian literature) is reductive, counterproductive and destructive: a twee rhyme that encapsulates how risible I find notions such as, ‘This must be good because this is ancient’, ‘It’s Chinese so it must have deep spiritual value’ or indeed, ‘It’s Japanese: it’s cool’. Each writer must be assessed on their merits. I for one am tired of hearing that because a writer is black, Indian, feminist, working-class, young or indeed a struggling single mother, their work must be above all criticism.
This has strayed a long way from Rushdie’s book, and I’m not criticising writers. It’s the zeitgeist, not some nefarious plot. Rushdie has talent, but his book did nothing for me emotionally, except occasionally raise a smile. I didn’t dislike it – nor is it the great masterpiece it’s supposed to be. I think that it hit a nerve, but then, so did dozens of forgotten Booker winners. Time will tell what endures. If Rushdie’s book does, I will be surprised.
One thing I didn’t expect it to be is dated. But it is. Literature needs to move on, I feel, and I think the first step is cultural acceptance – which doesn’t mean writing lots of Eastern-influenced pseudo-esotericism (though admittedly I’m using that bandwagon as a hook in my attempts to get a literary agent – but it never influenced my writing, and my influences are the nicely mashed-up, non-specific works I’m propounding). It means not thinking that because something is influenced by another culture, it is mystical, superior and above editing. A good story is a good story, wherever and whenever it is set, by whomever it is told. Similarly, some books, like Midnight’s Children, are bloated and ponderous and in need of major cutting, even if they’re intertwined with the identity of a specific country.
Cultural acceptance is when we recognise the influences beneath the themes of a novel, absorb them, recognise them but do not dwell on them. If anything, pigeonholing Rushdie and any other writers from other cultures (including émigré Russian literature) is reductive, counterproductive and destructive: a twee rhyme that encapsulates how risible I find notions such as, ‘This must be good because this is ancient’, ‘It’s Chinese so it must have deep spiritual value’ or indeed, ‘It’s Japanese: it’s cool’. Each writer must be assessed on their merits. I for one am tired of hearing that because a writer is black, Indian, feminist, working-class, young or indeed a struggling single mother, their work must be above all criticism.
This has strayed a long way from Rushdie’s book, and I’m not criticising writers. It’s the zeitgeist, not some nefarious plot. Rushdie has talent, but his book did nothing for me emotionally, except occasionally raise a smile. I didn’t dislike it – nor is it the great masterpiece it’s supposed to be. I think that it hit a nerve, but then, so did dozens of forgotten Booker winners. Time will tell what endures. If Rushdie’s book does, I will be surprised.
Ghostwritten
I just finished David Mitchell’s first book – Ghostwritten, another book of variously-voiced fragments, with some impressively, chillingly prescient moments of reflection upon terrorism and world politics, given that it was written in 1999.
The book was in many ways just like Cloud Atlas: the same idea of having a series of stories set in different times and places that inform one another but are linked only by a recurrent idea here, a repeated character there (who could really have been a non-repeated character, much like Vincent Vega’s appearance in Butch’s story in Pulp Fiction – it’s done to raise a smile, to slightly inform); the same seriousness in moving into science fiction that surprised me in Cloud Atlas; even two characters who appear in both novels – the very same Timothy Cavendish and a rather different Luisa Rey. The final similarity is that it is tantalisingly close to being a brilliant book, but falls just short.
The advantage that Ghostwritten has over Cloud Atlas is that the different speakers are much less exaggerated, an exercise in different voices, rather than different generalised fictional genres. Where Cloud Atlas felt like the class clown doing his best impersonations of teachers and celebrities, Ghostwritten felt much more like fragments of well-developed novels with well-developed characters. Some stories were inevitably better than others: I enjoyed a sweet, plaintive love story between a Japanese boy who works in a record shop and a girl who is curious enough about him to come back after her first visit in order to speak to him far more than I enjoyed one about a simple woman living in a tea shop as politics in China alter the world around her but never her outlook. I thought the idea of a sentient defence system governed by four Asimov-influenced laws with the power to kill everyone on the planet taking moral cues from a radio talk show host much more compelling than the limp and long-winded section regarding the woman who made this system possible, and her empty digressions on some simplified ideas of quantum physics mostly made up of buzzword (though the link between these two passages was the strongest of any).
Where the stories were good, they were very good, and Mitchell writes in an elegant, concise and playful style that I very much enjoy, an identity that he allows to come through in these less grotesque characters far more than he does in his latest work. Two or three of the ephemeral characters in Ghostwritten will likely endure in my mind longer than those of Cloud Atlas.
However, Mitchell’s storytelling has two faults. One is that he tries too hard to stamp the identity of his chosen setting on each passage. He puts in far more local colour than it would occur to a resident of that particular place to mention. It’s just not quite subtle enough, and breaks the spell that otherwise keeps us enchanted, especially when other prime facets of his characters’ lives don’t ring true (despite one of his characters being a drummer, I very much doubt Mitchell knows a ride cymbal from a splash). Secondly, a problem that was bad in Cloud Atlas is even worse here: because he writes several tenuously linked stories, he does not quite manage to give a complete and satisfactory story in any one of them. Cloud Atlas at least revisited each of its stories and concluded them (to varying degrees of satisfaction), but in Ghostwritten, only one narrative is repeated, as a kind of epilogue.
Mitchell is a very talented writer, and his books are certainly worth reading. There is much to be admired in his creativity and eclecticism. However, so far, his disjointedness does not quite cohere: it is like listening to a greatest hits album – enjoyable in its own right, but sooner or later you want to hear the songs in the context of their original album: only there is none.
I shall read Number9dream, his second book, tomorrow; I think Mitchell has enormous potential, but so far, I don’t think he has realised it. However, I will be keen to read his work in the future, and hope something truly special will soon come from his fertile imagination.
The book was in many ways just like Cloud Atlas: the same idea of having a series of stories set in different times and places that inform one another but are linked only by a recurrent idea here, a repeated character there (who could really have been a non-repeated character, much like Vincent Vega’s appearance in Butch’s story in Pulp Fiction – it’s done to raise a smile, to slightly inform); the same seriousness in moving into science fiction that surprised me in Cloud Atlas; even two characters who appear in both novels – the very same Timothy Cavendish and a rather different Luisa Rey. The final similarity is that it is tantalisingly close to being a brilliant book, but falls just short.
The advantage that Ghostwritten has over Cloud Atlas is that the different speakers are much less exaggerated, an exercise in different voices, rather than different generalised fictional genres. Where Cloud Atlas felt like the class clown doing his best impersonations of teachers and celebrities, Ghostwritten felt much more like fragments of well-developed novels with well-developed characters. Some stories were inevitably better than others: I enjoyed a sweet, plaintive love story between a Japanese boy who works in a record shop and a girl who is curious enough about him to come back after her first visit in order to speak to him far more than I enjoyed one about a simple woman living in a tea shop as politics in China alter the world around her but never her outlook. I thought the idea of a sentient defence system governed by four Asimov-influenced laws with the power to kill everyone on the planet taking moral cues from a radio talk show host much more compelling than the limp and long-winded section regarding the woman who made this system possible, and her empty digressions on some simplified ideas of quantum physics mostly made up of buzzword (though the link between these two passages was the strongest of any).
Where the stories were good, they were very good, and Mitchell writes in an elegant, concise and playful style that I very much enjoy, an identity that he allows to come through in these less grotesque characters far more than he does in his latest work. Two or three of the ephemeral characters in Ghostwritten will likely endure in my mind longer than those of Cloud Atlas.
However, Mitchell’s storytelling has two faults. One is that he tries too hard to stamp the identity of his chosen setting on each passage. He puts in far more local colour than it would occur to a resident of that particular place to mention. It’s just not quite subtle enough, and breaks the spell that otherwise keeps us enchanted, especially when other prime facets of his characters’ lives don’t ring true (despite one of his characters being a drummer, I very much doubt Mitchell knows a ride cymbal from a splash). Secondly, a problem that was bad in Cloud Atlas is even worse here: because he writes several tenuously linked stories, he does not quite manage to give a complete and satisfactory story in any one of them. Cloud Atlas at least revisited each of its stories and concluded them (to varying degrees of satisfaction), but in Ghostwritten, only one narrative is repeated, as a kind of epilogue.
Mitchell is a very talented writer, and his books are certainly worth reading. There is much to be admired in his creativity and eclecticism. However, so far, his disjointedness does not quite cohere: it is like listening to a greatest hits album – enjoyable in its own right, but sooner or later you want to hear the songs in the context of their original album: only there is none.
I shall read Number9dream, his second book, tomorrow; I think Mitchell has enormous potential, but so far, I don’t think he has realised it. However, I will be keen to read his work in the future, and hope something truly special will soon come from his fertile imagination.
A Storm of Swords, by George R.R. Martin
A book long enough to be divided into two separate volumes in many bookshops, it is more of the same from George R.R. Martin. The whole Song of Ice and Fire saga is, it’s becoming apparent, basically one extended novel, with lots of cliffhangers and only the changes in point-of-view characters to break up the overall structure – as well as the short opening and closing chapters that give one-off characters a brief voice.
At the end of A Clash of Kings, the Lannisters have overpowered Stannis Baratheon and are in a position of strength. Robb is still a threat, and Catelyn Stark wants nothing more than to get her daughters back. As ever, trouble is brewing in the North, beyond the wall, and winter, true to form, continues to be coming.
I always expect to dislike the next book in this sequence. I start to get bored, especially with the chapters dealing with the Night’s Watch (here we get Samwell’s story as well as Jon Snow’s – and despite little flecks of romance, neither is very interesting). I find Martin’s writing style tiresome and smirk at how now that he’s discovered the word ‘merlon’ he’s damn well going to use it whenever he can, almost as much as ‘whickered’.
And then he smack me in the face with brilliant storytelling and very unexpected twists that really hit home emotionally, and I read the rest of the book ravenously, and with a faint sense of guilt for underestimating his skill. Because he can write a very, very compelling narrative and serves up some real shockers. I have certain expectations of conventional storytelling. This character has to at least find out what happened to his family before he’s in any real danger. That character will definitely be safe until these various plot strands are tied up. But these things are nothing to Martin, and probably the saddest a book has ever made me has been when this one abruptly brought an end to the possibility of some plot strands being resolved, or characters to meet what had seemed to be their destinies. (Although a final twist reverses this to a degree.) The stories I looked forward to don’t get told – but that only makes me more emotionally invested and appreciative of the cleverness of the decision. Great stuff.
And anyone who comes up with such a fantastic character as Petyr Baelish cannot be a poor writer.
At the end of A Clash of Kings, the Lannisters have overpowered Stannis Baratheon and are in a position of strength. Robb is still a threat, and Catelyn Stark wants nothing more than to get her daughters back. As ever, trouble is brewing in the North, beyond the wall, and winter, true to form, continues to be coming.
I always expect to dislike the next book in this sequence. I start to get bored, especially with the chapters dealing with the Night’s Watch (here we get Samwell’s story as well as Jon Snow’s – and despite little flecks of romance, neither is very interesting). I find Martin’s writing style tiresome and smirk at how now that he’s discovered the word ‘merlon’ he’s damn well going to use it whenever he can, almost as much as ‘whickered’.
And then he smack me in the face with brilliant storytelling and very unexpected twists that really hit home emotionally, and I read the rest of the book ravenously, and with a faint sense of guilt for underestimating his skill. Because he can write a very, very compelling narrative and serves up some real shockers. I have certain expectations of conventional storytelling. This character has to at least find out what happened to his family before he’s in any real danger. That character will definitely be safe until these various plot strands are tied up. But these things are nothing to Martin, and probably the saddest a book has ever made me has been when this one abruptly brought an end to the possibility of some plot strands being resolved, or characters to meet what had seemed to be their destinies. (Although a final twist reverses this to a degree.) The stories I looked forward to don’t get told – but that only makes me more emotionally invested and appreciative of the cleverness of the decision. Great stuff.
And anyone who comes up with such a fantastic character as Petyr Baelish cannot be a poor writer.
Monday 3 October 2011
Number9dream
I finished Number9dream last night, so have now read all Mitchell’s published works.
The structure of the book is what I had hoped Mitchell’s other books would be – a single story, interspersed with different voices. Eiji Miyaki, a country boy from Japan, comes to Tokyo in search of his father, but this soon becomes complicated enough to involve several different jobs, a love affair and more than one run-in with the Yakuza.
Mitchell’s greatest asset is disorientation. The boundaries between truth and fantasy are clearly demarcated, but of course, when you begin the book, you can’t see the pattern, so suddenly you don’t know whether what you’re reading is sci-fi, a spy thriller or a wild fantasy. Of course, it turns out to be the latter. Eiji is a vivid daydreamer.
