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.
Friday 30 September 2011
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.
The Weavers of Saramyr
I picture Chris Wooding as a chef, cooking up a broth in an oversized pot. He’s made several simple, tasty dishes beforehand, but now he’s aiming for a more refined clientele. He has already decided on the ingredients he’s most comfortable with: supernatural powers, monsters, suspense and a crowd of heroes who have to infiltrate the enemy stronghold. But now he needs to throw in some things that will make people take him seriously. How about some grisly deaths and child-rapes, for that superficial shock value? How about some clever words from the thesaurus? Oh, and why not mix in some unconvincing politics. And for the extra-spicy part, how about random lesbian sex?
And we all know what page his cookbook is open on. Stan Lee’s Uncanny X-Men all the way.
The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray was extremely enjoyable because it was clearly an author having a lot of fun and writing what he was most comfortable with. It was a little bit silly, but it was meant to be, and worked much better for it. Here, Wooding is forcing himself to write in a way that really doesn’t suit him, and it’s much to the detriment of his style. He just doesn’t seem to have any inkling of when he’s using phrasing that seems too comic, too overblown or too archaic for the situation. I cringed at a dead girl being described as an ‘erstwhile companion’, and someone ‘swearing an impolite oath’ had me shaking my head. On top of that, he uses obscure, mostly archaic words like ‘limned’ at every opportunity, often twisting sentences painfully to accommodate them, while simultaneously making elementary mistakes (like using ‘omnipresent’ as a synonym for ‘ever-present’) and punctuating this mess with baby-words like ‘wodge’. Speaking of which, it’s entirely natural for a fantasy writer to include some indication of whether he or she is British, American, Australian etc., but if I’m not mistaken, Wooding at one point affects an Americanism, whilst in several other places using phrasing that clearly indicates that he is a British writer. Perhaps this was not conscious. I hope not.
The style isn’t the only element I found unappealing. There’s a lot we have to swallow. Wooding creates an intricate world in excellent detail; he’s at his best when describing the three moons, the architecture, the religious traditions of Saramyr. But the plot he lays on this foundation is weak. We have to believe that the Weavers are tolerated, despite being monstrous, because they are useful. Fine. But that the nobles don’t just get rid of them, by fair means or foul, once they go murderously insane is dubious. We are told that there is firm religious belief, but we never see it – the holy character never really seems to believe. We have to accept that the entire population is so stupid that they don’t notice the Weaver monasteries are at the epicentre of the blight on the land. We have to accept that there are people who are to be feared, despite the fact that just about every single evil person in the book turns into a coward and a weakling at the slightest threat. And then we must believe that the people hate aberrants. This is the stickiest point of all.
In a world where the weavers look like monstrous corpses, and there are demons that are perfectly well-tolerated, the weavers have convinced the people they hate aberrants. Yet it just doesn’t seem convincing. Yes, there’s a precedent, as with the Nazi propaganda and a dozen other examples. But there, the ‘enemy’ was always visible, always seemed a threat. Maintaining hatred of a race/mutation that is already stamped out seems less likely, especially when just about everyone who meets an aberrant in the book decides they like them after all.
The plot is overlong, and rather shoddy. There’s no clear impetus for most of the events, and certainly no clear goal until the very latter parts of the book. The viewpoint jumps and lurches around, sometimes twice in the same paragraph, and we often have lengthy sections about things that don’t particularly matter. Monsters and random guards are produced at will to provide a bit of action, but soon become tedious. The twist at the end is unimpressive, because it just makes you think, ‘Why on earth didn’t he betray them years ago? And in a much simpler manner?’ It seemed like a twist for the sake of a twist, and everyone involved in it promptly died anyway, so it made no real difference at all. And then the ending dragged on for at least a chapter longer than it should.
All in all, I’m very disappointed. I will read more of Wooding’s work at some point in the future, but I don’t think I shall bother with The Skein of Lament any time soon.
And we all know what page his cookbook is open on. Stan Lee’s Uncanny X-Men all the way.
The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray was extremely enjoyable because it was clearly an author having a lot of fun and writing what he was most comfortable with. It was a little bit silly, but it was meant to be, and worked much better for it. Here, Wooding is forcing himself to write in a way that really doesn’t suit him, and it’s much to the detriment of his style. He just doesn’t seem to have any inkling of when he’s using phrasing that seems too comic, too overblown or too archaic for the situation. I cringed at a dead girl being described as an ‘erstwhile companion’, and someone ‘swearing an impolite oath’ had me shaking my head. On top of that, he uses obscure, mostly archaic words like ‘limned’ at every opportunity, often twisting sentences painfully to accommodate them, while simultaneously making elementary mistakes (like using ‘omnipresent’ as a synonym for ‘ever-present’) and punctuating this mess with baby-words like ‘wodge’. Speaking of which, it’s entirely natural for a fantasy writer to include some indication of whether he or she is British, American, Australian etc., but if I’m not mistaken, Wooding at one point affects an Americanism, whilst in several other places using phrasing that clearly indicates that he is a British writer. Perhaps this was not conscious. I hope not.
The style isn’t the only element I found unappealing. There’s a lot we have to swallow. Wooding creates an intricate world in excellent detail; he’s at his best when describing the three moons, the architecture, the religious traditions of Saramyr. But the plot he lays on this foundation is weak. We have to believe that the Weavers are tolerated, despite being monstrous, because they are useful. Fine. But that the nobles don’t just get rid of them, by fair means or foul, once they go murderously insane is dubious. We are told that there is firm religious belief, but we never see it – the holy character never really seems to believe. We have to accept that the entire population is so stupid that they don’t notice the Weaver monasteries are at the epicentre of the blight on the land. We have to accept that there are people who are to be feared, despite the fact that just about every single evil person in the book turns into a coward and a weakling at the slightest threat. And then we must believe that the people hate aberrants. This is the stickiest point of all.
In a world where the weavers look like monstrous corpses, and there are demons that are perfectly well-tolerated, the weavers have convinced the people they hate aberrants. Yet it just doesn’t seem convincing. Yes, there’s a precedent, as with the Nazi propaganda and a dozen other examples. But there, the ‘enemy’ was always visible, always seemed a threat. Maintaining hatred of a race/mutation that is already stamped out seems less likely, especially when just about everyone who meets an aberrant in the book decides they like them after all.
The plot is overlong, and rather shoddy. There’s no clear impetus for most of the events, and certainly no clear goal until the very latter parts of the book. The viewpoint jumps and lurches around, sometimes twice in the same paragraph, and we often have lengthy sections about things that don’t particularly matter. Monsters and random guards are produced at will to provide a bit of action, but soon become tedious. The twist at the end is unimpressive, because it just makes you think, ‘Why on earth didn’t he betray them years ago? And in a much simpler manner?’ It seemed like a twist for the sake of a twist, and everyone involved in it promptly died anyway, so it made no real difference at all. And then the ending dragged on for at least a chapter longer than it should.
All in all, I’m very disappointed. I will read more of Wooding’s work at some point in the future, but I don’t think I shall bother with The Skein of Lament any time soon.
Catcher in the Rye
It’s quite hard to express what I feel about Catcher in the Rye. I like it, but I don’t love it. It was an enjoyable but inconsequential experience. Perhaps it’s the hype that surrounds the book, but I expected to have extreme feelings one way or the other. To find myself quite indifferent, albeit overall more pleased than otherwise, seems strange.
Holden is rather an extreme character, kept purposefully vague. I can see why so many teenagers relate to him; he’s unpredictable, rebellious, afraid of change yet eager to be an adult, wildly imaginative, and – more importantly – despite his many idiosyncrasies, his real thoughts are quite indistinct, making it easier to fill in the blanks yourself. However, for me, there just wasn’t enough to him. He was charming, yes, and sweet, and vulnerable in an endearing way. Flawed, too – selfish and snobbish and hypocritical, plus unhinged in a very teenaged way. A hero for the outsider. But for all that, he just wasn’t very engaging. The novel was very short, but I actually got quite bored of Holden. I’m not sure I believed entirely in his realism. I understood him, yes, and recognised some of my own teenaged thought process, but I’m sure I would have felt at fifteen what I feel now: I recognise elements of myself, but there’s a whole lot of Caulfield that’s alien, and I’m always aware of a ‘phoniness’ – I can see that the reason so many people relate to him is the same reason magicians and con artists can use cold readings. Beyond that, I’m left cold. After all, besides Holden’s character, there’s not much to the book at all.
Some of the other characters are superb, but it actually bothers me how well-sketched they are. Phoebe and Antolini are excellently-portrayed, believable characters in their brief appearances, but I don’t believe for a moment that Holden could ever have rendered their characters so well. Antolini seems to be Salinger’s way of proving he can write conventionally, not just in the slang-strewn, accessible style Holden uses (which I must admit kept making me think of Bugsy Malone, but I could accept it was realistic despite the distance between our worlds). Clearly Salinger COULD write in Antolini’s style, but for one moment, I can no longer believe it’s Caulfield telling me this story. To a lesser extent, the same goes for Phoebe.