Parallels have been drawn by reviewers to Billy Liar, but Eiji does not lie, he simply imagines fantastical scenarios, and keep them to himself. As Number9dream progresses, the sections that weave around the narrative change: dreams, diaries – even a collection of children’s stories about a goat, a chicken and The Missing Link (later compared to the superego, ego and id, though the analogy doesn’t quite work). These stories, all on the subject of being a writer, are rather incongruous; I suspect Mitchell has included them despite their being written quite outside the composition of this novel, especially as they are so utterly British. Still, they are entertaining enough to be welcome additions. This bravura literary acrobatics display sometimes makes the book drag, with a little too much indulgence, particularly towards the end, where inspiration seems to dribble one to the floor, where Mitchell tries to mop it up with feeble poeticism in an attempt to give a dreamlike state. Really, the novel should have ended fifty pages earlier.
It’s a shame, because I really thought this would be the novel I liked the most, but it wasn’t as satisfying as the other two disjointed books because despite the fact that my hopes for one single, unified story were answered, it just isn’t a very good story at all.
Reality soon becomes stranger than fiction, and the sections of ‘real’ narrative get more and more outlandish. The yakuza segments are totally bizarre and outrageous, with lots of death and fireballs and life-on-the-line card games, the drug-fuelled double date Eiji is drawn into seems like an adolescent fantasy, but is just about passable, and when what seemed to be a deranged computer hacker’s delusion of grandeur and ridiculous false hope turns out to be a reality, the whole thing is too ridiculous to believe. Which is, essentially, the point.
We’re supposed to be questioning the reality of what we read because of the dreamlike nature of the narrative. But this is no excuse for a weak and rambling story. Add to this a dull love story, in which I wanted to tell Eiji that he deserves better (since beyond a nice neck and an appealing intelligence, Ai did not strike me as at all an attractive character – but hey, different strokes for different blokes!), and the book just seemed to be a jamming together of different ideas that Mitchell wanted to write into a story that didn’t really accommodate them.
Still there were some moments that I very much enjoyed. The flashbacks to Eiji’s childhood with his twin sister were poignant, elegant and rang true to my own memories of what being a child was like. They also had a scenario that seemed to be straight out of anime! Indeed, alongside a reference to Miyazaki’s Laputa, I DID wonder whether Eiji mentioning an ‘Unfamiliar Ceiling’ was a reference to Evangelion. I wouldn’t be surprised.
There was more self-reference in this book. The foul Mongolian gangster from Ghostwritten reappears, and I finally get to know why such an incongruously Japanese idol-type name as ‘Zizzi Hikaru’ popped up in the thoroughly Korean segment of Cloud Atlas. I’m not a big fan of these show-off’s self-references, but they don’t do any harm. Even the overused ‘Cloud atlas’ imagery comes from one of Eiji’s musings.
So the book had moments that were very entertaining, and the pure, naïve young protagonist was certainly appealing, but as a story, it didn’t really work, and the feeble ending was a real let-down.
Apparently it’s all very derivative of Murakami. Suddenly, the Murakami books sitting waiting for me to pick them up and read them have lost a fair chunk of their appeal.
The structure of the book is what I had hoped Mitchell’s other books would be – a single story, interspersed with different voices. Eiji Miyaki, a country boy from Japan, comes to Tokyo in search of his father, but this soon becomes complicated enough to involve several different jobs, a love affair and more than one run-in with the Yakuza.
Mitchell’s greatest asset is disorientation. The boundaries between truth and fantasy are clearly demarcated, but of course, when you begin the book, you can’t see the pattern, so suddenly you don’t know whether what you’re reading is sci-fi, a spy thriller or a wild fantasy. Of course, it turns out to be the latter. Eiji is a vivid daydreamer.
Parallels have been drawn by reviewers to Billy Liar, but Eiji does not lie, he simply imagines fantastical scenarios, and keep them to himself. As Number9dream progresses, the sections that weave around the narrative change: dreams, diaries – even a collection of children’s stories about a goat, a chicken and The Missing Link (later compared to the superego, ego and id, though the analogy doesn’t quite work). These stories, all on the subject of being a writer, are rather incongruous; I suspect Mitchell has included them despite their being written quite outside the composition of this novel, especially as they are so utterly British. Still, they are entertaining enough to be welcome additions. This bravura literary acrobatics display sometimes makes the book drag, with a little too much indulgence, particularly towards the end, where inspiration seems to dribble one to the floor, where Mitchell tries to mop it up with feeble poeticism in an attempt to give a dreamlike state. Really, the novel should have ended fifty pages earlier.
It’s a shame, because I really thought this would be the novel I liked the most, but it wasn’t as satisfying as the other two disjointed books because despite the fact that my hopes for one single, unified story were answered, it just isn’t a very good story at all.
Reality soon becomes stranger than fiction, and the sections of ‘real’ narrative get more and more outlandish. The yakuza segments are totally bizarre and outrageous, with lots of death and fireballs and life-on-the-line card games, the drug-fuelled double date Eiji is drawn into seems like an adolescent fantasy, but is just about passable, and when what seemed to be a deranged computer hacker’s delusion of grandeur and ridiculous false hope turns out to be a reality, the whole thing is too ridiculous to believe. Which is, essentially, the point.
We’re supposed to be questioning the reality of what we read because of the dreamlike nature of the narrative. But this is no excuse for a weak and rambling story. Add to this a dull love story, in which I wanted to tell Eiji that he deserves better (since beyond a nice neck and an appealing intelligence, Ai did not strike me as at all an attractive character – but hey, different strokes for different blokes!), and the book just seemed to be a jamming together of different ideas that Mitchell wanted to write into a story that didn’t really accommodate them.
Still there were some moments that I very much enjoyed. The flashbacks to Eiji’s childhood with his twin sister were poignant, elegant and rang true to my own memories of what being a child was like. They also had a scenario that seemed to be straight out of anime! Indeed, alongside a reference to Miyazaki’s Laputa, I DID wonder whether Eiji mentioning an ‘Unfamiliar Ceiling’ was a reference to Evangelion. I wouldn’t be surprised.
There was more self-reference in this book. The foul Mongolian gangster from Ghostwritten reappears, and I finally get to know why such an incongruously Japanese idol-type name as ‘Zizzi Hikaru’ popped up in the thoroughly Korean segment of Cloud Atlas. I’m not a big fan of these show-off’s self-references, but they don’t do any harm. Even the overused ‘Cloud atlas’ imagery comes from one of Eiji’s musings.
So the book had moments that were very entertaining, and the pure, naïve young protagonist was certainly appealing, but as a story, it didn’t really work, and the feeble ending was a real let-down.
Apparently it’s all very derivative of Murakami. Suddenly, the Murakami books sitting waiting for me to pick them up and read them have lost a fair chunk of their appeal.
Saturday 1 October 2011
The Child in Time
Slow and stately, this was closer to Atonement than the other McEwan books I’ve read (Enduring Love, which I will shortly have to try to recall in detail, and The Cement Garden) in terms of tone, but certainly distinct in its own right.
I enjoy McEwan’s directness and emphasis on story and ideas over style, but he can be rather ponderous at times, and this book sometimes dragged.
However, it had moments of real magnificence. Stephen Lewis is a published writer who wrote his debut novel intending it for serious literary readers, only to have it published to great acclaim as a children’s book. This amusing history, however, gives way to a truly horrifying fate. One day Lewis takes his little daughter Kate to the supermarket. While he is distracted, she vanishes – almost certainly abducted. This truly chilling event of course has huge implications, and Lewis’ life is irrevocably changed. His relationship with his wife crumbles and they drift apart, unable to communicate their loss. He becomes obsessed, constantly looking for his daughter in groups of children, or getting lost in memories of her. Stephen’s journey is painful and arduous, but the inevitable conclusion to the story comes in a truly memorable sequence that brings renewed hope, changing Stephen’s view that time ‘forbids second chances’ and bringing a real sense of optimism in a perhaps obvious but still uplifting fashion.
Written in the 80s, the story is set in the near future, with a thinly-veiled Thatcher still in power. Along with licensing beggars, Mrs. Thatcher has assembled a group of impressive-sounding spokespeople to attach their names to a report on how best to raise children, even though their input will be totally disregarded. The political commentary was an unwelcome addition, mostly because it seemed petty and reductive, and only pointed out the obvious flaws in bureaucracy. Similarly the compacted explorations of (now dated, naturally) theoretical physics. But both are necessary because McEwan wants to examine his two major themes – the child and time – in as many ways as possible. However, these asides are almost entirely irrelevant to the main story, and most affecting statement: that of a man coping with the loss of a child, the desire to live in the past and the impression that time has ceased for those who lose the most important things in their lives.
Additional complications, like a friend of the protagonist’s who regresses with alarming physical adequacy to childhood and an exciting but arbitrary motorway accident added only to show time slowing to a crawl in an emergency seem like padding, detracting from the far more striking scenes, such as the memory of the day Kate goes missing, Stephen’s own childhood and a delusional Stephen’s surreal invasion of a school when he thinks he has seen his daughter, but in the end, the book was satisfying and melancholy, and haunting for anyone, especially parents.
I enjoy McEwan’s directness and emphasis on story and ideas over style, but he can be rather ponderous at times, and this book sometimes dragged.
However, it had moments of real magnificence. Stephen Lewis is a published writer who wrote his debut novel intending it for serious literary readers, only to have it published to great acclaim as a children’s book. This amusing history, however, gives way to a truly horrifying fate. One day Lewis takes his little daughter Kate to the supermarket. While he is distracted, she vanishes – almost certainly abducted. This truly chilling event of course has huge implications, and Lewis’ life is irrevocably changed. His relationship with his wife crumbles and they drift apart, unable to communicate their loss. He becomes obsessed, constantly looking for his daughter in groups of children, or getting lost in memories of her. Stephen’s journey is painful and arduous, but the inevitable conclusion to the story comes in a truly memorable sequence that brings renewed hope, changing Stephen’s view that time ‘forbids second chances’ and bringing a real sense of optimism in a perhaps obvious but still uplifting fashion.
Written in the 80s, the story is set in the near future, with a thinly-veiled Thatcher still in power. Along with licensing beggars, Mrs. Thatcher has assembled a group of impressive-sounding spokespeople to attach their names to a report on how best to raise children, even though their input will be totally disregarded. The political commentary was an unwelcome addition, mostly because it seemed petty and reductive, and only pointed out the obvious flaws in bureaucracy. Similarly the compacted explorations of (now dated, naturally) theoretical physics. But both are necessary because McEwan wants to examine his two major themes – the child and time – in as many ways as possible. However, these asides are almost entirely irrelevant to the main story, and most affecting statement: that of a man coping with the loss of a child, the desire to live in the past and the impression that time has ceased for those who lose the most important things in their lives.
Additional complications, like a friend of the protagonist’s who regresses with alarming physical adequacy to childhood and an exciting but arbitrary motorway accident added only to show time slowing to a crawl in an emergency seem like padding, detracting from the far more striking scenes, such as the memory of the day Kate goes missing, Stephen’s own childhood and a delusional Stephen’s surreal invasion of a school when he thinks he has seen his daughter, but in the end, the book was satisfying and melancholy, and haunting for anyone, especially parents.
Friday 30 September 2011
The Comfort of Strangers
The Comfort of Strangers, a novella of just 100 pages, shows the striking difference between early and late McEwan. His first books, such as The Cement Garden and this particular one, have an edgy, fresh, compelling quality, while the later books are much better-crafted, well-thought-out and concerned with characters rather than relationships. I can’t say one is better than the other; they feel like entirely distinct characters, but The Comfort of Strangers had only one strength – the extremely believable strangeness of Colin and Mary’s love.
Colin and Mary are an English couple on holiday, presumably in Venice (it’s never named, but where else do you get in a boat and call it a taxi?), and while they are in love, they are so familiar with one another, so used to being together that they are both bored. They barely speak, and when they do, they mostly bicker. They sometimes feel as though they are simply the same person.
One day, trying to find a restaurant still open so that they can have a late dinner, they meet a strange man who takes them to a bar, tells them his life story and makes them promise to come and visit him. Only after this, in the middle of the narrative, do we discover that Colin and Mary are not middle-aged and plain, as they have seemed, but a beautiful young couple: Mary has had two children, but still gets attention on the beach, and Colin is a veritable Adonis who looks ‘like a god’ in a woman’s nighty. Indeed, Robert, the strange man from the bar who seems to be keeping his young wife imprisoned and abused in their home, has been taking surreptitious photographs of him…
It’s a rather self-consciously shocking little piece of macabre melodrama, which in its brevity seems almost abortive, but worth reading just for the strange state of entropied love Colin and Mary naturally feel. It’s like watching a guttering candle flame blown by a strange new breeze and glowing brighter for a moment. The story surrounding it may not be especially interesting, but that achingly painful familiarity certainly is.
Colin and Mary are an English couple on holiday, presumably in Venice (it’s never named, but where else do you get in a boat and call it a taxi?), and while they are in love, they are so familiar with one another, so used to being together that they are both bored. They barely speak, and when they do, they mostly bicker. They sometimes feel as though they are simply the same person.
One day, trying to find a restaurant still open so that they can have a late dinner, they meet a strange man who takes them to a bar, tells them his life story and makes them promise to come and visit him. Only after this, in the middle of the narrative, do we discover that Colin and Mary are not middle-aged and plain, as they have seemed, but a beautiful young couple: Mary has had two children, but still gets attention on the beach, and Colin is a veritable Adonis who looks ‘like a god’ in a woman’s nighty. Indeed, Robert, the strange man from the bar who seems to be keeping his young wife imprisoned and abused in their home, has been taking surreptitious photographs of him…
It’s a rather self-consciously shocking little piece of macabre melodrama, which in its brevity seems almost abortive, but worth reading just for the strange state of entropied love Colin and Mary naturally feel. It’s like watching a guttering candle flame blown by a strange new breeze and glowing brighter for a moment. The story surrounding it may not be especially interesting, but that achingly painful familiarity certainly is.
The Light of Day
Read Graham Swift’s The Light of Day, with a very misleading cover that says ‘Winner of the Booker Prize’, referring not to the book but to Swift.
It also had probably the largest type I’ve ever seen in adult literature, but was reasonably entertaining. It takes old noir-ish detective clichés – George is an ex-cop and a private investigator who’s in love with a murderer client, and recounts the story of the mysterious workings of fate on a single day ... but avoids triteness by taking a grim and realistic look at what it really must be like to be in love with a woman who murdered her husband as she serves her time. I like the fragmented timeline, the randomness of the memories, the directness of the style – but there is just far, far too much padding, even for such a short book. It just doesn’t sustain interest, and becomes most tiresome.
It also had probably the largest type I’ve ever seen in adult literature, but was reasonably entertaining. It takes old noir-ish detective clichés – George is an ex-cop and a private investigator who’s in love with a murderer client, and recounts the story of the mysterious workings of fate on a single day ... but avoids triteness by taking a grim and realistic look at what it really must be like to be in love with a woman who murdered her husband as she serves her time. I like the fragmented timeline, the randomness of the memories, the directness of the style – but there is just far, far too much padding, even for such a short book. It just doesn’t sustain interest, and becomes most tiresome.
Thursday 29 September 2011
Educating Peter
Very much enjoyed this. Obviously, it’s not meant to be a great work of literature or to change lives, but for a slice of entertainment to be greedily consumed in a few hours, it’s perfect. Obviously written by a journalist, it’s essentially one long anecdotal article, and the acknowledgements at the back (as well as what the author himself, who is charmingly accessible online, has written) made it clear that the story is non-fiction, which only confirms what you come to think sooner or later. It’s not a great work of creativity; it’s a fun story, told in a sparky and entertaining style, which in its idiom makes great reading.
There are some problems. While Cox is excellent on the music he loves, and is clearly writing for people with a similar taste to him, who look with similar amused bewilderment at the teenagers of today, he really should have researched the kind of music his young ward encouraged him to listen to. Certain bizarre inconsistencies can be put down to the whims of being a teenager (Peter hates rap yet likes Linkin Park and early Slipknot, is ignorant of older bands yet enjoyed AC/DC, and I suspect it was he that mis-spelt ‘Kittie’ and Cox simply copied it, which was pretty sloppy on his part), but other mistakes seem to be Cox’s. He mixes up Kyuss and Drowning Pool, two very different bands, for one thing.
Cox’s musical tastes seem to place him closer to 37 than 27, with the exception of his inexplicable dislike for T-Rex (yes, they’re bland and repetitive, but that’s their charm, and there is genius in their music, even if it’s drowned by padding), but what he likes, he likes very much, and I deeply respect that. This isn’t a great book for showing the reality of contact between a teenaged boy and a prematurely aged man. For all the suggestion that Peter really is a genuine teen, and that teenaged clichés exist because they are based on truth, there is a lot of sarcasm, a lot of belittling that I would be quite insulted to read, were I Peter. He comes across as very sweet in his naivety – bordering on stupidity – and I cringe to remember some of the things that I did at a similar age when trying to find my identity. But the book would have been infinitely more coherent and more significant if Cox really did open his mind to the things Peter likes, rather than just pretending to.
Certain elements of my taste have changed and matured as I have grown older. But for all their association with empty corporate angst, lacking in rebellion, I remember the early days of bands like System of a Down, Slipknot and even Limp Bizkit (yes, even they had credibility in the beginning, when nu-metal was still an obscure and esoteric term), and the intelligent and powerful things they had to say, if only you were listening. And no matter how many sheep-like teenagers don the hoodies of those bands, no matter how uncool they become, I will always see those early days, when no-one knew who on earth they were, when they were angry, and hungry, and passionate, and I will be just as moved, affected and inspired as the people who grew up with The Who, Led Zep, Nirvana – or even Pentangle.
I’ve drifted away from the review, but it’s important for me to say this. I don’t care what’s cool and what’s not. I don’t care about credibility. I listen to the massively popular and the obscure, if I like it, and won’t abandon a band just because people dismiss them based on cursory analysis and the audience schematic. It’s those who do that who are the real sell-outs. Additionally, I will not loathe one style of music because I like another, any more than I will stop watching one genre of movies because I prefer another. I sometimes think that people both don’t take their music seriously enough, when they let the opinion of others sway them, and that they take it too seriously, when they begin to judge others and fear how they are judged over something that is supposed to be fun and entertaining.
This is far too serious an obloquy for a review of a fun and light-hearted book, but it needed to be said!
Oh, and isn’t ‘Educating Peter’ a euphemism for masturbation? o_O
There are some problems. While Cox is excellent on the music he loves, and is clearly writing for people with a similar taste to him, who look with similar amused bewilderment at the teenagers of today, he really should have researched the kind of music his young ward encouraged him to listen to. Certain bizarre inconsistencies can be put down to the whims of being a teenager (Peter hates rap yet likes Linkin Park and early Slipknot, is ignorant of older bands yet enjoyed AC/DC, and I suspect it was he that mis-spelt ‘Kittie’ and Cox simply copied it, which was pretty sloppy on his part), but other mistakes seem to be Cox’s. He mixes up Kyuss and Drowning Pool, two very different bands, for one thing.
Cox’s musical tastes seem to place him closer to 37 than 27, with the exception of his inexplicable dislike for T-Rex (yes, they’re bland and repetitive, but that’s their charm, and there is genius in their music, even if it’s drowned by padding), but what he likes, he likes very much, and I deeply respect that. This isn’t a great book for showing the reality of contact between a teenaged boy and a prematurely aged man. For all the suggestion that Peter really is a genuine teen, and that teenaged clichés exist because they are based on truth, there is a lot of sarcasm, a lot of belittling that I would be quite insulted to read, were I Peter. He comes across as very sweet in his naivety – bordering on stupidity – and I cringe to remember some of the things that I did at a similar age when trying to find my identity. But the book would have been infinitely more coherent and more significant if Cox really did open his mind to the things Peter likes, rather than just pretending to.
Certain elements of my taste have changed and matured as I have grown older. But for all their association with empty corporate angst, lacking in rebellion, I remember the early days of bands like System of a Down, Slipknot and even Limp Bizkit (yes, even they had credibility in the beginning, when nu-metal was still an obscure and esoteric term), and the intelligent and powerful things they had to say, if only you were listening. And no matter how many sheep-like teenagers don the hoodies of those bands, no matter how uncool they become, I will always see those early days, when no-one knew who on earth they were, when they were angry, and hungry, and passionate, and I will be just as moved, affected and inspired as the people who grew up with The Who, Led Zep, Nirvana – or even Pentangle.
I’ve drifted away from the review, but it’s important for me to say this. I don’t care what’s cool and what’s not. I don’t care about credibility. I listen to the massively popular and the obscure, if I like it, and won’t abandon a band just because people dismiss them based on cursory analysis and the audience schematic. It’s those who do that who are the real sell-outs. Additionally, I will not loathe one style of music because I like another, any more than I will stop watching one genre of movies because I prefer another. I sometimes think that people both don’t take their music seriously enough, when they let the opinion of others sway them, and that they take it too seriously, when they begin to judge others and fear how they are judged over something that is supposed to be fun and entertaining.
This is far too serious an obloquy for a review of a fun and light-hearted book, but it needed to be said!
Oh, and isn’t ‘Educating Peter’ a euphemism for masturbation? o_O
The Wind Singer
This morning, I got around to finishing William Nicholson’s The Wind Singer. Sadly, it didn’t quite fulfil its early promise, and while it was good enough for me to want to read the two sequels I’ve already bought, it’s a shame that it didn’t live up to expectations. It starts off very enjoyable, a fast-paced and funny little satire about the education system: the population of the city of Amaranth is constantly examined, and their privileges and jobs within a caste system are decided wholly by these exams, in spite of any natural intelligence or propensity to manual work. The Hath family rebel against this, each in their own way, until Kestrel, the rebellious daughter of the family, is going to be locked away in a hidden chamber full of strange, aged children rather like those in Akira, only far more sinister. Learning she will become like them, she escapes with her twin brother Bowman and their classmate, Mumpo, a mentally retarded boy who has always been a repulsive outcast, and yet has a good heart. After meeting the imprisoned emperor, Kestrel has been given a mission: to find the Wind Singer.
Unfortunately, this is where it all goes rather wrong. Nicholson, a man who didn’t WRITE Gladiator but tightened it up and made it streamlined enough for Hollywood, writes in a perfunctory style perfectly suited to the early satire of the book. Like Dahl or Lemony Snicket, the world works because it is too grotesque to be quite believable, funny and bizarre. The characters are all extreme: the authority figures simple and easily mocked, the Emperor himself imprisoned by an addiction to chocolate buttons, the children rebelling by yelling made-up swearwords like ‘pompaprune’ and expressing encouragement to others by going ‘hubba hubba’. It works in the satirical city, and it works with the rather dull episode involving mud-people, but when Nicholson tries to make the story epic and even chilling, it just falls flat.
Kestrel and Bowman, even Mumpo, are good characters, even if the twins’ psychic link is rather cheesy and unnecessary, and Mumpo’s strange ability to be Mumpo even when he should be brainwashed makes little sense. Their emotions are extreme and superficial because of Nicholson’s style, but they are certainly likeable. But Nicholson soon puts them in situations that just do not work. It seems that he has had half a dozen exciting ideas, and crammed them all in, one after another. There’s nothing wrong with episodic quest stories, but with all the ideas left half-developed, and most questions left unanswered, the whole thing seems unfinished and unsatisfying, and the conundrums we’re left are ones that are unlikely to ever be answered: is being descended from a prophet the only reason Bowman has psychic powers? How do the children recognise things that they can never have seen in a life spent in Amaranth? If the people of the city do not TRULY believe in the system they live under (since the spell will be broken by the Wind Singer), why are the Hath family not also bewitched?
Nicholson’s narrative style is also rather dubious. The Hollywood cinematic rush leaves me constantly wondering what the characters THINK about their circumstances, but this is not what I have issues with – rather, I am concerned with pacing. He intersperses the scenes of an epic quest with rather uninteresting snippets of the Hath parents back in Amaranth, and while this line from Kestrel and Bowman’s mother was one of the book’s funniest moments:
‘O, unhappy people!’ cried the prophetess. ‘The time has come to sit and eat buns!’
That alone did not make the tedious chapters worthwhile: which surely is something a Hollywood writer should spot!
The kids’ return trip is nearly a Tolkien cliché (Eagles carry them at least SOME of the way), but then, as though just to avoid that particular pitfall, the rest of the journey is hurriedly described and feels like a mere inconvenience.
I’ll read the other two books, but it’s a shame that something potentially so good turned out to be mediocre.
Here’s Nicholson’s writing in his own words:
‘For a writer reared on English Literature at Cambridge, Hollywood is as far away as you can go. No one in Hollywood cares about your voice, or your sensibility. What they want is big characters, big stories, big audiences. Very smart people there do nothing all day but beat writers into shape. I was duly beaten into shape. As a result I now understand that I am not writing to reveal my own mysteriously-fascinating self to others – no one’s listening, no one cares – but to explore the world we all share.’
It’s sad, but he’s right. But to extract one’s own voice as much as he has only removes all sense of continuous identity.
Unfortunately, this is where it all goes rather wrong. Nicholson, a man who didn’t WRITE Gladiator but tightened it up and made it streamlined enough for Hollywood, writes in a perfunctory style perfectly suited to the early satire of the book. Like Dahl or Lemony Snicket, the world works because it is too grotesque to be quite believable, funny and bizarre. The characters are all extreme: the authority figures simple and easily mocked, the Emperor himself imprisoned by an addiction to chocolate buttons, the children rebelling by yelling made-up swearwords like ‘pompaprune’ and expressing encouragement to others by going ‘hubba hubba’. It works in the satirical city, and it works with the rather dull episode involving mud-people, but when Nicholson tries to make the story epic and even chilling, it just falls flat.