I know how controversial the book was, for its directness and realism, but both are entirely commendable.
My final impression was that I liked Caulfield, and certainly related to him, but there’s just not much to the story. I feel that the reason it resonates with so many people is that there’s actually something lacking. Enjoyable, but in the end, only average.
Holden is rather an extreme character, kept purposefully vague. I can see why so many teenagers relate to him; he’s unpredictable, rebellious, afraid of change yet eager to be an adult, wildly imaginative, and – more importantly – despite his many idiosyncrasies, his real thoughts are quite indistinct, making it easier to fill in the blanks yourself. However, for me, there just wasn’t enough to him. He was charming, yes, and sweet, and vulnerable in an endearing way. Flawed, too – selfish and snobbish and hypocritical, plus unhinged in a very teenaged way. A hero for the outsider. But for all that, he just wasn’t very engaging. The novel was very short, but I actually got quite bored of Holden. I’m not sure I believed entirely in his realism. I understood him, yes, and recognised some of my own teenaged thought process, but I’m sure I would have felt at fifteen what I feel now: I recognise elements of myself, but there’s a whole lot of Caulfield that’s alien, and I’m always aware of a ‘phoniness’ – I can see that the reason so many people relate to him is the same reason magicians and con artists can use cold readings. Beyond that, I’m left cold. After all, besides Holden’s character, there’s not much to the book at all.
Some of the other characters are superb, but it actually bothers me how well-sketched they are. Phoebe and Antolini are excellently-portrayed, believable characters in their brief appearances, but I don’t believe for a moment that Holden could ever have rendered their characters so well. Antolini seems to be Salinger’s way of proving he can write conventionally, not just in the slang-strewn, accessible style Holden uses (which I must admit kept making me think of Bugsy Malone, but I could accept it was realistic despite the distance between our worlds). Clearly Salinger COULD write in Antolini’s style, but for one moment, I can no longer believe it’s Caulfield telling me this story. To a lesser extent, the same goes for Phoebe.
I know how controversial the book was, for its directness and realism, but both are entirely commendable.
My final impression was that I liked Caulfield, and certainly related to him, but there’s just not much to the story. I feel that the reason it resonates with so many people is that there’s actually something lacking. Enjoyable, but in the end, only average.
Shinsengumi – The Shogun’s Last Samurai Corps, by Romulus Hilsborough
I just finished this account of the rise and fall of perhaps the most feared and respected group of samurai in feudal Japan. Hilsborough writes in a rather irritating manner, insisting on repeating buzzword-like phrases such as ‘propensity to kill’ and the Nietzsche-lite ‘will to power’ ad nauseum, but I rather like his gung-ho attitude to reliability of sources, his honesty about said attitude, and his subject matter is utterly fascinating. Whether or not one is familiar with the legendary corps, much romanticised in various anime and live-action dramas, the account here is compelling, by turns chilling and deeply sad, showing an alien set of values that meant the deaths of hundreds of men, and chronicling a turbulent time in world history.
The subject is ripe for Memoirs of a Geisha-style western adaptation. I wonder if anyone will plunder this particular treasure chest any time soon…
The subject is ripe for Memoirs of a Geisha-style western adaptation. I wonder if anyone will plunder this particular treasure chest any time soon…
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
A young writer investigating a scientist responsible for creating the atomic bomb goes to a tropical island republic in an attempt to hear the stories of the great man’s children. He finds out not only about the socially oblivious eccentric who seemed totally detached from reality, but about his final creation, the mysterious substance Ice-9.
This was my first experience of Vonnegut’s writing, but it certainly won’t be my last. Vonnegut’s style is absolutely superb. He writes in short chapters, each of them a pithy self-contained episode, more often than not brutally dissecting a character or situation, and almost always provoking some sort of strong reaction. The book is wilfully excessive – I am reminded, of all things, of The Visit by Dürrenmatt – with broadly-drawn characters defined by their peculiar quirks, a storyline that illustrates subtle ideas by blowing them out of proportion, and a fine streak of black humour, as well as some moments of beautiful delicacy in the language. One of the most amusing parts of the book is Bokononism – the invented religion centred on humanity’s total incapability to understand the will of God, and the futility of trying to find any sort of truth, all conveyed with an endearing winsome simplicity that seldom failed to make me laugh. The idea of Bokonon and the island leaders constantly playing roles of good vs. evil to keep the people happy also really resonated with me. The book was full of superb ideas, all told with a glib concision that made it impossible to lose interest.
A novel I would recommend to anyone, and which I’m grateful was given to me. I’m not sure it’ll make a particularly good film, much of the humour of the first half being very literary, but it seems there’s one in the making. I’ll have to wait and see…
This was my first experience of Vonnegut’s writing, but it certainly won’t be my last. Vonnegut’s style is absolutely superb. He writes in short chapters, each of them a pithy self-contained episode, more often than not brutally dissecting a character or situation, and almost always provoking some sort of strong reaction. The book is wilfully excessive – I am reminded, of all things, of The Visit by Dürrenmatt – with broadly-drawn characters defined by their peculiar quirks, a storyline that illustrates subtle ideas by blowing them out of proportion, and a fine streak of black humour, as well as some moments of beautiful delicacy in the language. One of the most amusing parts of the book is Bokononism – the invented religion centred on humanity’s total incapability to understand the will of God, and the futility of trying to find any sort of truth, all conveyed with an endearing winsome simplicity that seldom failed to make me laugh. The idea of Bokonon and the island leaders constantly playing roles of good vs. evil to keep the people happy also really resonated with me. The book was full of superb ideas, all told with a glib concision that made it impossible to lose interest.
A novel I would recommend to anyone, and which I’m grateful was given to me. I’m not sure it’ll make a particularly good film, much of the humour of the first half being very literary, but it seems there’s one in the making. I’ll have to wait and see…
Predator’s Gold by Philip Reeve
Tom and Hester have been travelling the ‘Bird Roads’ for two years after the events of Mortal Engines. But the ship they took from Anna Fang, legendary aviatrix, is drawing unwanted attention in their direction.
Mortal Engines was an extremely fun read, so I was hoping for the same from Predator’s Gold. Reeve ups the ante quite significantly. Locations are more exotic, characters are more realistic and moral implications are far more intellectually stimulating. It’s really very brave to make one of your heroes something of a monster towards the end of the story, and Reeve not only shows a convincing lovers’ tiff, but implies sex in a way obvious enough that it would go over the heads of only the youngest readers, and later pregnancy too. Unfortunately, this increase in maturity doesn’t sit well with his style, and in the end, it only highlights his other shortcomings.
After all, Mortal Engines was fun because it was a very old-fashioned adventure story, essentially a pirate story with a sci-fi twist, plus a twee British flavour and lots of silliness. You could accept the inconsistencies and weaker plot elements because it was all just a bit of fun. When Reeve tries to make it all more serious, you suddenly start questioning the logistics of fuelling the motion of a city over ice and feeding its inhabitants. You start asking how these characters know about various things they almost certainly have never seen, and why they’re all so very British despite there being no reason for them to be. Getting annoyed by big plot tangents that never really go anywhere (and Reeve supplies only a very feeble ending, leaving a LOT open for the third book). Asking yourself why so much ostensibly serious angst hinges on such a silly premise. It just didn’t have the charm that made the first book so accessible, and for that, it suffered.
There are rather too many plot strands. The first book was very simple: Tom gets thrown off his city, makes his way back (with a few self-contained adventures en route), discovers a conspiracy and has a showdown. There’s a subplot with another protagonist, but it’s more to fill in the blanks in Tom’s adventure than much of a story in its own right. Here, though, you get the story of Anchorage, a city searching for the fertile land rumoured to exist in America under the guidance of a spoilt Margravine (don’t you need a Margrave for a Margravine? Oh well, it’s the future; things change), whose character developments are abrupt to say the least. Then there’s the story of the Green Storm trying to bring back their deified leader from the dead. Then there’s the Lost Boys (essentially Fagin’s gang), who are looting Anchorage but really want to attack the Green Storm. Then there’s Tom and Hester’s love story. And then the story of Arkangel coming to chase Anchorage. Yes, they’re all linked somehow, but the story lurches between these stories, leaving the rest dangling until you don’t really care about the leftover parts any more, but still feel vaguely dissatisfied. I think I would have cut the whole Lost Boys story. I liked Caul, but he never had enough time to develop as a character.
There was a lot of potential here, and it has a lot of good moments. However, when it comes down to it, I don’t feel Reeve quite rose up to his own challenge. A shame.