Kestrel and Bowman, even Mumpo, are good characters, even if the twins’ psychic link is rather cheesy and unnecessary, and Mumpo’s strange ability to be Mumpo even when he should be brainwashed makes little sense. Their emotions are extreme and superficial because of Nicholson’s style, but they are certainly likeable. But Nicholson soon puts them in situations that just do not work. It seems that he has had half a dozen exciting ideas, and crammed them all in, one after another. There’s nothing wrong with episodic quest stories, but with all the ideas left half-developed, and most questions left unanswered, the whole thing seems unfinished and unsatisfying, and the conundrums we’re left are ones that are unlikely to ever be answered: is being descended from a prophet the only reason Bowman has psychic powers? How do the children recognise things that they can never have seen in a life spent in Amaranth? If the people of the city do not TRULY believe in the system they live under (since the spell will be broken by the Wind Singer), why are the Hath family not also bewitched?
Nicholson’s narrative style is also rather dubious. The Hollywood cinematic rush leaves me constantly wondering what the characters THINK about their circumstances, but this is not what I have issues with – rather, I am concerned with pacing. He intersperses the scenes of an epic quest with rather uninteresting snippets of the Hath parents back in Amaranth, and while this line from Kestrel and Bowman’s mother was one of the book’s funniest moments:
‘O, unhappy people!’ cried the prophetess. ‘The time has come to sit and eat buns!’
That alone did not make the tedious chapters worthwhile: which surely is something a Hollywood writer should spot!
The kids’ return trip is nearly a Tolkien cliché (Eagles carry them at least SOME of the way), but then, as though just to avoid that particular pitfall, the rest of the journey is hurriedly described and feels like a mere inconvenience.
I’ll read the other two books, but it’s a shame that something potentially so good turned out to be mediocre.
Here’s Nicholson’s writing in his own words:
‘For a writer reared on English Literature at Cambridge, Hollywood is as far away as you can go. No one in Hollywood cares about your voice, or your sensibility. What they want is big characters, big stories, big audiences. Very smart people there do nothing all day but beat writers into shape. I was duly beaten into shape. As a result I now understand that I am not writing to reveal my own mysteriously-fascinating self to others – no one’s listening, no one cares – but to explore the world we all share.’
It’s sad, but he’s right. But to extract one’s own voice as much as he has only removes all sense of continuous identity.
Wednesday 28 September 2011
Slaves of the Mastery
I just finished reading Slaves of the Mastery, the sequel to William Nicholson’s The Wind Singer. And, to my surprise, I absolutely loved it. I mean it – I adored it, and when I laid it down, after finishing drinking up the last pages, I felt energised, determined, eager for more.
All this much to my surprise. The improvement from the last book is immeasurable; gone is the simple episodic structure of the original, and the brisk, superficial prose, replaced by simple but elegant writing, brimful with detail and pleasing imagery, and a narrative that becomes truly grandiose. Rather than charming but daft ideas that seemed like rejections from Gulliver’s Travels, here Nicholson borrows heavily from religious imagery – a race of pilgrim people escaping their masters to find a promised land, a woman happy to turn the other cheek, a force that flows through all things and is best embraced and followed rather than controlled. The effect is stunning.
I would recommend it to anyone, and for that reason, advise you not to read on if you don’t want the story spoiled.
It’s best to forget the first book, where Aramanth seemed the only significant place in the world of the books, then as vulnerable as it is now, and the characters bear little resemblance to their original incarnations. The city falls when the soldiers of the mastery invade, enslaving the population and taking them to the city of the Mastery. Here the stakes are raised instantly, when the brutality of the Mastery is shown starkly – they trap people in cages and burn them to death in front of their loved ones to serve as a deterrent. The shocking directness of this image brilliantly sets the tone: dark, adult, intense, moving.
There is a lull in the middle, but most things cohere in the end. I disliked the envoy from Gang, expecting them to be a brief diversion like the Chaka and Baraka in the first book rather than a major plot element, but in the end Sisi was an interesting and amusing character, and Kestrel’s dance was entirely beautiful. I wasn’t keen on a talking cat (well, a holistic ability to talk to animals), but as comic relief, the cat was perfect, if unoriginal. Psychic powers are rather a dull addition, but it IS cool to see Bowman sweeping soldiers from the staircase before him. Like the best anime, Slaves of the Mastery succeeds brilliantly by taking a story that would look uninspired in summary and making it totally captivating in the details.
The Master being an ambiguous villain, who has created something utterly beautiful which he rules with an iron fist, is expertly revealed, and a city full of slaves is an enchantingly bold concept. The scene where the whole city is coordinated in a vast musical performance is inspired, and even Mumpo’s moment as a fighter (while a continuation of an irritating central-characters-are-naturally-vastly-gifted conceit) shines. The whole climax is superbly orchestrated, and while I thought that the whole thing was going to hinge on the rather weak reliance on one character having fallen in love with Kestrel, that was not, in fact, a particularly necessary part of the puzzle at all, and only made one moment all the more poignant. Brilliant writing, brilliant plotting – worth the slow build-up, for the pay-off was so massive.
And it’s refreshing that in escaping their masters, in setting themselves free, the heroes cause the destruction of something beautiful and the deaths of many –are they really so much better than what they fought against?
It oozes cinematic glory, sexuality, intelligence and knowledge of how to make not only a good story, but good characters (amidst, I have to say, several very flat ones) with intrigue that will carry to the next book quite easily. Everything is wrought in intricate detail, and Nicholson showed a brilliance with minor touches I had never thought possible after The Wind Singer. A mountain is made of a molehill when Kestrel thinks she is betraying Sisi by making her use a secret sign that means one thing to her, quite another to Zohon, her admirer, but when she realises she cannot go through with her deception, but Sisi does the gesture of her own accord anyway, it is one of those classic brilliantly-contrived moments.
If anything deserves to be made into a film, it is this little gem. What a shame it so out-shines its predecessor; if this had come first, the trilogy would likely have made a far greater impact than it did. Stunningly beautiful.
Truly the best children’s book I have read in some time – one of the best, in fact, that I have ever read. Superb.
All this much to my surprise. The improvement from the last book is immeasurable; gone is the simple episodic structure of the original, and the brisk, superficial prose, replaced by simple but elegant writing, brimful with detail and pleasing imagery, and a narrative that becomes truly grandiose. Rather than charming but daft ideas that seemed like rejections from Gulliver’s Travels, here Nicholson borrows heavily from religious imagery – a race of pilgrim people escaping their masters to find a promised land, a woman happy to turn the other cheek, a force that flows through all things and is best embraced and followed rather than controlled. The effect is stunning.
I would recommend it to anyone, and for that reason, advise you not to read on if you don’t want the story spoiled.
It’s best to forget the first book, where Aramanth seemed the only significant place in the world of the books, then as vulnerable as it is now, and the characters bear little resemblance to their original incarnations. The city falls when the soldiers of the mastery invade, enslaving the population and taking them to the city of the Mastery. Here the stakes are raised instantly, when the brutality of the Mastery is shown starkly – they trap people in cages and burn them to death in front of their loved ones to serve as a deterrent. The shocking directness of this image brilliantly sets the tone: dark, adult, intense, moving.
There is a lull in the middle, but most things cohere in the end. I disliked the envoy from Gang, expecting them to be a brief diversion like the Chaka and Baraka in the first book rather than a major plot element, but in the end Sisi was an interesting and amusing character, and Kestrel’s dance was entirely beautiful. I wasn’t keen on a talking cat (well, a holistic ability to talk to animals), but as comic relief, the cat was perfect, if unoriginal. Psychic powers are rather a dull addition, but it IS cool to see Bowman sweeping soldiers from the staircase before him. Like the best anime, Slaves of the Mastery succeeds brilliantly by taking a story that would look uninspired in summary and making it totally captivating in the details.
The Master being an ambiguous villain, who has created something utterly beautiful which he rules with an iron fist, is expertly revealed, and a city full of slaves is an enchantingly bold concept. The scene where the whole city is coordinated in a vast musical performance is inspired, and even Mumpo’s moment as a fighter (while a continuation of an irritating central-characters-are-naturally-vastly-gifted conceit) shines. The whole climax is superbly orchestrated, and while I thought that the whole thing was going to hinge on the rather weak reliance on one character having fallen in love with Kestrel, that was not, in fact, a particularly necessary part of the puzzle at all, and only made one moment all the more poignant. Brilliant writing, brilliant plotting – worth the slow build-up, for the pay-off was so massive.
And it’s refreshing that in escaping their masters, in setting themselves free, the heroes cause the destruction of something beautiful and the deaths of many –are they really so much better than what they fought against?
It oozes cinematic glory, sexuality, intelligence and knowledge of how to make not only a good story, but good characters (amidst, I have to say, several very flat ones) with intrigue that will carry to the next book quite easily. Everything is wrought in intricate detail, and Nicholson showed a brilliance with minor touches I had never thought possible after The Wind Singer. A mountain is made of a molehill when Kestrel thinks she is betraying Sisi by making her use a secret sign that means one thing to her, quite another to Zohon, her admirer, but when she realises she cannot go through with her deception, but Sisi does the gesture of her own accord anyway, it is one of those classic brilliantly-contrived moments.
If anything deserves to be made into a film, it is this little gem. What a shame it so out-shines its predecessor; if this had come first, the trilogy would likely have made a far greater impact than it did. Stunningly beautiful.
Truly the best children’s book I have read in some time – one of the best, in fact, that I have ever read. Superb.
After the Quake
five pretty short stories and one utterly insane one, elegant but ultimately inconsequential, yet accessible, compelling and beautiful enough for me to want to read more of Murakami's writing.
Firesong
After the superb Slaves of the Mastery, this book had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, it falls far short. The Manth people begin their journey to find their ‘homeland’, which means that the elegant simplicity of the plot of Slaves gives way to the clumsy episodic nature of book one. While it’s more serious in tone than The Wind Singer, this final instalment lacks its charm, and cannot come close to the sustained flow and driving climax of the second. There are some good ideas, but all underdeveloped, giving the impression of a sad nest of unhatched eggs: the Manth people slaughter a whole tribe of thieves for trying to steal their young women, but this is never treated as reprehensible. Just when the reality of travel across a snowy wasteland seems to be taking a realistic toll, Kestrel walks a few feet and finds a valley that has tropical weather – a daft resolution to a crisis if ever there was one. Once the powers of the Singer people are revealed, the heroes go Super Saiyan and start flying about, which was rubbish in Dragonball Z, rubbish in The Matrix and is rubbish here.
It’s meant to be epic, but it’s just naff. Albard, formerly known as The Master, and his companion Jumper are both non-characters, the passages concerning them hurried and unconvincing. But worse, the major characters don’t develop at all. Love is presented so clumsily, as so direct and unproblematic – someone says they love someone else, and that’s that – although people seem to be able to change the objects of their desire quite easily. Kestrel’s sacrifice seems contrived just so that Bowman can happily marry Sisi, making a nonsense of all the actual training Bowman undertakes, and the idea that embracing death freely gives ultimate happiness is frankly not a very good message. Ultimately, the book was shallow and unsatisfying, and rather a chore, which is a great shame considering how I loved the predecessor. But while that was a feast for the reader, this one seemed to barely have been cooked.
It’s meant to be epic, but it’s just naff. Albard, formerly known as The Master, and his companion Jumper are both non-characters, the passages concerning them hurried and unconvincing. But worse, the major characters don’t develop at all. Love is presented so clumsily, as so direct and unproblematic – someone says they love someone else, and that’s that – although people seem to be able to change the objects of their desire quite easily. Kestrel’s sacrifice seems contrived just so that Bowman can happily marry Sisi, making a nonsense of all the actual training Bowman undertakes, and the idea that embracing death freely gives ultimate happiness is frankly not a very good message. Ultimately, the book was shallow and unsatisfying, and rather a chore, which is a great shame considering how I loved the predecessor. But while that was a feast for the reader, this one seemed to barely have been cooked.
The Phantom Tollbooth
If there’s a twentieth-century American classic of children’s literature, this is it. A movie has been made (a Water-Babies-esque mix of live action and animation, apparently; I should track it down), it is mentioned in the same tones as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the works of Dr. Seuss, and it is consistently listed as a children’s classic – all in America. For some reason, it remains fairly obscure over here. I read it as a teenager, but the puns in Shark Boy were so similar in style (a ‘train of thought’, a ‘stream of consciousness’) that I was reminded of it, and desired to reacquaint myself with the quirky little story.
A series of images rather than a real narrative, rather like Alice’s Adventures or Le Petit Prince, it is less fantastical than those masterpieces, but rather less charming. Milo, a boy who is thoroughly bored with the mundane rigmarole of life, one day finds a toy tollbooth has been delivered to his room. He has a toy car that he can sit in and drive, so he drives up to the tollbooth in it, and is transported to another world – a world where King Azaz, ruler of Dictionopolis, and the Mathemagician, whose domain is Digitopolis, can never agree whether it is letters or numbers which are most important. They will always disagree until their sisters, the princesses Rhyme and Reason, return to the land, so Milo sets off to find them, assisted by Tock the Watchdog (half-dog, half-clock, naturally) and posturing insect the Humbug.