Mortal Engines was an extremely fun read, so I was hoping for the same from Predator’s Gold. Reeve ups the ante quite significantly. Locations are more exotic, characters are more realistic and moral implications are far more intellectually stimulating. It’s really very brave to make one of your heroes something of a monster towards the end of the story, and Reeve not only shows a convincing lovers’ tiff, but implies sex in a way obvious enough that it would go over the heads of only the youngest readers, and later pregnancy too. Unfortunately, this increase in maturity doesn’t sit well with his style, and in the end, it only highlights his other shortcomings.
After all, Mortal Engines was fun because it was a very old-fashioned adventure story, essentially a pirate story with a sci-fi twist, plus a twee British flavour and lots of silliness. You could accept the inconsistencies and weaker plot elements because it was all just a bit of fun. When Reeve tries to make it all more serious, you suddenly start questioning the logistics of fuelling the motion of a city over ice and feeding its inhabitants. You start asking how these characters know about various things they almost certainly have never seen, and why they’re all so very British despite there being no reason for them to be. Getting annoyed by big plot tangents that never really go anywhere (and Reeve supplies only a very feeble ending, leaving a LOT open for the third book). Asking yourself why so much ostensibly serious angst hinges on such a silly premise. It just didn’t have the charm that made the first book so accessible, and for that, it suffered.
There are rather too many plot strands. The first book was very simple: Tom gets thrown off his city, makes his way back (with a few self-contained adventures en route), discovers a conspiracy and has a showdown. There’s a subplot with another protagonist, but it’s more to fill in the blanks in Tom’s adventure than much of a story in its own right. Here, though, you get the story of Anchorage, a city searching for the fertile land rumoured to exist in America under the guidance of a spoilt Margravine (don’t you need a Margrave for a Margravine? Oh well, it’s the future; things change), whose character developments are abrupt to say the least. Then there’s the story of the Green Storm trying to bring back their deified leader from the dead. Then there’s the Lost Boys (essentially Fagin’s gang), who are looting Anchorage but really want to attack the Green Storm. Then there’s Tom and Hester’s love story. And then the story of Arkangel coming to chase Anchorage. Yes, they’re all linked somehow, but the story lurches between these stories, leaving the rest dangling until you don’t really care about the leftover parts any more, but still feel vaguely dissatisfied. I think I would have cut the whole Lost Boys story. I liked Caul, but he never had enough time to develop as a character.
There was a lot of potential here, and it has a lot of good moments. However, when it comes down to it, I don’t feel Reeve quite rose up to his own challenge. A shame.
V for Vendetta (comic)
This is the third Moore comic I’ve read, and probably my favourite – yes, even better than Watchmen and certainly better than The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s hard to believe it was written so long ago, for it could have been released any time in the last twenty-five years and still been as fresh and current – as the movie adaptation goes to show (though Moore’s condemnation and mixed critical reception leave me wary). To say that V’s actions against his corrupt fascist government have any more resemblance to Muslim suicide bombers attacking the Bush administration than any other abstract anarchist vs. The Man story, however, at least judging by the comic, is highly dubious.
V for Vendetta is set in a near-future Britain (1997!) that after surviving full-out nuclear war (since, disarmed, we were not a target) has been taken over by a totalitarian fascist regime who have purged England of liberals, non-whites and gays. With Orwellian CCTV systems, they monitor all the citizens’ activities and keep a tight control using a computer system called ‘Fate’. However, a terrorist called V has other ideas about freedom, and intends to destroy the system so that it can be rebuilt from the ground up.
As in 20th Century Boys, there is a significant amount of what is in literary circles known as ‘OH YEAH, NOW THAT’S COOL!’ to this series. There’s a noir tone to the seedy bars, gangsters and detectives, and a wonderland element to V’s personal world of freedom. V himself is perhaps the most compelling antihero since Alex from A Clockwork Orange. His story at first seems to be an Edmond Dantes-style quest for revenge, but it soon becomes apparent that he has greater ideas. In his entertaining essay accompanying the comic, Moore describes how V could have ended up being ‘Doll’, the transsexual vigilante, if not for artist David Lloyd’s inspired idea to make him look like Guy Fawkes – and that really was a stroke of genius. It’s iconic, creepy and has echoes of the super-hero tradition, but actually looks good. And V is so compelling, quoting Blake, Crowley and the Rolling Stones, reading The Faraway Tree, spontaneously talking in iambs, showing himself to be educated, enigmatic and certainly a man of principles – as well as a callous murderer who thinks nothing of killing, and who is so manipulative that he makes Mr. Rochester look about as scheming as a puppy.
David Lloyd’s art suits the piece well. His background art is exquisite, and V always looks preternatural and impressive. The faces of other characters strike me as somewhat inconsistent, but the overall realism helped to set the tone, and make the melodrama all the more elegant.
Because yes, again I compare it to 20th Century Boys in that it’s totally excessive. Things blowing up, people getting murdered, paedophile priests, gangsters and the rest of the scum of the earth getting what they deserve, human experimentation, almost mythical fighting prowess – all present, and all just a little bit cheesy, but undeniably good fun.
The trouble is that many of the minor characters are very undeveloped. There’s a detective character who has a very important part to play in the unfolding drama (I wonder if that’s who Stephen Fry plays – he wouldn’t suit the role, but I can’t think who else he might be…except maybe Susan – yes, perhaps that’s more likely), but he sort of appears at the beginning, has a very random druggy moment, and then suddenly becomes perhaps the most important supporting character in the piece. All in all, the ending seems rather rushed, and it never feels like the government really is a threat. They have a lot of power, yes, but it’s so fragile, based on such corruption that you feel it could have fallen apart quite easily on its own without V’s prodding. Plus there’s just too much contrivance and coincidence, with detectives figuring out puzzles just in time to dash to the scene of the next crime at the most dramatic moment, and you have to wonder whether V’s plan could possibly have worked without certain events unfolding in a very specific way.
Still, a very enjoyable read that I wish had continued longer than it did. I’ll be interested in what the film is like…
V for Vendetta is set in a near-future Britain (1997!) that after surviving full-out nuclear war (since, disarmed, we were not a target) has been taken over by a totalitarian fascist regime who have purged England of liberals, non-whites and gays. With Orwellian CCTV systems, they monitor all the citizens’ activities and keep a tight control using a computer system called ‘Fate’. However, a terrorist called V has other ideas about freedom, and intends to destroy the system so that it can be rebuilt from the ground up.
As in 20th Century Boys, there is a significant amount of what is in literary circles known as ‘OH YEAH, NOW THAT’S COOL!’ to this series. There’s a noir tone to the seedy bars, gangsters and detectives, and a wonderland element to V’s personal world of freedom. V himself is perhaps the most compelling antihero since Alex from A Clockwork Orange. His story at first seems to be an Edmond Dantes-style quest for revenge, but it soon becomes apparent that he has greater ideas. In his entertaining essay accompanying the comic, Moore describes how V could have ended up being ‘Doll’, the transsexual vigilante, if not for artist David Lloyd’s inspired idea to make him look like Guy Fawkes – and that really was a stroke of genius. It’s iconic, creepy and has echoes of the super-hero tradition, but actually looks good. And V is so compelling, quoting Blake, Crowley and the Rolling Stones, reading The Faraway Tree, spontaneously talking in iambs, showing himself to be educated, enigmatic and certainly a man of principles – as well as a callous murderer who thinks nothing of killing, and who is so manipulative that he makes Mr. Rochester look about as scheming as a puppy.
David Lloyd’s art suits the piece well. His background art is exquisite, and V always looks preternatural and impressive. The faces of other characters strike me as somewhat inconsistent, but the overall realism helped to set the tone, and make the melodrama all the more elegant.
Because yes, again I compare it to 20th Century Boys in that it’s totally excessive. Things blowing up, people getting murdered, paedophile priests, gangsters and the rest of the scum of the earth getting what they deserve, human experimentation, almost mythical fighting prowess – all present, and all just a little bit cheesy, but undeniably good fun.
The trouble is that many of the minor characters are very undeveloped. There’s a detective character who has a very important part to play in the unfolding drama (I wonder if that’s who Stephen Fry plays – he wouldn’t suit the role, but I can’t think who else he might be…except maybe Susan – yes, perhaps that’s more likely), but he sort of appears at the beginning, has a very random druggy moment, and then suddenly becomes perhaps the most important supporting character in the piece. All in all, the ending seems rather rushed, and it never feels like the government really is a threat. They have a lot of power, yes, but it’s so fragile, based on such corruption that you feel it could have fallen apart quite easily on its own without V’s prodding. Plus there’s just too much contrivance and coincidence, with detectives figuring out puzzles just in time to dash to the scene of the next crime at the most dramatic moment, and you have to wonder whether V’s plan could possibly have worked without certain events unfolding in a very specific way.
Still, a very enjoyable read that I wish had continued longer than it did. I’ll be interested in what the film is like…
Infernal Devices by Philip Reeve
Book three of Philip Reeve’s Hungry City Chronicles, and the penultimate book of the series. An enjoyable romp, but I fear that the books are getting progressively weaker.
First of all, let me establish that I usually hate it when a series jumps a decade or two and the focus shifts away from the original characters and onto their protégés/children/successors etc, unless it really does feel like the characters’ stories have been told in full. Here, I found it somewhat irksome; the best thing about the last book was the way they developed Hester to be a very dark heroine, taking after her father in her rather psychotic ways. It wasn’t particularly well-done, since it felt a bit artificial, but the dynamic it created made me curious to see what would happen next. Well, what happened next was that Tom and Hester had the child hinted at towards the end of book two and settled down peacefully and raised the child. It was a bit of a stretch to believe that nothing happened until their daughter Wren brings crisis on them all, but the final payoff of this arc does work very well, and sets up the final book excellently.
Hester is really exactly the same character she was in book two. Tom huffs and puffs a bit more, but is essentially the same. The trouble with making them older is that then the teenaged character, Wren, starts to be etched in rather condescending lines: she’s fifteen, but innocent as a 10-year-old, wanting to have ‘adventures’ as though she’s in a Famous Five novel.
Where Reeve dealt with teenaged love very well in previous books, here it seems tacked-on and glib, and Wren’s ‘I don’t want adventures any more!’ reaction soon into the book makes her character very hard to take seriously. To this is added the problem that Reeve’s sense of humour has got very old by now. Yes, it’s all terribly twee in a whimsical British way, with principle locations being Brighton and Grimsby and all sorts of silly pop culture references, and most of the characters being bumblingly middle-classed. For the first time in the series, black characters seemed token, and the amount of times poetic references were spoilt by the fact that no-one could possibly know about the things referred to in this sci-fi world had doubled (though many were the omniscient narrator’s, thus acceptable).
The real problem, however, is the plot. The Lost Boys come back to Anchorage, now Anchorage-in-Vineland, after an artefact they saw on their last visit, The Tin Book. Wren, thirsty for adventure, takes it to them, but Hester’s fury leads to most of the Lost Boys ending up dead, and Wren being kidnapped. Wren ends up in Brighton, Tom and Hester search for her in Grimsby, and at the same time, the Green Storm hear that the Tin Book really exists and come for it.
The Tin Book is the ultimate McGuffin. No-one but Anna Fang know what it’s for, so try to get hold of it for spurious reasons such as its value to collectors, and while it will most likely figure into the next book (though not in any way that couldn’t have been introduced by myriad other sources), it was totally useless here except as a plot device. Yup, McGuffin epitomised.
That would be okay, except that it means that really, none of the characters’ movements have much real point in the story at all. The central plots are Tom and Hester rescuing Wren (which takes about two minutes, after much procrastination), Wren trying to get back the Tin Book (again, with much padding), and Oenone Zero trying to bring down The Stalker Fang, which happens regardless of the intervention of any of the main characters. It just feels like several disparate things having nothing to do with each other happening at once, with a lot of contrivance and convenient coincidence tying it all together. There was never really anything driving the plot: it never seemed Wren was in any real danger, since the focus was on her being a proactive teen heroine, there was no real reason to care about the Tin Book and ultimately Wren’s actions had no significance to the conclusion, and Oenone Zero’s plot was obvious from the start, and nothing ever got in its way. Thus, there was no real sense of tension or satisfaction.
But the journey itself, the moment-to-moment retelling of events, was full of excitement and the climax, while open-ended, was spectacular and thrilling. Reeve is excellent at adventure writing and grand gestures. His characters are flimsy and his plots are contrived, but perhaps that helps establish the adventurous mood.
Unsatisfying, but good fun nonetheless.
First of all, let me establish that I usually hate it when a series jumps a decade or two and the focus shifts away from the original characters and onto their protégés/children/successors etc, unless it really does feel like the characters’ stories have been told in full. Here, I found it somewhat irksome; the best thing about the last book was the way they developed Hester to be a very dark heroine, taking after her father in her rather psychotic ways. It wasn’t particularly well-done, since it felt a bit artificial, but the dynamic it created made me curious to see what would happen next. Well, what happened next was that Tom and Hester had the child hinted at towards the end of book two and settled down peacefully and raised the child. It was a bit of a stretch to believe that nothing happened until their daughter Wren brings crisis on them all, but the final payoff of this arc does work very well, and sets up the final book excellently.
Hester is really exactly the same character she was in book two. Tom huffs and puffs a bit more, but is essentially the same. The trouble with making them older is that then the teenaged character, Wren, starts to be etched in rather condescending lines: she’s fifteen, but innocent as a 10-year-old, wanting to have ‘adventures’ as though she’s in a Famous Five novel.
Where Reeve dealt with teenaged love very well in previous books, here it seems tacked-on and glib, and Wren’s ‘I don’t want adventures any more!’ reaction soon into the book makes her character very hard to take seriously. To this is added the problem that Reeve’s sense of humour has got very old by now. Yes, it’s all terribly twee in a whimsical British way, with principle locations being Brighton and Grimsby and all sorts of silly pop culture references, and most of the characters being bumblingly middle-classed. For the first time in the series, black characters seemed token, and the amount of times poetic references were spoilt by the fact that no-one could possibly know about the things referred to in this sci-fi world had doubled (though many were the omniscient narrator’s, thus acceptable).
The real problem, however, is the plot. The Lost Boys come back to Anchorage, now Anchorage-in-Vineland, after an artefact they saw on their last visit, The Tin Book. Wren, thirsty for adventure, takes it to them, but Hester’s fury leads to most of the Lost Boys ending up dead, and Wren being kidnapped. Wren ends up in Brighton, Tom and Hester search for her in Grimsby, and at the same time, the Green Storm hear that the Tin Book really exists and come for it.
The Tin Book is the ultimate McGuffin. No-one but Anna Fang know what it’s for, so try to get hold of it for spurious reasons such as its value to collectors, and while it will most likely figure into the next book (though not in any way that couldn’t have been introduced by myriad other sources), it was totally useless here except as a plot device. Yup, McGuffin epitomised.
That would be okay, except that it means that really, none of the characters’ movements have much real point in the story at all. The central plots are Tom and Hester rescuing Wren (which takes about two minutes, after much procrastination), Wren trying to get back the Tin Book (again, with much padding), and Oenone Zero trying to bring down The Stalker Fang, which happens regardless of the intervention of any of the main characters. It just feels like several disparate things having nothing to do with each other happening at once, with a lot of contrivance and convenient coincidence tying it all together. There was never really anything driving the plot: it never seemed Wren was in any real danger, since the focus was on her being a proactive teen heroine, there was no real reason to care about the Tin Book and ultimately Wren’s actions had no significance to the conclusion, and Oenone Zero’s plot was obvious from the start, and nothing ever got in its way. Thus, there was no real sense of tension or satisfaction.
But the journey itself, the moment-to-moment retelling of events, was full of excitement and the climax, while open-ended, was spectacular and thrilling. Reeve is excellent at adventure writing and grand gestures. His characters are flimsy and his plots are contrived, but perhaps that helps establish the adventurous mood.
Unsatisfying, but good fun nonetheless.
A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve
It seems to happen to every author who writes adventure stories for young adults; what begins as a silly, frivolous series written with tongue firmly in cheek becomes, with the addition of the catalyst known as ‘success’, something very self-important, epic and serious. This can result in some real trainwrecks of misguided overambitious last novels, but Philip Reeve just barely manages to escape this pitfall.
This bloated novel, almost as fat as a Harry Potter doorstop, is that last of Philip Reeves’ charming Hungry City Chronicles, and despite its scale remains frivolous enough to avoid looking like self-parody. The Stalker Fang is still alive, and now she has the codes to awaken the orbital superweapon ODIN. Meanwhile, there are signs of life in the old wreck of London, Tom Natsworthy’s old town. He and his daughter Wren want to go and see if there might have been survivors, but for that, they will have to enter into Green Storm territory, where despite a truce, the inhabitants of moving cities are not welcome.
With three books’ worth of backstory, this is certainly not for the uninitiated, but there’s much to recommend the previous stories, and I feel it’s quite a shame Reeve isn’t getting more attention than he already is. His daft wit, extremely well-realised but also totally bizarre future setting, his love of classic boys’ adventure storytelling and his talent for occasionally spicing a descriptive passage with a metaphor that he beautifully extends that little bit further than expected are all admirable, and you’ll find few books more fun than this one, or more evocative and cinematic in the telling.
The major flaw of the book, however, is its mess of a plot. Reeve uses the classic weak storyline approach of having half a dozen different plotlines overlapping at the same time, with far too many characters becoming the focus of attention for just a few pages before disappearing again while the others have their turns. The action is kept fast-paced by this constant switching, but without much to really capture the interest in any of them, it all starts to get a bit dull, and the characters become more expositional vehicles than people in their own rights. Some bad decisions also lead to characters like Fishcake who begin in very interesting situations and have some of the book’s best emotional development barely appearing, while Theo, who was just totally flat and uninteresting and seems to have been included mostly because Reeve was fetishising the idea of having a mixed-race romantic couple in his books, spends chapters and chapters getting into irrelevant scrapes and ultimately being of no consequence whatsoever. The climax of the action is anything but climactic, and everything seems to fizzle out as Reeve realises he’s gone on for over 50 chapters. Some secondary characters get killed off for no reason but to look heroic, characters who should have strong bonds barely seem to think about one another, comic relief characters get far more attention in far more contrived ways than I would have expected from Reeve, who genuinely did surprise me in some of the previous books, and only a highly cheesy but also extremely beautiful final passage saves the whole ending from being a sad implosion of bathos.