The defining characteristic of the book is the aforementioned reliance on puns. There are placenames like The Point of View, Context, Ignorance and Conclusions. You can guess which you note that you are out of, which you jump to and so on. There is some extremely entertaining imagery, but ultimately the story is rather flat and lifeless, without much in the way of characters. An enjoyable afternoon’s diversion, for the reader as well as Milo, but no classic.
A series of images rather than a real narrative, rather like Alice’s Adventures or Le Petit Prince, it is less fantastical than those masterpieces, but rather less charming. Milo, a boy who is thoroughly bored with the mundane rigmarole of life, one day finds a toy tollbooth has been delivered to his room. He has a toy car that he can sit in and drive, so he drives up to the tollbooth in it, and is transported to another world – a world where King Azaz, ruler of Dictionopolis, and the Mathemagician, whose domain is Digitopolis, can never agree whether it is letters or numbers which are most important. They will always disagree until their sisters, the princesses Rhyme and Reason, return to the land, so Milo sets off to find them, assisted by Tock the Watchdog (half-dog, half-clock, naturally) and posturing insect the Humbug.
The defining characteristic of the book is the aforementioned reliance on puns. There are placenames like The Point of View, Context, Ignorance and Conclusions. You can guess which you note that you are out of, which you jump to and so on. There is some extremely entertaining imagery, but ultimately the story is rather flat and lifeless, without much in the way of characters. An enjoyable afternoon’s diversion, for the reader as well as Milo, but no classic.
Of Mice and Men
A popular classic that’s long languished on my to-read list, I finally got around to reading Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men, and find myself compelled to read his other works, particularly The Grapes of Wrath, in the near future. Beautiful in its simplicity, Of Mice and Men is one of several books recently that has amply show that a brisk, simple tale can reach inside and grip by the heart and – like Lennie – never let go. George and Lennie are friends so close that you cannot help but like them both, simply because their kindness to one another shows them to be genuinely good people. All they have in the world is one another and their shared dream – to one day have their own farm. Lennie is mentally handicapped, so simple and childlike that despite his great size and strength, I felt a great protective urge over him – and that George has it too is what makes the narrative work so well. Lennie cannot understand the fragility of life, which often leads him into trouble, which George has to get him out of. Even though he is, of course, sharper and more self-aware, George’s passions and longings are just as simple as Lennie’s, and his fraternal bond equally strong.
The driving force for the action is loneliness. The cast is full of outsiders: Crooks, the only black worker, who pretends to be hostile but cannot conceal his pleasure when someone pays him a visit; old Candy, who has no-one until George and Lennie arrive, and it is his desire to be a part of their strong friendship that turns their dream into a real possibility; and Curly’s wife, too – who for all her faults is ultimately just a lonely girl who doesn’t love her husband. As I read the novel, I realised that it seemed very much as though I was reading a play – other than one exquisite sentence in the opening paragraphs about a heron, the prose is perfunctory, precise, unspectacular, and the book as a whole is made up almost entirely of dialogue. Reading the introduction after enjoying the story (always the time to read the introduction, contrarily), my expectations were confirmed: Steinbeck had of course consciously decided to write in this style, merging the play and the novel because he was troubled that there was no future in the conventional novel. There is something to be said for the style; I was put in mind of a master drummer who listens to the music and realises that in the context, what is needed is not a showy beat, but the elegance of simplicity. That said, I would’ve liked to have seen more of the internal states of the characters, known more of their feelings, more of their emotional responses. But I fear that would have been to the detriment of the story. The objective nature of the prose allows the grandly-drawn, almost sentimental characters to seem more realistic. They’re big, flat characters, almost archetypes, but that doesn’t mean one cannot make a connection with them: I certainly cared about Lennie and George, and broad characterisation does not necessarily mean unrealistic characterisation. There are plenty of simple people in the world, and I care about them, too.
The only part I can really fault is a hallucinogenic segment involving talking rabbits. The sudden invasion of Lennie’s thoughts breaks that objective mood, and the visions simply don’t have the creepy, shocking quality of, say, Simon conversing with The Lord of the Flies. That minor low point aside, Of Mice and Men is full of hauntingly beautiful moments, with a simple but touching story, told in a voice that perhaps would seem unsatisfying if not for the perfect precision and brevity of the tale, and its excellent dialogue. Worthy of the classic status it holds.
The driving force for the action is loneliness. The cast is full of outsiders: Crooks, the only black worker, who pretends to be hostile but cannot conceal his pleasure when someone pays him a visit; old Candy, who has no-one until George and Lennie arrive, and it is his desire to be a part of their strong friendship that turns their dream into a real possibility; and Curly’s wife, too – who for all her faults is ultimately just a lonely girl who doesn’t love her husband. As I read the novel, I realised that it seemed very much as though I was reading a play – other than one exquisite sentence in the opening paragraphs about a heron, the prose is perfunctory, precise, unspectacular, and the book as a whole is made up almost entirely of dialogue. Reading the introduction after enjoying the story (always the time to read the introduction, contrarily), my expectations were confirmed: Steinbeck had of course consciously decided to write in this style, merging the play and the novel because he was troubled that there was no future in the conventional novel. There is something to be said for the style; I was put in mind of a master drummer who listens to the music and realises that in the context, what is needed is not a showy beat, but the elegance of simplicity. That said, I would’ve liked to have seen more of the internal states of the characters, known more of their feelings, more of their emotional responses. But I fear that would have been to the detriment of the story. The objective nature of the prose allows the grandly-drawn, almost sentimental characters to seem more realistic. They’re big, flat characters, almost archetypes, but that doesn’t mean one cannot make a connection with them: I certainly cared about Lennie and George, and broad characterisation does not necessarily mean unrealistic characterisation. There are plenty of simple people in the world, and I care about them, too.
The only part I can really fault is a hallucinogenic segment involving talking rabbits. The sudden invasion of Lennie’s thoughts breaks that objective mood, and the visions simply don’t have the creepy, shocking quality of, say, Simon conversing with The Lord of the Flies. That minor low point aside, Of Mice and Men is full of hauntingly beautiful moments, with a simple but touching story, told in a voice that perhaps would seem unsatisfying if not for the perfect precision and brevity of the tale, and its excellent dialogue. Worthy of the classic status it holds.
Memoirs of a Geisha
I rather enjoyed this book, although it began to drag severely towards the end. Astonishingly thorough in its research, I feel sure it’s the novel Arthur Golden was born to write, and as far as I know, the sophisticated evocation of early twentieth-century Japan is accurate in every detail – and seeing as Golden interviewed several real Geisha, I see no reason to doubt the veracity of the story. Whatever the challenges of its conception, it’s absolutely believable as a memoir, and Chiyo/Sayuri is not only a good narrator, but has a highly individual personality and ‘speaking’ style; she loves to use imagery every two or three sentences, and describes the people around her chiefly in terms of their habits or idiosyncrasies, which makes the prose an absolute pleasure to read – really delightful stuff, with almost every simile, every metaphor spot-on. It’s this sparkling style that makes the book interesting, because the story is a little long-winded, dull and contrived. Also, because Chiyo sees other people in such a flat way, it’s hard to make any real connection with them. I’d be surprised if Spielberg made a classic film from the story, because it really thrives on its rich language, and few films can be classics on sumptuous visuals (the celluloid equivalent) alone.
Japan is meticulously evoked, with a persuasive familiarity: it is exotic and bewildering to me, but mundane to Chiyo. Gion certainly wasn’t very exciting when we visited, but to one whose life revolves around the area, it becomes a whole miniature world – and a prison, too. Chiyo is endearingly naïve, her childishness likeable, her attempts at manipulation and coercion mostly backfiring to teach her a lesson, and while the ending is pure tripe, I certainly did feel for her as she grew up, struggling to fit in, despite being used as a pawn in two senior geishas’ rivalry. Culturally, it was fascinating – I think my reading experience was complemented by my knowledge of Japan, but I also think that I found the whole thing much more chilling than many would. More than anything, I was reminded of Pretty Baby, the movie in which a 12-year-old Brooke Shields plays a young prostitute whose virginity, like Chiyo’s, is sold to the highest bidder. But where Pretty Baby has grime, romanticised but useless struggling artists and a familial bond, Geisha has beauty, formality, high-society and a horrible parody of a family in Mother, Auntie and Granny. Geisha were high-class prostitutes, after all, and I find it disturbing for a girl to think so little of her body and her virginity – while at the same time accepting the reality of the portrait. Pretty Baby is perhaps sadder, more disturbing, more offensive to our sensibilities, but Geisha is more chilling in its absolute (rather Eastern) acceptance of the way life must be, and the importance of meekness.
I think the novel would have been much improved had the final 200 or so pages been cut or heavily condensed, since the soap operatics, the over-convenient coincidences and reunions, and the rather unlikely devotion to one man idealised in childhood, only add unnecessary and ugly brushstrokes to an otherwise beautiful and simple watercolour.
Japan is meticulously evoked, with a persuasive familiarity: it is exotic and bewildering to me, but mundane to Chiyo. Gion certainly wasn’t very exciting when we visited, but to one whose life revolves around the area, it becomes a whole miniature world – and a prison, too. Chiyo is endearingly naïve, her childishness likeable, her attempts at manipulation and coercion mostly backfiring to teach her a lesson, and while the ending is pure tripe, I certainly did feel for her as she grew up, struggling to fit in, despite being used as a pawn in two senior geishas’ rivalry. Culturally, it was fascinating – I think my reading experience was complemented by my knowledge of Japan, but I also think that I found the whole thing much more chilling than many would. More than anything, I was reminded of Pretty Baby, the movie in which a 12-year-old Brooke Shields plays a young prostitute whose virginity, like Chiyo’s, is sold to the highest bidder. But where Pretty Baby has grime, romanticised but useless struggling artists and a familial bond, Geisha has beauty, formality, high-society and a horrible parody of a family in Mother, Auntie and Granny. Geisha were high-class prostitutes, after all, and I find it disturbing for a girl to think so little of her body and her virginity – while at the same time accepting the reality of the portrait. Pretty Baby is perhaps sadder, more disturbing, more offensive to our sensibilities, but Geisha is more chilling in its absolute (rather Eastern) acceptance of the way life must be, and the importance of meekness.
I think the novel would have been much improved had the final 200 or so pages been cut or heavily condensed, since the soap operatics, the over-convenient coincidences and reunions, and the rather unlikely devotion to one man idealised in childhood, only add unnecessary and ugly brushstrokes to an otherwise beautiful and simple watercolour.
Artemis Fowl
Artemis Fowl is one of the more popular children’s fantasies around at the moment, but it’s also one of the poorer ones. I first read it at the same time as The Wind Singer, and forgot just as much of it, though the one thing that I remembered was the little encoded story about a prophet who sees the future encoded in phlegm. I was keen on codes at that stage in my life, even daft ones where fairy language just happens to have a symbol for every English letter, and found the phlegm-reader’s story quite entertaining; I wrote it out in purple ink, but unfortunately on Friday I dropped it in the bath. Sorry, lil’ me! Unfortunately, it’s only a tiny aside, an ‘Easter egg’ in internet parlance. The main story has less to commend it.
There are two sorts of children’s book in the world: cute and cool. Roald Dahl is ‘cute’. So is Lemony Snicket. They’re not realistic, and don’t pretend to be. They’re silly, and exaggerated, and tell a fun story, with great scope for humour. On the ‘cool’ side, you have books like His Dark Materials and The Lord of the Rings. They take themselves more seriously, and though they can have humour in them, there’s more coherence and they tend to have more emotional impact. I prefer the latter category, but there is plenty of good stuff in the former. And some series manage to cross over. Harry Potter, for example, starts cute, and has now made the transition into cool – although one of the problems I have with the series is how the hangovers from the ‘cute’ stages are something of an albatross now.
Artemis Fowl is written ‘cute’, but badly wants to be ‘cool’. This is its problem: it’s forever doing two things at once, and doing neither of them well. Artemis is supposed to be a criminal genius, but he’s really just a normal boy who loves his mum. This could work well, if not for the fact that we never believe he’s a master criminal. The writer, Eoin Colfer, has to keep telling us that he’s a genius, telling us that he’s scary, and is forever making him do something like laugh or joke, then saying ‘Oh, but that was very out of character’, not only for him, but for Commander Short, for Foaly, for Butler…we are told so much that a character is doing something that they don’t usually that it’s hard not to think Colfer is just trying to shoehorn characters into shapes that he doesn’t really want to write. The premise is cool: criminal mastermind kid takes on the fairies, who secretly have lots of big guns. In execution, we get badly-thought-out ideas about magic, endless corny jokes that even Terry Pratchett would be above (mostly following the format ‘oh I’m going to say a dirty word like a- ’ ‘Woah, there!’) and poo jokes, a jokey style that you can’t take seriously when it tries to build up the suspense, and a totally vacuous plot.
Still, The Wind Singer made the same mistake: starting with an interesting idea, trying to get epic and then failing. But the sequel was excellent, so perhaps I will give Eoin Colfer another chance.