But that final passage really did lift my spirits, and reminded me of the deeper undercurrents of thought running through the series beneath the adrenaline rush. A highly enjoyable YA sci-fi series, quintessentially British and always a lot of fun. My gripes about characters making metaphors with knowledge they almost certainly wouldn’t have, cultural homogeny, silly names and a degree of smugness remain, but they’re outweighed by the sheer sugar-rush of exuberance the books unleash.
This bloated novel, almost as fat as a Harry Potter doorstop, is that last of Philip Reeves’ charming Hungry City Chronicles, and despite its scale remains frivolous enough to avoid looking like self-parody. The Stalker Fang is still alive, and now she has the codes to awaken the orbital superweapon ODIN. Meanwhile, there are signs of life in the old wreck of London, Tom Natsworthy’s old town. He and his daughter Wren want to go and see if there might have been survivors, but for that, they will have to enter into Green Storm territory, where despite a truce, the inhabitants of moving cities are not welcome.
With three books’ worth of backstory, this is certainly not for the uninitiated, but there’s much to recommend the previous stories, and I feel it’s quite a shame Reeve isn’t getting more attention than he already is. His daft wit, extremely well-realised but also totally bizarre future setting, his love of classic boys’ adventure storytelling and his talent for occasionally spicing a descriptive passage with a metaphor that he beautifully extends that little bit further than expected are all admirable, and you’ll find few books more fun than this one, or more evocative and cinematic in the telling.
The major flaw of the book, however, is its mess of a plot. Reeve uses the classic weak storyline approach of having half a dozen different plotlines overlapping at the same time, with far too many characters becoming the focus of attention for just a few pages before disappearing again while the others have their turns. The action is kept fast-paced by this constant switching, but without much to really capture the interest in any of them, it all starts to get a bit dull, and the characters become more expositional vehicles than people in their own rights. Some bad decisions also lead to characters like Fishcake who begin in very interesting situations and have some of the book’s best emotional development barely appearing, while Theo, who was just totally flat and uninteresting and seems to have been included mostly because Reeve was fetishising the idea of having a mixed-race romantic couple in his books, spends chapters and chapters getting into irrelevant scrapes and ultimately being of no consequence whatsoever. The climax of the action is anything but climactic, and everything seems to fizzle out as Reeve realises he’s gone on for over 50 chapters. Some secondary characters get killed off for no reason but to look heroic, characters who should have strong bonds barely seem to think about one another, comic relief characters get far more attention in far more contrived ways than I would have expected from Reeve, who genuinely did surprise me in some of the previous books, and only a highly cheesy but also extremely beautiful final passage saves the whole ending from being a sad implosion of bathos.
But that final passage really did lift my spirits, and reminded me of the deeper undercurrents of thought running through the series beneath the adrenaline rush. A highly enjoyable YA sci-fi series, quintessentially British and always a lot of fun. My gripes about characters making metaphors with knowledge they almost certainly wouldn’t have, cultural homogeny, silly names and a degree of smugness remain, but they’re outweighed by the sheer sugar-rush of exuberance the books unleash.
Catch-22
Joseph Heller wasn’t the first to write in a comic fashion about war. From Aristophanes through Voltaire and to the films of Stanley Kubrick, comedy has always been mixed with the tragedy and the glorious exaltations of patriotism’s finest hours – when men are killing pro patria. I was raised on Blackadder goes Forth and later became infatuated by Wilfred Owen, who of course longed to emulate the acerbic wit that Siegfried Sassoon poured into his anti-war poems. But I don’t think that I’ve ever laughed so much AND been so impressed on a serious level as I was by Catch-22.
Yossarian is an American bombardier in the Second World War, who is very dissatisfied with the fact that people he doesn’t know keep trying to kill him, and that thanks to the bureaucrats running the war, it looks like he’ll never get sent home. Everyone around him seems to be a madman, and most of them keep telling him he’s the crazy one.
I loved the style of Heller’s composition. I loved how a chapter can turn on a sentence and a tangent you thought was unimportant leads you in a totally different direction. I love that we come to understand the quirks and idiosyncrasies of just about everyone mentioned in the book. And I especially love that just when you’re growing used to the humour, he’ll hit you with something so real and so devastating that you’ll never forget it. Some will probably hate the meandering nature of the prose, and I must admit I probably enjoyed it more reading a few chapters a day than I would trying to tackle the whole thing at once.
I think I saw in Yossarian what many seem to see in Holden Caulfield – a figure that is unpredictable, often doing strange and inexplicable things, yet who has an everyman quality, a mindset that can be easily understood, and whose occasional outbursts of irrational behaviour can be understood in the context. I feel I would behave much like Yossarian in his position (without all the fondling, bien sûr), and that made his quirky character all the more fascinating.
And I think I have seldom laughed so loud or so often at a book. Not all the jokes quite hit the spot – I could have done without the drawn-out capitalism satire of Milo Enterprises that just stretched believability that little bit too far, and the hapless CIA men just seemed too unimaginative and obvious for the joke to work – but so many of them were just inspired, be the absurd situations (‘T.S.Eliot!’) or perfectly apposite character traits (I still smile at how spot-on Cathcart’s ‘Feather in the cap’ vs ‘Black eye’ fixation really was). They made the book really, genuinely enjoyable.
Funny and moving, comfortable and shocking, a book built up of opposites. I couldn’t recommend it more.
Yossarian is an American bombardier in the Second World War, who is very dissatisfied with the fact that people he doesn’t know keep trying to kill him, and that thanks to the bureaucrats running the war, it looks like he’ll never get sent home. Everyone around him seems to be a madman, and most of them keep telling him he’s the crazy one.
I loved the style of Heller’s composition. I loved how a chapter can turn on a sentence and a tangent you thought was unimportant leads you in a totally different direction. I love that we come to understand the quirks and idiosyncrasies of just about everyone mentioned in the book. And I especially love that just when you’re growing used to the humour, he’ll hit you with something so real and so devastating that you’ll never forget it. Some will probably hate the meandering nature of the prose, and I must admit I probably enjoyed it more reading a few chapters a day than I would trying to tackle the whole thing at once.
I think I saw in Yossarian what many seem to see in Holden Caulfield – a figure that is unpredictable, often doing strange and inexplicable things, yet who has an everyman quality, a mindset that can be easily understood, and whose occasional outbursts of irrational behaviour can be understood in the context. I feel I would behave much like Yossarian in his position (without all the fondling, bien sûr), and that made his quirky character all the more fascinating.
And I think I have seldom laughed so loud or so often at a book. Not all the jokes quite hit the spot – I could have done without the drawn-out capitalism satire of Milo Enterprises that just stretched believability that little bit too far, and the hapless CIA men just seemed too unimaginative and obvious for the joke to work – but so many of them were just inspired, be the absurd situations (‘T.S.Eliot!’) or perfectly apposite character traits (I still smile at how spot-on Cathcart’s ‘Feather in the cap’ vs ‘Black eye’ fixation really was). They made the book really, genuinely enjoyable.
Funny and moving, comfortable and shocking, a book built up of opposites. I couldn’t recommend it more.
Seeker
His Slaves of the Mastery remains my favourite kids’ book written in the last twenty years, so it was with some excitement I started to read William Nicholson’s Seeker. However, it turned out to be quite a disappointment.
I’m coming quite late to the fantasy-with-an-eastern-flavour market, and Nicholson seems to be dipping his feet in those waters. A community of monks with mysterious superpowers called the Nomana live on an island, going around the world doing good works. Only they’re not very good at it, because a huge empire exists nearby where they imprison people on petty charges or simply abduct them in order to throw them off the top of a cliff as a sacrifice to their Sun god, a ritual performed every single day. Seeker is a boy of 16 whose brother is one of these Noma monks, but he is destined to become a scholar, because that is what his father wants. Secretly, though, he yearns to join the Nomana. After hearing a mysterious plot-driving voice, he goes into the monks’ inner sanctum and witnesses his brother being brainwashed, then overhears the monks talking about a secret weapon in the nearby empire that will destroy the island. When his brother is cast out and he is rejected as a novice, he joins two other rejected youths – the sarcastic, incredibly irritating Silvertongued silver-tongued girl who can see auras, Morning Star, and the fun but unoriginal Wildman, whose transformation from murdering, psychotic...well, Wildman to sensitive individual happens far too quickly to be believable – and sets off to find his cast-out brother and the secret weapon.
Not a bad set-up. Trouble is, it’s such a mess! Too much happens too quickly, and the climax is a deeply unsatisfying shambles. The characters are dulls I didn’t care for one of them except perhaps everyman Seeker. The world we’re introduced to is very flawed (what, the Noma don’t care about this evil empire of murderers until they’re threatened? Okay, I can just about swallow that, with monks wanting to keep themselves to themselves, but if it’s as easy for the empire to be brought down as it obviously was, why hasn’t it been done before by dozens of others?). Plot strands just get abandoned – Nicholson seems to have a complex about kids having to conform in schools, given Seeker’s story and The Wind Singer’s opening, but the concept never really gets tied up – just conveniently dismissed at the end. Various reprehensible things are seemingly condoned (also a problem I had with Firesong), from a girl making a vulnerable woman love her as a daughter and then totally destroying her psychologically, merely because she’s a product of her deluded society and thus wicked enough to suffer, to a woman abandoning her husband and child because she’s a bit of a manic depressive and hears voices. The driving antagonistic force of mysterious unseen psychic figures is lazy, and when the ending comes and you realise that the whole conclusion would have happened in much the same way with or without the story we followed, it’s annoying. For Nicholson to THEN have the audacity to try and engineer a meaningless twist in which it was all orchestrated and the kids were being protected despite all of them being in a position where no-one could have stopped them dying more than once (one of them actually got abducted) was extremely irksome.
Peculiar, though, that there was no romantic spark whatsoever between the lead female and the boys, but the two of them were often found to be huddling together in the cold, throwing themselves into one another’s arms, one being described as ‘beautiful’ and the other as ‘babyfaced’…almost like he knows the fantasy audience well!
Not to say it wasn’t a good page-turner or an enjoyable read. It was fun in places, but as a story, poor. I don’t particularly feel like reading book two, but then, I felt that way after The Wind Singer, too…so I probably will.
I’m coming quite late to the fantasy-with-an-eastern-flavour market, and Nicholson seems to be dipping his feet in those waters. A community of monks with mysterious superpowers called the Nomana live on an island, going around the world doing good works. Only they’re not very good at it, because a huge empire exists nearby where they imprison people on petty charges or simply abduct them in order to throw them off the top of a cliff as a sacrifice to their Sun god, a ritual performed every single day. Seeker is a boy of 16 whose brother is one of these Noma monks, but he is destined to become a scholar, because that is what his father wants. Secretly, though, he yearns to join the Nomana. After hearing a mysterious plot-driving voice, he goes into the monks’ inner sanctum and witnesses his brother being brainwashed, then overhears the monks talking about a secret weapon in the nearby empire that will destroy the island. When his brother is cast out and he is rejected as a novice, he joins two other rejected youths – the sarcastic, incredibly irritating Silvertongued silver-tongued girl who can see auras, Morning Star, and the fun but unoriginal Wildman, whose transformation from murdering, psychotic...well, Wildman to sensitive individual happens far too quickly to be believable – and sets off to find his cast-out brother and the secret weapon.
Not a bad set-up. Trouble is, it’s such a mess! Too much happens too quickly, and the climax is a deeply unsatisfying shambles. The characters are dulls I didn’t care for one of them except perhaps everyman Seeker. The world we’re introduced to is very flawed (what, the Noma don’t care about this evil empire of murderers until they’re threatened? Okay, I can just about swallow that, with monks wanting to keep themselves to themselves, but if it’s as easy for the empire to be brought down as it obviously was, why hasn’t it been done before by dozens of others?). Plot strands just get abandoned – Nicholson seems to have a complex about kids having to conform in schools, given Seeker’s story and The Wind Singer’s opening, but the concept never really gets tied up – just conveniently dismissed at the end. Various reprehensible things are seemingly condoned (also a problem I had with Firesong), from a girl making a vulnerable woman love her as a daughter and then totally destroying her psychologically, merely because she’s a product of her deluded society and thus wicked enough to suffer, to a woman abandoning her husband and child because she’s a bit of a manic depressive and hears voices. The driving antagonistic force of mysterious unseen psychic figures is lazy, and when the ending comes and you realise that the whole conclusion would have happened in much the same way with or without the story we followed, it’s annoying. For Nicholson to THEN have the audacity to try and engineer a meaningless twist in which it was all orchestrated and the kids were being protected despite all of them being in a position where no-one could have stopped them dying more than once (one of them actually got abducted) was extremely irksome.
Peculiar, though, that there was no romantic spark whatsoever between the lead female and the boys, but the two of them were often found to be huddling together in the cold, throwing themselves into one another’s arms, one being described as ‘beautiful’ and the other as ‘babyfaced’…almost like he knows the fantasy audience well!
Not to say it wasn’t a good page-turner or an enjoyable read. It was fun in places, but as a story, poor. I don’t particularly feel like reading book two, but then, I felt that way after The Wind Singer, too…so I probably will.
Tuesday 20 September 2011
300 (graphic novel)
Despite being the original, I came to 300 as an interesting companion piece to the movie it spawned, with more realistic male nudity (given the Spartans’ reputation) and better pacing.
The mere mere five issues actually answered just about every qualm I had with the film. The lame betraying brother subplot didn’t exist, and the ‘strong woman’ actually looked a hell of a lot stronger by asserting herself properly in just one scene. ‘Herakles’ replaces ‘Hercules’ and the bits that dragged were skipped through at the right speed here. The focus on the evils of slavery was less intense, making the Spartans look less hypocritical, given that the Spartans had plenty of slaves – something Miller acknowledged in his letters page at the same time as addressing the homophobic line, though his reasoning behind that line (there is evidence the Spartans lied about their homosexuality; this is what he was doing – but that misses the point that it wouldn’t be something Leonidas would have though to be something that should be mocked) was a bit suspect.
The mere mere five issues actually answered just about every qualm I had with the film. The lame betraying brother subplot didn’t exist, and the ‘strong woman’ actually looked a hell of a lot stronger by asserting herself properly in just one scene. ‘Herakles’ replaces ‘Hercules’ and the bits that dragged were skipped through at the right speed here. The focus on the evils of slavery was less intense, making the Spartans look less hypocritical, given that the Spartans had plenty of slaves – something Miller acknowledged in his letters page at the same time as addressing the homophobic line, though his reasoning behind that line (there is evidence the Spartans lied about their homosexuality; this is what he was doing – but that misses the point that it wouldn’t be something Leonidas would have though to be something that should be mocked) was a bit suspect.
Tuesday 6 September 2011
Kingdom Come (graphic novel)
Wow. If I thought The Dark Knight Returns was good, I had another thing coming – though it’s Frank Miller and Alan Moore’s shadows that loom large over Mark Waid’s ambitious writing. Almost every good idea in Civil War was already done here, ten years ago, from superheroes being made accountable for their actions and prominent ‘good guys’ arguing over the methodology and morality of controlling others to just about every prominent character in the universe making an appearance – and some of the more dubious ones, too (like crises beginning with the detonation of a nuclear-powered metahuman). I’m far less well-versed with the DC universe than the Marvel one (it was info about Marvel vs DC comics that led me to this series), never having heard of Hawkman, struggling to remember Green Arrow is called Green Arrow and having no idea Captain Marvel was as powerful as he was, so most cameos were lost on me, but I knew enough to follow with ease. As in The Dark Knight Returns, Superman and Batman are now old, jaded, lost in a world not quite as simple as it used to be, and finding it difficult as always to cooperate. There is also a framing device that’s much more intimate than Miller’s talking heads – an old preacher made to watch events unfold, and it’s curiously impressive how easy it is to empathise with this old man, who after all does not get much time to be developed. Everything is presented more seriously, more realistically, more straightforwardly, and even if yes, nuclear warheads are a cliché that grates even in a comic where clichés like flying men in tights can be accommodated, I have to say I’ve seldom been more impressed by a limited series.
And oh, the art. The art, the art. Alex Ross has a true gift. I love manga-style art, and artists like Takeshi Obata are incredible, but they’re working within a pretty, hyper-real world that can be produced at speed, and it’s quite another experience to see truly amazing Western comic art.
And oh, the art. The art, the art. Alex Ross has a true gift. I love manga-style art, and artists like Takeshi Obata are incredible, but they’re working within a pretty, hyper-real world that can be produced at speed, and it’s quite another experience to see truly amazing Western comic art.
Sunday 4 September 2011
Poison, by Chris Wooding
I’m definitely inclined to think that The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray was just a one-off - it'll take some convincing now for me to think Wooding is worth spending any more time or money on (though I do still have a masochistic compulsion to read Storm Thief or whatever it was called). Because Wooding really does write trash. Alaizabel Cray worked because it never tried to be anything other than a trashy, fun adventure. Poison gets ideas above its station and as a result falls flat.