There are two sorts of children’s book in the world: cute and cool. Roald Dahl is ‘cute’. So is Lemony Snicket. They’re not realistic, and don’t pretend to be. They’re silly, and exaggerated, and tell a fun story, with great scope for humour. On the ‘cool’ side, you have books like His Dark Materials and The Lord of the Rings. They take themselves more seriously, and though they can have humour in them, there’s more coherence and they tend to have more emotional impact. I prefer the latter category, but there is plenty of good stuff in the former. And some series manage to cross over. Harry Potter, for example, starts cute, and has now made the transition into cool – although one of the problems I have with the series is how the hangovers from the ‘cute’ stages are something of an albatross now.
Artemis Fowl is written ‘cute’, but badly wants to be ‘cool’. This is its problem: it’s forever doing two things at once, and doing neither of them well. Artemis is supposed to be a criminal genius, but he’s really just a normal boy who loves his mum. This could work well, if not for the fact that we never believe he’s a master criminal. The writer, Eoin Colfer, has to keep telling us that he’s a genius, telling us that he’s scary, and is forever making him do something like laugh or joke, then saying ‘Oh, but that was very out of character’, not only for him, but for Commander Short, for Foaly, for Butler…we are told so much that a character is doing something that they don’t usually that it’s hard not to think Colfer is just trying to shoehorn characters into shapes that he doesn’t really want to write. The premise is cool: criminal mastermind kid takes on the fairies, who secretly have lots of big guns. In execution, we get badly-thought-out ideas about magic, endless corny jokes that even Terry Pratchett would be above (mostly following the format ‘oh I’m going to say a dirty word like a- ’ ‘Woah, there!’) and poo jokes, a jokey style that you can’t take seriously when it tries to build up the suspense, and a totally vacuous plot.
Still, The Wind Singer made the same mistake: starting with an interesting idea, trying to get epic and then failing. But the sequel was excellent, so perhaps I will give Eoin Colfer another chance.
Monday 26 September 2011
The Snow Spider
Jenny Nimmo’s Snow Spider trilogy has always enchanted me, for some reason. Yet even though I’ve read them numerous times in the past, most recently only five or six years ago, I always forget their plots, and remember only the enchanting cover illustration of the first book, showing a beautiful little girl with shining hair and pale skin, aglow as if lit from within. It’s clearly based on the television series, which I’ve tracked down and may watch later on tonight. Since I laid eyes on the books before going to France and couldn’t remember anything about them except that they’re set in Wales, and since I’m going to be writing a book set in Wales very soon, I thought it might be a good idea to re-read them as something light and relaxing. They’re children’s books in a pleasantly old-fashioned style, brisk and innocent, with obvious characters and a plot stuffed with every shortcut and cliché magic can give.
It’s rather a clunky plot – Gwyn discovers he’s a magician on his ninth birthday when his grandmother gives him magical items that he can ‘give to the wind’. He uses them to try to bring back his sister, who disappeared years ago. This, he believes, will make his father happy again; the ogre of a man seems to blame Gwyn for her disappearance. The wind gives him a strange spider that allows him to see another world, and a girl appears in the village who bears more than a passing resemblance to his sister, except for her light skin and hair. Then the plot lurches away wildly: Gwyn gives the wrong item to the wind, and must right his wrong. It’s all rather sloppy, and Nimmo seems to have no idea how to use punctuation, but there’s a certain innocence and whimsy to her storytelling that’s very charming. No children’s classic, but a traditional tale with some delightful imagery: and while I felt somewhat unsatisfied upon reading it, I had to read the two sequels before I could really judge the story. As it turned out, the following books were quite different, and rather better.
It’s rather a clunky plot – Gwyn discovers he’s a magician on his ninth birthday when his grandmother gives him magical items that he can ‘give to the wind’. He uses them to try to bring back his sister, who disappeared years ago. This, he believes, will make his father happy again; the ogre of a man seems to blame Gwyn for her disappearance. The wind gives him a strange spider that allows him to see another world, and a girl appears in the village who bears more than a passing resemblance to his sister, except for her light skin and hair. Then the plot lurches away wildly: Gwyn gives the wrong item to the wind, and must right his wrong. It’s all rather sloppy, and Nimmo seems to have no idea how to use punctuation, but there’s a certain innocence and whimsy to her storytelling that’s very charming. No children’s classic, but a traditional tale with some delightful imagery: and while I felt somewhat unsatisfied upon reading it, I had to read the two sequels before I could really judge the story. As it turned out, the following books were quite different, and rather better.
Emlyn’s Moon by Jenny Nimmo
Perhaps it’s because I’ve watched so many movies, but I’m always surprised when the second book in a trilogy is better than the first, but right after Slaves of the Mastery, I come across this, the sequel to The Snow Spider, which improves on its predecessor in many ways. However, despite superior style, tone and concept, ultimately Emlyn’s Moon was less satisfying than its charmingly simple predecessor, because despite setting up premises infinitely more intriguing than the first book ever did, it cannot deliver what it promises, so in the end is more of a disappointment. It may be a technically a better book, but the bathos of the second half makes it a very unsatisfactory read.
Nimmo jettisons the rather limiting ‘A wizard must always be alone’ concept of the first book, and introduces a new protagonist and ally for Gwyn: Nia Lloyd, his best friend’s sister. Nimmo takes the brave step of making her hero appear to be the antagonist at first, and throughout the story makes magic seem to be a dark, frightening force. This was hinted to be the case at the end of The Snow Spider, but where it was abrupt and undeveloped there, here it makes the story richer, deeper, more interesting. Nia befriends both Gwyn and his cousin Emlyn, long-time enemies thanks to a quarrel between their fathers. Emlyn is a good character – a normal boy, but an outsider, who reacts to Nia’s attention with an endearing eagerness, and whose pain at a broken promise is actually quite touching. But sadly, after an argument, he all but disappears from the plot, and rather than the problems being reconciled in any real manner, there is a rescue, and a rather absurd resolution of the problems between the fathers involving Emlyn’s mother having become a pill-popping recluse in the next valley. The crisis seems to come about simply because the end of the book is approaching rather than because there’s been any real catalyst, and Nia’s inferiority complex never seems quite believable. Nevertheless, the story of her making a collage, the conflict between the boys in the first half and the imaginative fantasy sequences when magic is evoked are all well-sketched, and even though the adults in the series are all woefully simple or vague, the children are convincing ten-year-olds, even those of them who are very old for their years.
Overall, some fascinating ideas and a marked improvement in style, sadly underdeveloped, and with a very artificial climax that ultimately teaches its characters very little. Still, far from a bad book, with much to recommend it.
Nimmo jettisons the rather limiting ‘A wizard must always be alone’ concept of the first book, and introduces a new protagonist and ally for Gwyn: Nia Lloyd, his best friend’s sister. Nimmo takes the brave step of making her hero appear to be the antagonist at first, and throughout the story makes magic seem to be a dark, frightening force. This was hinted to be the case at the end of The Snow Spider, but where it was abrupt and undeveloped there, here it makes the story richer, deeper, more interesting. Nia befriends both Gwyn and his cousin Emlyn, long-time enemies thanks to a quarrel between their fathers. Emlyn is a good character – a normal boy, but an outsider, who reacts to Nia’s attention with an endearing eagerness, and whose pain at a broken promise is actually quite touching. But sadly, after an argument, he all but disappears from the plot, and rather than the problems being reconciled in any real manner, there is a rescue, and a rather absurd resolution of the problems between the fathers involving Emlyn’s mother having become a pill-popping recluse in the next valley. The crisis seems to come about simply because the end of the book is approaching rather than because there’s been any real catalyst, and Nia’s inferiority complex never seems quite believable. Nevertheless, the story of her making a collage, the conflict between the boys in the first half and the imaginative fantasy sequences when magic is evoked are all well-sketched, and even though the adults in the series are all woefully simple or vague, the children are convincing ten-year-olds, even those of them who are very old for their years.
Overall, some fascinating ideas and a marked improvement in style, sadly underdeveloped, and with a very artificial climax that ultimately teaches its characters very little. Still, far from a bad book, with much to recommend it.
The Chestnut Soldier
The final part of Jenny Nimmo’s Snow Spider trilogy. Well-written, particularly when compared to the first book, but rather dull. Sadly, the interesting Otherworld of the first books does not get explored, and Nimmo instead focuses on a ‘parallel’ version of old Welsh myths. Gwyn’s mysterious relative Evan Llyr appears, capturing the hearts of all the women of the town, but something dark and ancient is inside him, and only Gwyn can lay it to rest. Like the last book, the story ended with too many unanswered questions, not only in the plot but in many of the characters’ actions. Plus Evan prances around acting far too much like a panto villain for Nia’s devotion to be believable. The appearance of the classical Gwydion was daft, and the ending was deeply unsatisfying. It feels like a story left half-finished – not open, and inviting speculation: just unfinished.
Watchmen (comic)
Just finished Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and am deeply impressed. A superb piece of work, sophisticated, eloquent, innovative and willing to take risks, I now see its far-reaching influence, not just on The Incredibles – the writers of which derived most of their good ideas from concepts found here, as I said before – but on the comic book world as a whole. There were some good ideas in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but beside the concepts, storytelling skill and coherence of tone on display here, that other famous work of Moore’s pales into insignificance. Even though the cheesier side of the superhero comic becomes apparent in several places, it is always with a clever twist or sudden shock of reality that makes it palatable.
Watchmen gives us a world where superheroes really exist. Not a simple, black-and-white world like the early DC or Marvel universes. Not even the grimmer reality of later, still sanitised comics. Moore pulls no punches, and gives us a real world, of crime, sexual perversion, prostitution, broken homes and murder. We meet the last active costumed hero: Rorschach. His character design, apparently based on the blank-faced The Question, is superb: a noir-style overcoat and hat, but a face covered with a material that somehow shifts and changes so that his face always appears to be a Rorschach ink blot. Whatever world this character is introduced into, he would look cool. We soon discover that he is something of an extremist, using horrible force to get his information, and with some chilling right-wing views. Later, he is framed, arrested and psychoanalysed, and this side-story is one of the most compelling and bleak.
And this is Watchmen’s strength: once the mystery of the plot is established, it becomes a secondary matter, wrapped up rather melodramatically, but still in a striking, subversive manner that belies its predictable frame, in the final two chapters. The ending, ultimately, is an intriguing, if not particularly original one, posing the question ‘Is a Pyrrhic victory really a victory at all?’, only rather than questioning what is apparently a triumph, we are made to question what is apparently a great loss, but ultimately beneficial to mankind. Interesting stuff, if not very delicately presented. But this is Moore’s writing, and – film-makers take note, for this is why From Hell and LXG failed – where Moore’s writing thrives is in details. From the minutae of little background references to detailed character backstories, Moore likes to answer questions. Thus we have clever snippets of other media: autobiographies, trashy right-wing newspapers, a pirate comic that always seems to be commenting on the world around its reader. We have a detailed evocation of a world and its characters, even when they have superpowers (though I must say, if there’s a weak point in the story, it’s the concept of Dr. Manhattan, whose mental powers never quite stood up to examination). He creates sympathy for even the incidental characters whose lives are forfeit to the inconceivable plans of others. Best of all, his characters are human (even those who are, in fact, superhuman): flawed, changeable, often not particularly likeable, but always fascinating.
A great achievement, which makes me want to read From Hell, and other seminal comic works – The Dark Knight Returns, for example, and Sandman. All in good time.
Watchmen gives us a world where superheroes really exist. Not a simple, black-and-white world like the early DC or Marvel universes. Not even the grimmer reality of later, still sanitised comics. Moore pulls no punches, and gives us a real world, of crime, sexual perversion, prostitution, broken homes and murder. We meet the last active costumed hero: Rorschach. His character design, apparently based on the blank-faced The Question, is superb: a noir-style overcoat and hat, but a face covered with a material that somehow shifts and changes so that his face always appears to be a Rorschach ink blot. Whatever world this character is introduced into, he would look cool. We soon discover that he is something of an extremist, using horrible force to get his information, and with some chilling right-wing views. Later, he is framed, arrested and psychoanalysed, and this side-story is one of the most compelling and bleak.
And this is Watchmen’s strength: once the mystery of the plot is established, it becomes a secondary matter, wrapped up rather melodramatically, but still in a striking, subversive manner that belies its predictable frame, in the final two chapters. The ending, ultimately, is an intriguing, if not particularly original one, posing the question ‘Is a Pyrrhic victory really a victory at all?’, only rather than questioning what is apparently a triumph, we are made to question what is apparently a great loss, but ultimately beneficial to mankind. Interesting stuff, if not very delicately presented. But this is Moore’s writing, and – film-makers take note, for this is why From Hell and LXG failed – where Moore’s writing thrives is in details. From the minutae of little background references to detailed character backstories, Moore likes to answer questions. Thus we have clever snippets of other media: autobiographies, trashy right-wing newspapers, a pirate comic that always seems to be commenting on the world around its reader. We have a detailed evocation of a world and its characters, even when they have superpowers (though I must say, if there’s a weak point in the story, it’s the concept of Dr. Manhattan, whose mental powers never quite stood up to examination). He creates sympathy for even the incidental characters whose lives are forfeit to the inconceivable plans of others. Best of all, his characters are human (even those who are, in fact, superhuman): flawed, changeable, often not particularly likeable, but always fascinating.