Reading the blurb and looking at the cover of this book, I thought it was going to be a sort of gothic fairytale set principally in our world, a kind of dark Alice in Wonderland, which probably would have appealed to me more than the fantasy setting Wooding created, especially since it’s very hard to imagine Poison, with the description Wooding gives her, as anything other than a cartoon figure in the vein of Emily Strange. Some sort of Gaimanesque slightly weird but recognisable world would have worked better than a fantasy land where the protagonist grows up in a swamp, especially since it’s so lazily conceived: are we really supposed to believe that Poison knows what coal chutes and chandeliers are just from hearing word-of-mouth stories? That she doesn’t react to the world with more wonder when she’s seen little more than mud for her entire life?
That aside, it seems for a while that Wooding is going to give us a nice, rewarding lowbrow adventure, until Poison enters the world of Faerie (with her two utterly useless companions – what purpose is there to Peppercorn? Are we supposed to find her total submissive girliness cute rather than patronising?) and Wooding introduces ideas that will dominate the rest of the book – metatextual ideas about storytelling. I suspect he pinched the concept from Sophie’s World, though without the eloquence or tasteful unfolding of the idea, instead trying to sledgehammer home how clever Wooding is, and reminding us again and again that he’s the greater maker. I know Wooding is an anime fan, but I wonder if he’s seen Princess Tutu, which does the same thing as Poison, down to drawing from fairy tales, only with far more wit and sophistication, despite its daft title. And it really does rankle when someone’s trying to be very smart indeed with a world that includes trolls with names like Mgwar.
And while failing entirely to look clever despite his ardent efforts, Wooding again tortures us with his awful writing. I remember impressed by the opening of Alazaizabel Cray, with a beautiful metaphor about a wedge-shaped building as the prow of a ship, but really, that was the first and last time Wooding impressed me. In every book he seems to have an obsession with a slightly obscure word he knows. In Alaizabel it was ‘limned’. Here it’s ‘pique’, which he uses several times, each time sounding like he’s a small child flashing a favourite toy. And then he drops stinkers on us, like a bark being taken up by ‘another canine throat’, or the time when, in a scene that we’re supposed to be taking seriously, we’re told that Poison’s ‘pain returned with reinforcements.’ Pants!
Reading the blurb and looking at the cover of this book, I thought it was going to be a sort of gothic fairytale set principally in our world, a kind of dark Alice in Wonderland, which probably would have appealed to me more than the fantasy setting Wooding created, especially since it’s very hard to imagine Poison, with the description Wooding gives her, as anything other than a cartoon figure in the vein of Emily Strange. Some sort of Gaimanesque slightly weird but recognisable world would have worked better than a fantasy land where the protagonist grows up in a swamp, especially since it’s so lazily conceived: are we really supposed to believe that Poison knows what coal chutes and chandeliers are just from hearing word-of-mouth stories? That she doesn’t react to the world with more wonder when she’s seen little more than mud for her entire life?
That aside, it seems for a while that Wooding is going to give us a nice, rewarding lowbrow adventure, until Poison enters the world of Faerie (with her two utterly useless companions – what purpose is there to Peppercorn? Are we supposed to find her total submissive girliness cute rather than patronising?) and Wooding introduces ideas that will dominate the rest of the book – metatextual ideas about storytelling. I suspect he pinched the concept from Sophie’s World, though without the eloquence or tasteful unfolding of the idea, instead trying to sledgehammer home how clever Wooding is, and reminding us again and again that he’s the greater maker. I know Wooding is an anime fan, but I wonder if he’s seen Princess Tutu, which does the same thing as Poison, down to drawing from fairy tales, only with far more wit and sophistication, despite its daft title. And it really does rankle when someone’s trying to be very smart indeed with a world that includes trolls with names like Mgwar.
And while failing entirely to look clever despite his ardent efforts, Wooding again tortures us with his awful writing. I remember impressed by the opening of Alazaizabel Cray, with a beautiful metaphor about a wedge-shaped building as the prow of a ship, but really, that was the first and last time Wooding impressed me. In every book he seems to have an obsession with a slightly obscure word he knows. In Alaizabel it was ‘limned’. Here it’s ‘pique’, which he uses several times, each time sounding like he’s a small child flashing a favourite toy. And then he drops stinkers on us, like a bark being taken up by ‘another canine throat’, or the time when, in a scene that we’re supposed to be taking seriously, we’re told that Poison’s ‘pain returned with reinforcements.’ Pants!
Saturday 3 September 2011
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness is a curious little book. In some ways simple enough to be deeply anticlimactic in its final pages and in other ways complex enough to have captivated critics and inspired many a far-reaching interpretive and very possibly agendist essay, it is despite its story-within-a-story structure fascinating more as a piece of craft than as a narrative tale, and shows once more how realising a character with minimal detail can make him seem, rather than simple and uninteresting, enigmatic, powerful and complex.
This tiny novella revolves around the character of Kurtz. The first two chapters build up to Marlow’s meeting of this strange figure and the third shows us what happens when he does. We hear a lot more about Kurtz than we see, including, quite cleverly, the fact that his ideological beliefs have changed over time. We don’t need to be made aware that Conrad lived a very similar experience to this story himself; everything seems so real, even the recollections of things that themselves seem unreal.
The real marvel, though, is the language and construction of the work, given that it was written before the 20th century had even begun. The naturalism that creeps into the dialogue, the clever similes, the interplay of ordinary speech and eloquence all seems so ahead of its time, giving us gems of passages like this one: -
‘I fancy I had some vague notion of falling upon him and giving him a drubbing. I don’t know. I had some imbecile thoughts. The knitting old woman with the cat obtruded herself upon my memory as a most improper person to be sitting at the other end of such an affair.’
And yet the attitude to the ‘savage’ natives of Africa remind us that this book was written during colonial times, when Europeans considered it their right to brutalise and misuse black people – though it’s worth noting that Marlow tends to objectify everyone he describes.
Occasionally lacking in subtlety, sometimes too caught up in its tangents and really despite its status as a classic story rather unfulfilling in terms of narrative, it certainly seems like a milestone in English literature, and is both a fascinating read and a clever piece of craftsmanship. Not, I feel, worthy of the empty academicism flung at it, though. Psychoanalysing Kurtz the way you wish to psychoanalyse him is easy, because he’s left inchoate, with just enough of shape that moulding the details becomes a simple task.
This tiny novella revolves around the character of Kurtz. The first two chapters build up to Marlow’s meeting of this strange figure and the third shows us what happens when he does. We hear a lot more about Kurtz than we see, including, quite cleverly, the fact that his ideological beliefs have changed over time. We don’t need to be made aware that Conrad lived a very similar experience to this story himself; everything seems so real, even the recollections of things that themselves seem unreal.
The real marvel, though, is the language and construction of the work, given that it was written before the 20th century had even begun. The naturalism that creeps into the dialogue, the clever similes, the interplay of ordinary speech and eloquence all seems so ahead of its time, giving us gems of passages like this one: -
‘I fancy I had some vague notion of falling upon him and giving him a drubbing. I don’t know. I had some imbecile thoughts. The knitting old woman with the cat obtruded herself upon my memory as a most improper person to be sitting at the other end of such an affair.’
And yet the attitude to the ‘savage’ natives of Africa remind us that this book was written during colonial times, when Europeans considered it their right to brutalise and misuse black people – though it’s worth noting that Marlow tends to objectify everyone he describes.
Occasionally lacking in subtlety, sometimes too caught up in its tangents and really despite its status as a classic story rather unfulfilling in terms of narrative, it certainly seems like a milestone in English literature, and is both a fascinating read and a clever piece of craftsmanship. Not, I feel, worthy of the empty academicism flung at it, though. Psychoanalysing Kurtz the way you wish to psychoanalyse him is easy, because he’s left inchoate, with just enough of shape that moulding the details becomes a simple task.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
That was an awful, awful book. Easily the worst in the series, and it was hard to top Order of the Phoenix. Plotless, contrived, dull and sentimental, it was an absolute disappointment and deeply unsatisfying.
So after a pretentious and unnecessary quote from The Choephoroe, our story picks up where it left off in book 6 – Harry is dropping out of school like a real role model to go to search for bits of Voldemort’s soul, while Voldemort himself is taking over the world. Except, wait, he’s not taking over the world at all, or acting in a particularly threatening way at all. He’s supposedly infiltrated the wizarding government, but is remaining hidden away and spends most of the book floating around looking for a wand. By not being there, Voldemort is being ‘clever’, since, ‘the air of mystery is creating more terror than showing himself.’ This, incidentally, is absolute bollocks. The fact is that there’s no good reason for Voldemort not to appear as a tyrant figure, publicly announce that he’s going to execute everyone close to Harry if he does not give himself up, and kill him, but that is just swept under the carpet. Bad storytelling. Not to mention how time-turners, luck charms et al could affect everything immeasurably.