A great achievement, which makes me want to read From Hell, and other seminal comic works – The Dark Knight Returns, for example, and Sandman. All in good time.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
I picked up this slim volume, published by MTV books, after hearing good things about it online, and began it with little idea what to expect. The novel is epistolary, a year’s worth of letters from a 15-year-old American boy starting high school to an unknown recipient. The intention is to make the reader feel directly addressed, thus making more of a connection with Charlie, the writer of the letters, and while it’s a simple trick, it works, giving more of an impression of a confessional than a diary would. Charlie goes through several typical teenaged experiences: falling in love with a girl who doesn’t love him back, dating a girl who he doesn’t particularly like, experimenting with drugs and developing his tastes in music and literature.
I got off to an uncomfortable start with the book. I at first assumed the boy must be a preteen, for he seemed to write, behave and think like a ten-year-old. But then it was revealed that he was fifteen, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading something like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and that Charlie was in some way handicapped or emotionally subnormal. After all, he has his first wet dream, aged 15, and promptly goes up to the subject of said dream and informs her of it. Later, we hear he was sent to a psychiatrist as a boy, and there is a clumsy tacked-on revelation about abuse, but ultimately, the character is a mess, sometimes ordinary, sometimes extremely insightful, sometimes rather dull. I wish I could say that this was a good reflection on the teenaged psyche, but it’s not; it’s just bad writing, and clumsy characterisation. Stylistically, the whole thing is sloppy. The author, Stephen Chbosky, tries to do clever things with the boy’s writing style, having it go from something close to a stream of consciousness to a more polished style, then lapsing again, but it’s so ham-fisted and blatant that you can’t possibly believe it’s anything but a literary device. But worst of all is the plot. It was extremely tedious, and for all its purported realism, was extremely hard to swallow. Chbosky, for all his light-hearted jibes at pseudo-intellectual liberal teens, has constructed a fantasia on left-wing idealist themes: a universally popular gay kid who secretly dates a star footballer until they can have a deliciously histrionic tiff in the school cafeteria; a teacher who dotes on one ‘special’ student, giving him all his favourite books and saying a teary goodbye to him once he’s made him a better person; a group of pot-smoking friends whose nonconformity is not only accepted but indulged with sing-a-long-a-Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show nights; and people who actually LISTEN to the mix-tapes their friends make…all I can say is that if this is merely Chbosky’s memoirs, he’s had a charmed life, and as fiction, it’s painfully trite. However, I WAS pleased that the love interest actually did point out to the protagonist how his submissive behaviour (letting his male friend kiss him in order to help forget his ex, for example) was only harmful – I thought that he was going to spend the rest of his life thinking that was fine. The characters were all rather thin and inconsistent, meaning that I finished the book without feeling familiar with any of them. I think perhaps that this is a danger of basing characters on real people, but this is only a “hunch” – to borrow one of Charlie’s annoying punctuation habits.
That said, I did rather like the simplistic sketch of Mary Elizabeth, the girl Charlie begins unenthusiastically to date, and ends up hurting. She’s a pompous, opinionated, pretentious and insecure person, who makes kind gestures only for the reflection on herself and doesn’t have the confidence to relinquish control. I saw myself there, in a distorted, grotesque sort of a way, and heeded the warning well…
There were some interesting moments, and once or twice the cod-profundity fell away to leave some nice, simple examples of the pleasure of teenaged life, but in the end, an insipid gloss of wish-fulfilment, a dull story and what seems to be an attempt to be more highbrow than the author can possibly be bury these instances like pretty shells lost in the sand. And why he seems to think Hamlet is a ‘kid’ I’ll never know. He may have been a young man when Shakespeare first wrote the play, but in the version that’s survived, he certainly ain’t. And even before the changes made to accommodate a fat, aging actor, you certainly can’t say Hamlet is about ‘being a kid’. But then, nor, really, is The Perks of Being a Wallflower; it seems to me that it’s about looking back at being a teenager through a slightly misty lens of adulthood and wishing it into slightly tortured perfection. For what is more perfect to a smiling adult than a teenager whose ‘golden years’ were gilded with romance and friendship, but underneath were just that little bit stormy and dramatic?
I got off to an uncomfortable start with the book. I at first assumed the boy must be a preteen, for he seemed to write, behave and think like a ten-year-old. But then it was revealed that he was fifteen, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading something like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and that Charlie was in some way handicapped or emotionally subnormal. After all, he has his first wet dream, aged 15, and promptly goes up to the subject of said dream and informs her of it. Later, we hear he was sent to a psychiatrist as a boy, and there is a clumsy tacked-on revelation about abuse, but ultimately, the character is a mess, sometimes ordinary, sometimes extremely insightful, sometimes rather dull. I wish I could say that this was a good reflection on the teenaged psyche, but it’s not; it’s just bad writing, and clumsy characterisation. Stylistically, the whole thing is sloppy. The author, Stephen Chbosky, tries to do clever things with the boy’s writing style, having it go from something close to a stream of consciousness to a more polished style, then lapsing again, but it’s so ham-fisted and blatant that you can’t possibly believe it’s anything but a literary device. But worst of all is the plot. It was extremely tedious, and for all its purported realism, was extremely hard to swallow. Chbosky, for all his light-hearted jibes at pseudo-intellectual liberal teens, has constructed a fantasia on left-wing idealist themes: a universally popular gay kid who secretly dates a star footballer until they can have a deliciously histrionic tiff in the school cafeteria; a teacher who dotes on one ‘special’ student, giving him all his favourite books and saying a teary goodbye to him once he’s made him a better person; a group of pot-smoking friends whose nonconformity is not only accepted but indulged with sing-a-long-a-Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show nights; and people who actually LISTEN to the mix-tapes their friends make…all I can say is that if this is merely Chbosky’s memoirs, he’s had a charmed life, and as fiction, it’s painfully trite. However, I WAS pleased that the love interest actually did point out to the protagonist how his submissive behaviour (letting his male friend kiss him in order to help forget his ex, for example) was only harmful – I thought that he was going to spend the rest of his life thinking that was fine. The characters were all rather thin and inconsistent, meaning that I finished the book without feeling familiar with any of them. I think perhaps that this is a danger of basing characters on real people, but this is only a “hunch” – to borrow one of Charlie’s annoying punctuation habits.
That said, I did rather like the simplistic sketch of Mary Elizabeth, the girl Charlie begins unenthusiastically to date, and ends up hurting. She’s a pompous, opinionated, pretentious and insecure person, who makes kind gestures only for the reflection on herself and doesn’t have the confidence to relinquish control. I saw myself there, in a distorted, grotesque sort of a way, and heeded the warning well…
There were some interesting moments, and once or twice the cod-profundity fell away to leave some nice, simple examples of the pleasure of teenaged life, but in the end, an insipid gloss of wish-fulfilment, a dull story and what seems to be an attempt to be more highbrow than the author can possibly be bury these instances like pretty shells lost in the sand. And why he seems to think Hamlet is a ‘kid’ I’ll never know. He may have been a young man when Shakespeare first wrote the play, but in the version that’s survived, he certainly ain’t. And even before the changes made to accommodate a fat, aging actor, you certainly can’t say Hamlet is about ‘being a kid’. But then, nor, really, is The Perks of Being a Wallflower; it seems to me that it’s about looking back at being a teenager through a slightly misty lens of adulthood and wishing it into slightly tortured perfection. For what is more perfect to a smiling adult than a teenager whose ‘golden years’ were gilded with romance and friendship, but underneath were just that little bit stormy and dramatic?
Mansfield Park
I’ve had an aversion to Austen since studying Pride and Prejudice for my GCSEs. This time, I objected less to her language, in much the same way as I will now eat a steak without bothering to cut off the gristle. It’s unpleasant, but it doesn’t ruin a mouthful. Besides, I’m used to writing where every character speaks in the style (if not the character) of the author – as in Shakespeare and Wilde. However, The Picture of Dorian Gray, while a bit of a dull book, works because of the sober narrative voice. Here it’s like one of the faecetious characters is narrating the whole work, and must describe everything in long-winded excess. I simply find Austen’s prose style smug, monotonous and extremely tiresome.
This is not to say her characters are poor. They certainly have individuality, partially revealed through speech, partially because Austen directly informs us of how we should think of them. In addition, she is so heavy handed and obvious about each moment of character definition that it soon gets frustrating. Fanny has her faults – she is excessively timid and self-deprecating, and actually quite selfish despite the compunction she feels when acknowledging this. But where at first I thought her quite sweet in her giving, gentle and easily-embarrassed way, after the umpteenth illustration of this, she merely appeared utterly useless, an extremely frustrating person to be around, which I am quite sure was not Austen’s intention. Mrs. Norris was worse: initially, it seemed that she was a larger-than-life character, but believably so: controlling, self-centred and always wanting to receive more than her share of credit, she reminded me of Grandma. But again came the bludgeoning ways of Austen’s composition, and Norris becomes more and more draconian, less and less believable – a wicked aunt much like a fairy tale wicked stepmother, which is apt, because between her, the unpleasant sisters, the sweet, trodden-down heroine and the near-flawless prince, the thing that comes most immediately to mind is Cinderella, the characters only a little more fleshed out. They were rather Dickensian – only Austen’s world does not accommodate grotesques in the way Dickens’ do.
Fanny Price is born to a family pecuniary difficulties, but she is given a head-start when she is sent to live with her uncle, Baron Bertram of Mansfield Park. She is shown little kindness except by her cousin, Edmund, and as she grows up she realises she is in love with him. The family befriends the Crawfords, a brother and sister who have lived mostly in London and are terribly daring and modern. The dull lives of these characters are related at length: they discuss landscaping, try and pair off during scenic walks, put on a play only for the Baron to come home and angrily put a stop to it – all the stuff of children’s stories, but told at excessive length. After that, the tangled love lives motivate the story, and Fanny suffers great agonies as she watches the courtship of Edmund and Mary Crawford, but luckily for her it develops about as fast as the technology of a cannibal tribe in the jungle. She takes an inconsequential trip home and we see her family, whose world actually is Dickensian, which is rather a jolting change. To my modern sensibility, the sketch of the family seemed rather condescending. A scandal soon erupts, showing the true nature of the Crawfords, and everything soon comes right for Fanny as, somehow Edmund decides he loves the girl he thought of as his sister. In this unsettling style, the story draws to a close.
It occurs to me, looking at my own reviews that I tend to like honesty, like earnestness, and like the awe-inspiring, and dislike anything that tries to be something it cannot be, or presents itself as something it is not. Mansfield Park tries to be far more intelligent, eloquent, amusing and insightful than, in fact, it is. This, to me, is a far worse failing than something which simply tries to be lowbrow and achieves it.
This is not to say her characters are poor. They certainly have individuality, partially revealed through speech, partially because Austen directly informs us of how we should think of them. In addition, she is so heavy handed and obvious about each moment of character definition that it soon gets frustrating. Fanny has her faults – she is excessively timid and self-deprecating, and actually quite selfish despite the compunction she feels when acknowledging this. But where at first I thought her quite sweet in her giving, gentle and easily-embarrassed way, after the umpteenth illustration of this, she merely appeared utterly useless, an extremely frustrating person to be around, which I am quite sure was not Austen’s intention. Mrs. Norris was worse: initially, it seemed that she was a larger-than-life character, but believably so: controlling, self-centred and always wanting to receive more than her share of credit, she reminded me of Grandma. But again came the bludgeoning ways of Austen’s composition, and Norris becomes more and more draconian, less and less believable – a wicked aunt much like a fairy tale wicked stepmother, which is apt, because between her, the unpleasant sisters, the sweet, trodden-down heroine and the near-flawless prince, the thing that comes most immediately to mind is Cinderella, the characters only a little more fleshed out. They were rather Dickensian – only Austen’s world does not accommodate grotesques in the way Dickens’ do.
Fanny Price is born to a family pecuniary difficulties, but she is given a head-start when she is sent to live with her uncle, Baron Bertram of Mansfield Park. She is shown little kindness except by her cousin, Edmund, and as she grows up she realises she is in love with him. The family befriends the Crawfords, a brother and sister who have lived mostly in London and are terribly daring and modern. The dull lives of these characters are related at length: they discuss landscaping, try and pair off during scenic walks, put on a play only for the Baron to come home and angrily put a stop to it – all the stuff of children’s stories, but told at excessive length. After that, the tangled love lives motivate the story, and Fanny suffers great agonies as she watches the courtship of Edmund and Mary Crawford, but luckily for her it develops about as fast as the technology of a cannibal tribe in the jungle. She takes an inconsequential trip home and we see her family, whose world actually is Dickensian, which is rather a jolting change. To my modern sensibility, the sketch of the family seemed rather condescending. A scandal soon erupts, showing the true nature of the Crawfords, and everything soon comes right for Fanny as, somehow Edmund decides he loves the girl he thought of as his sister. In this unsettling style, the story draws to a close.
It occurs to me, looking at my own reviews that I tend to like honesty, like earnestness, and like the awe-inspiring, and dislike anything that tries to be something it cannot be, or presents itself as something it is not. Mansfield Park tries to be far more intelligent, eloquent, amusing and insightful than, in fact, it is. This, to me, is a far worse failing than something which simply tries to be lowbrow and achieves it.
The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
London is infested with evil spirits, ‘Wych-kin’ who dominate the city south of the Thames, and are slowly spreading north. The city’s best defence comes in the form of the Wych-hunters, and amongst the best is Thaniel Fox, son of the undisputed master of the craft. Thaniel has been in training for nine years, since the age of eight, and like many of his peers, has an acute ‘Wych-sense’ that can detect the presence of the preternatural. On a routine hunt of a Cradlejack, Thaniel comes across a beautiful but dishevelled girl, apparently out of her mind. He rescues her, and unwittingly finds himself at the centre of a plot that goes to the very highest echelons of society, and to another world altogether.
There can be no denying that this book is great fun. There are scary ghouls and ghosts, shootouts galore, knife-fights, magic, Masonic cults and a cast of good guys who are necessarily good-looking and honourable, creepy or cool. It will make a cracking film, and in many ways, reading this book feels like watching a Hollywood movie, with all the inherent advantages and disadvantages of that style of writing.
Wooding’s style is a little uneven. Sometimes he serves up an image that is inventive and truly beautiful – a triangular cinema as the prow of a ship, for example – but sometimes he tries a little too hard to be poetic and fails, inducing one or two cringes. But he is undisputedly good at suspense, and at action. His fight scenes are fast-paced and vivid, and always exciting. His love of schlocky horror is manifested in the moments of stillness and darkness, when our vulnerable heroes are approached by something evil out for their blood, and while it’s perhaps easy to do so when you’re describing supernatural monsters, he succeeds with aplomb.
But there are faults even within these successes. There is nothing here that has not been done before. The story, the action sequences, the horror elements – all are derived from a solid tradition. Tried and tested ideas are popular for a reason; if, however, you desire something original, that pushes back the boundaries of the genre, you won’t find it here.
If you can accept that, and enjoy the clichés for what they are, however, you will be deeply satisfied by this book. It is a comic book in novel form, complete with spider-sense. Wooding seems to be a little confused about some of the folklore tales he is deriving from (as with Black Annis and the Incubus), and also has an imperfect grasp of grammar, which is perhaps why one of his characters can quote, ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ without being struck as any educated person of the era, before the phrase seeped into popular culture, would have been by the error. And this is perhaps the reason that his characters talk in such a stilted manner. His protagonist and the eponymous heroine speak in a very odd way, half comic-book dialogue, half upper-class English wording, with no abbreviations of any kind, and without the convincing simplicity of the former or the sophistication of the latter. This sort of oversimplified characterisation is fine for the minor characters, like the stereotyped American in his Stetson, but it’s rather awkward in the main heroes.
The plot is a rollicking old-fashioned page-turner, with all the shortcuts commonly found in fantasy – psychics to advise, magical solutions to most problems, and a bad guy who has a thoroughly dubious reason for bringing about the apocalypse but does it anyway. It’s a serviceable framework to get the heroes from one action scene to the next, and is thoroughly enjoyable if you don’t think about it too much. There are so many happy coincidences to help the heroes on their way that Wooding even makes a plot point of it, suggesting it’s owing to divine intervention. There is not much of a twist at the end, since the revelation doesn’t contradict anything before it, but there are some nice ideas behind the alternate reality of the setting. And I was very surprised that a twist I was expecting never came: I was so sure that it would be revealed that a certain innocuous character who accompanies the heroes to the showdown’s alternate ego was a certain serial killer, since there seemed to be huge signposts pointing to the twist, but in the end, it wasn’t so.
The book has many faults, but in the end, it comes highly recommended, because when we pick up a book like The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray, just as when we sit down to watch a Hollywood blockbuster or when we pick up a comic book, we accept that not everything will be quite perfect, and things will be nice and simple and obvious, and it is in that mode that we can thoroughly enjoy ourselves. This book is tremendous fun, in its idiom; all in all, it is exemplary of its kind.
There can be no denying that this book is great fun. There are scary ghouls and ghosts, shootouts galore, knife-fights, magic, Masonic cults and a cast of good guys who are necessarily good-looking and honourable, creepy or cool. It will make a cracking film, and in many ways, reading this book feels like watching a Hollywood movie, with all the inherent advantages and disadvantages of that style of writing.
Wooding’s style is a little uneven. Sometimes he serves up an image that is inventive and truly beautiful – a triangular cinema as the prow of a ship, for example – but sometimes he tries a little too hard to be poetic and fails, inducing one or two cringes. But he is undisputedly good at suspense, and at action. His fight scenes are fast-paced and vivid, and always exciting. His love of schlocky horror is manifested in the moments of stillness and darkness, when our vulnerable heroes are approached by something evil out for their blood, and while it’s perhaps easy to do so when you’re describing supernatural monsters, he succeeds with aplomb.
But there are faults even within these successes. There is nothing here that has not been done before. The story, the action sequences, the horror elements – all are derived from a solid tradition. Tried and tested ideas are popular for a reason; if, however, you desire something original, that pushes back the boundaries of the genre, you won’t find it here.
If you can accept that, and enjoy the clichés for what they are, however, you will be deeply satisfied by this book. It is a comic book in novel form, complete with spider-sense. Wooding seems to be a little confused about some of the folklore tales he is deriving from (as with Black Annis and the Incubus), and also has an imperfect grasp of grammar, which is perhaps why one of his characters can quote, ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ without being struck as any educated person of the era, before the phrase seeped into popular culture, would have been by the error. And this is perhaps the reason that his characters talk in such a stilted manner. His protagonist and the eponymous heroine speak in a very odd way, half comic-book dialogue, half upper-class English wording, with no abbreviations of any kind, and without the convincing simplicity of the former or the sophistication of the latter. This sort of oversimplified characterisation is fine for the minor characters, like the stereotyped American in his Stetson, but it’s rather awkward in the main heroes.
The plot is a rollicking old-fashioned page-turner, with all the shortcuts commonly found in fantasy – psychics to advise, magical solutions to most problems, and a bad guy who has a thoroughly dubious reason for bringing about the apocalypse but does it anyway. It’s a serviceable framework to get the heroes from one action scene to the next, and is thoroughly enjoyable if you don’t think about it too much. There are so many happy coincidences to help the heroes on their way that Wooding even makes a plot point of it, suggesting it’s owing to divine intervention. There is not much of a twist at the end, since the revelation doesn’t contradict anything before it, but there are some nice ideas behind the alternate reality of the setting. And I was very surprised that a twist I was expecting never came: I was so sure that it would be revealed that a certain innocuous character who accompanies the heroes to the showdown’s alternate ego was a certain serial killer, since there seemed to be huge signposts pointing to the twist, but in the end, it wasn’t so.
The book has many faults, but in the end, it comes highly recommended, because when we pick up a book like The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray, just as when we sit down to watch a Hollywood blockbuster or when we pick up a comic book, we accept that not everything will be quite perfect, and things will be nice and simple and obvious, and it is in that mode that we can thoroughly enjoy ourselves. This book is tremendous fun, in its idiom; all in all, it is exemplary of its kind.
Jane Eyre
What a fool I feel, in retrospect, for being so presumptuous as to imagine, simply from a crossover in audience, that the Brontes wrote just like Jane Austen, and therefore concluded that I would greatly dislike Jane Eyre. The difference in style could hardly be greater. Where I find Austen contrived, smug, poorly characterised and – far worse than all besides – deathly dull, Currer Bell, née Charlotte Bronte, writes with such vigour and such obvious enjoyment that Jane Eyre was an absolute joy to read.
It is clear that Bronte wrote what she wished to read, not to ridicule the tastes of others, not as social commentary, but purely for pleasure. Indeed, but for her language and the paramount position held in the plot by adult relationships, Jane Eyre could almost be an excellent children’s book – there are broad characterisations, obvious emotions and conceits, incredible coincidences, a typical suffering orphan victimised by her parent figure as protagonist, and even a little bit of magic towards the end. But the realism of the major characters, as well as the aforementioned language, put the work amongst the best in adult literature. The language was perhaps the greatest surprise – I expected functionality, with the eloquence of vocabulary typical of the period. But the way Bronte writes is so much more than that: her descriptions of nature, of physical appearances, even of buildings show a grace in prose that is deeply poetic, with comparisons that made me pause to appreciate the evocative cleverness, the striking beauty of the images she spun. Her dialogue, too, with dialects imitated, with hesitations and broken sentences, is so much more believable than I had anticipated that I wished her influence on the way speech is rendered could have been greater. Stylistically, Bronte is first-rate, and that I must admit I had not expected; it was the first of several pleasant surprises.
Much of the character of Jane Eyre seems to be derived from Charlotte herself, from autobiographical details to temperament, and it is perhaps this that makes her so believable. She has faults, not only the ones pointed out in the text (eg impulsiveness), but others that make one wonder whether Charlotte would have considered them flaws at all, such as a tendency to be overbearingly clever and patronising around those of a lower social class, despite her own admirably modern views on the subject expressed elsewhere. Jane is fascinating, both strong and vulnerable, pragmatic and rash, and always believable. Rochester, too, is perhaps the perfect romantic interest: striking, powerful, yet tortured, flawed: someone the right woman could change given the chance, something many women yearn for. He’s a manipulative, scheming sort of a man, the kind of person who makes a woman think that he loves someone else just to make her suffer, and thus prove her own desires, but that only makes him more attractive, for someone like Jane, perhaps like the reader, can change him. They’re a wonderful couple, and their relationship is fascinating.
In summary, the narrative would perhaps seem a ludicrous – childish, even, as I have alluded to previously. But the soul of this story is character interaction, and here it can hardly be faulted. It is also quite brave to begin a whole new storyline at the very crisis point of the novel, starting again with a whole new set of characters, but this secondary plot was handled well, and was just as compelling as the main storyline. Why, though, the novel closes telling of a character from this segment, however, I’ll never know. The mystery cannot detract, however, from a deeply satisfying conclusion.
It is clear that Bronte wrote what she wished to read, not to ridicule the tastes of others, not as social commentary, but purely for pleasure. Indeed, but for her language and the paramount position held in the plot by adult relationships, Jane Eyre could almost be an excellent children’s book – there are broad characterisations, obvious emotions and conceits, incredible coincidences, a typical suffering orphan victimised by her parent figure as protagonist, and even a little bit of magic towards the end. But the realism of the major characters, as well as the aforementioned language, put the work amongst the best in adult literature. The language was perhaps the greatest surprise – I expected functionality, with the eloquence of vocabulary typical of the period. But the way Bronte writes is so much more than that: her descriptions of nature, of physical appearances, even of buildings show a grace in prose that is deeply poetic, with comparisons that made me pause to appreciate the evocative cleverness, the striking beauty of the images she spun. Her dialogue, too, with dialects imitated, with hesitations and broken sentences, is so much more believable than I had anticipated that I wished her influence on the way speech is rendered could have been greater. Stylistically, Bronte is first-rate, and that I must admit I had not expected; it was the first of several pleasant surprises.
Much of the character of Jane Eyre seems to be derived from Charlotte herself, from autobiographical details to temperament, and it is perhaps this that makes her so believable. She has faults, not only the ones pointed out in the text (eg impulsiveness), but others that make one wonder whether Charlotte would have considered them flaws at all, such as a tendency to be overbearingly clever and patronising around those of a lower social class, despite her own admirably modern views on the subject expressed elsewhere. Jane is fascinating, both strong and vulnerable, pragmatic and rash, and always believable. Rochester, too, is perhaps the perfect romantic interest: striking, powerful, yet tortured, flawed: someone the right woman could change given the chance, something many women yearn for. He’s a manipulative, scheming sort of a man, the kind of person who makes a woman think that he loves someone else just to make her suffer, and thus prove her own desires, but that only makes him more attractive, for someone like Jane, perhaps like the reader, can change him. They’re a wonderful couple, and their relationship is fascinating.
In summary, the narrative would perhaps seem a ludicrous – childish, even, as I have alluded to previously. But the soul of this story is character interaction, and here it can hardly be faulted. It is also quite brave to begin a whole new storyline at the very crisis point of the novel, starting again with a whole new set of characters, but this secondary plot was handled well, and was just as compelling as the main storyline. Why, though, the novel closes telling of a character from this segment, however, I’ll never know. The mystery cannot detract, however, from a deeply satisfying conclusion.
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