Those're just minor quibbles, though. The major problem with this book is its immensely dull middle section, in which the series’ central trio meander around England looking for Horcruxes without knowing where to look. It’s called a ‘pointless and rambling journey’ in the text, and you just wonder why we have to endure this pap, this collection quest that reminds one of an unimaginative video game RPG. Rowling made up the Horcruxes in the last book, and added some Hallows to this one so she could tack on some new expedient magical rules to make her ending work and spin out the dullness a bit longer, and we’re supposed to be interested in their collection? And of course they all turn out to be in strongholds Harry just happens to have visited previously. The coincidences of the locket AND the diadem just happening to be things Harry had unknowingly touched before grated, Rowling just trying to make her fangirls think how clever she is for incorporating little details from past books. The story would have been so, so much better if some other plotline had been made up and the entire middle section of the book had been cut, letting us skip to the big showdown in Hogwarts, which is after all the only good part of the entire novel. That in order to gain his final victory, Harry had to (a) destroy all the Horcruxes, which only coincidence led him to find, (b) happen to glean necessary information from stuff oozing from Snape’s orifices that he could well have not been there to collect, (c) have come back from death because of some stupid little contrivance, and (d) happen to have unknowingly fulfilled conditions necessary to take Voldemort’s wand in their final duel simply stretches credulity too far. The plot is weak, weak, weak and its lack of focus really doesn’t maintain interest.
Rowling is good at three things. Firstly, characterisation. But this book squanders her rich cast, giving us endless Trio and very, very little of anyone else. Characters like Cho and Tonks are totally shafted; even those who die (who are all pretty inconsequential – not that death really matters, or should be such a big issue, in a world where an afterlife is assured and it’s really easy to communicate with the deceased) do it with less significance than the unwanted old line of Transformers in the 80s animated movie. The trio don’t need any more developing, and grow tiresome. New characters of note are thin on the ground and uninteresting. Lupin gets about the most development of any minor character, and that’s in about two scenes. It’s palpable how much Rowling relies on her soap opera stories, in book 6 especially. Without them as a crutch, we see how weak her storytelling really is.
Back to the things Rowling’s good at. Second: humour. This is a dull and turgid book. I won’t call it ‘dark’, since it’s not like Rowling doesn’t try to inject humour – it’s just that, surprisingly, she fails. The only time I laughed was when Mrs Weasley said a Bad Word (in caps, too!) and I thought of the angry reaction of stuffy mothers.
Lastly, she’s good at nice juicy twists, albeit almost all of them being ‘The person you thought was good…IS BAD’, or vice versa. Same here…but almost all of us figured out that Snape wasn’t a bad guy just from reading book 6, so that one falls flat, and enough fan theories about Snape loving Lily have been circulated through fandom that that one was no surprise either. As for Dumbledore, the whole attack on journalists’ biographies takes one out of the Potter world to jarringly contemplate Rowling, and his string-pulling again relies too much on coincidence, unlikely reasoning and far too many made-up rules for magical items. And why oh why, When you have a bottomless bag, keep wearing a Horcrux that, like a ring of power, makes you belligerent and unlike yourself? The one thing in this novel I didn’t expect before I’d even begun to read it is that the creature on the cover with his hand growing out of Harry’s head was not a house elf but a goblin.
And while I thought it had improved in the last two books, Rowling’s writing style was at its worst here, too. Everything seems rushed and artless – because Voldemort’s nostrils are described as slits, his eyes can’t be, but then within a few paragraphs we hear Nagini has ‘slits for eyes’. We get awful platitudes like people leaning back from Voldemort lest they be ‘scorched by the ferocity of the gaze’. Details are flawed: the date on the Potters’ grave gives us a definite timelines, meaning her previous reference to a Playstation is anachronistic, though it was always fairly obvious she has no idea what a Playstation is. And then there’s the get cringe-inducing similes – at one point not only does Rowling compare the passing of a locket bearing the soul of Voldemort to a game of pass the parcel, even that bit of imagery gets messed up – you don’t pass the parcel only when the music stops!
The ending is a mess, the epilogue is tackier than Top Gun and there’s not even irony to save it. Crap book.
So after a pretentious and unnecessary quote from The Choephoroe, our story picks up where it left off in book 6 – Harry is dropping out of school like a real role model to go to search for bits of Voldemort’s soul, while Voldemort himself is taking over the world. Except, wait, he’s not taking over the world at all, or acting in a particularly threatening way at all. He’s supposedly infiltrated the wizarding government, but is remaining hidden away and spends most of the book floating around looking for a wand. By not being there, Voldemort is being ‘clever’, since, ‘the air of mystery is creating more terror than showing himself.’ This, incidentally, is absolute bollocks. The fact is that there’s no good reason for Voldemort not to appear as a tyrant figure, publicly announce that he’s going to execute everyone close to Harry if he does not give himself up, and kill him, but that is just swept under the carpet. Bad storytelling. Not to mention how time-turners, luck charms et al could affect everything immeasurably.
Those're just minor quibbles, though. The major problem with this book is its immensely dull middle section, in which the series’ central trio meander around England looking for Horcruxes without knowing where to look. It’s called a ‘pointless and rambling journey’ in the text, and you just wonder why we have to endure this pap, this collection quest that reminds one of an unimaginative video game RPG. Rowling made up the Horcruxes in the last book, and added some Hallows to this one so she could tack on some new expedient magical rules to make her ending work and spin out the dullness a bit longer, and we’re supposed to be interested in their collection? And of course they all turn out to be in strongholds Harry just happens to have visited previously. The coincidences of the locket AND the diadem just happening to be things Harry had unknowingly touched before grated, Rowling just trying to make her fangirls think how clever she is for incorporating little details from past books. The story would have been so, so much better if some other plotline had been made up and the entire middle section of the book had been cut, letting us skip to the big showdown in Hogwarts, which is after all the only good part of the entire novel. That in order to gain his final victory, Harry had to (a) destroy all the Horcruxes, which only coincidence led him to find, (b) happen to glean necessary information from stuff oozing from Snape’s orifices that he could well have not been there to collect, (c) have come back from death because of some stupid little contrivance, and (d) happen to have unknowingly fulfilled conditions necessary to take Voldemort’s wand in their final duel simply stretches credulity too far. The plot is weak, weak, weak and its lack of focus really doesn’t maintain interest.
Rowling is good at three things. Firstly, characterisation. But this book squanders her rich cast, giving us endless Trio and very, very little of anyone else. Characters like Cho and Tonks are totally shafted; even those who die (who are all pretty inconsequential – not that death really matters, or should be such a big issue, in a world where an afterlife is assured and it’s really easy to communicate with the deceased) do it with less significance than the unwanted old line of Transformers in the 80s animated movie. The trio don’t need any more developing, and grow tiresome. New characters of note are thin on the ground and uninteresting. Lupin gets about the most development of any minor character, and that’s in about two scenes. It’s palpable how much Rowling relies on her soap opera stories, in book 6 especially. Without them as a crutch, we see how weak her storytelling really is.
Back to the things Rowling’s good at. Second: humour. This is a dull and turgid book. I won’t call it ‘dark’, since it’s not like Rowling doesn’t try to inject humour – it’s just that, surprisingly, she fails. The only time I laughed was when Mrs Weasley said a Bad Word (in caps, too!) and I thought of the angry reaction of stuffy mothers.
Lastly, she’s good at nice juicy twists, albeit almost all of them being ‘The person you thought was good…IS BAD’, or vice versa. Same here…but almost all of us figured out that Snape wasn’t a bad guy just from reading book 6, so that one falls flat, and enough fan theories about Snape loving Lily have been circulated through fandom that that one was no surprise either. As for Dumbledore, the whole attack on journalists’ biographies takes one out of the Potter world to jarringly contemplate Rowling, and his string-pulling again relies too much on coincidence, unlikely reasoning and far too many made-up rules for magical items. And why oh why, When you have a bottomless bag, keep wearing a Horcrux that, like a ring of power, makes you belligerent and unlike yourself? The one thing in this novel I didn’t expect before I’d even begun to read it is that the creature on the cover with his hand growing out of Harry’s head was not a house elf but a goblin.
And while I thought it had improved in the last two books, Rowling’s writing style was at its worst here, too. Everything seems rushed and artless – because Voldemort’s nostrils are described as slits, his eyes can’t be, but then within a few paragraphs we hear Nagini has ‘slits for eyes’. We get awful platitudes like people leaning back from Voldemort lest they be ‘scorched by the ferocity of the gaze’. Details are flawed: the date on the Potters’ grave gives us a definite timelines, meaning her previous reference to a Playstation is anachronistic, though it was always fairly obvious she has no idea what a Playstation is. And then there’s the get cringe-inducing similes – at one point not only does Rowling compare the passing of a locket bearing the soul of Voldemort to a game of pass the parcel, even that bit of imagery gets messed up – you don’t pass the parcel only when the music stops!
The ending is a mess, the epilogue is tackier than Top Gun and there’s not even irony to save it. Crap book.
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