If I were to be unkind, I could summarise The Subtle Knife really quite adequately by simply saying, ‘Some people go some places – and this boy finds a knife’. Because that is basically all that happens. No wonder I didn’t remember anything about it from the first time I’d read it! Yes, Lyra was very sweet, even if she seemed to be regressing rather than growing up, and yes, it’s good to see a wound that actually bothers someone properly in a children’s book, but it really wasn’t especially interesting.
And to be honest, the links to Paradise Lost and the story of the Fall, as well as almost all the cod-philosophical musings on Dark Matter and puberty are inelegant and really rather arbitrary.
Still, it’s better than almost any children’s literature out there, and I had a pretty enjoyable read. I’m not going to complain.
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Lolita
It took far longer than it should have done, but I’ve come to the end of Lolita, truly amongst the best books of all time. Nabokov’s prose is a tour de force throughout, and consistently beautiful – while in many places opaque. The story itself is functional and well-crafted, with only enough actual events for a short story so firmly fixed by foreshadowing, by allusions, by the intricate detail in which such events are unfolded, that the prose and the study of Humbert Humbert’s psychological state take centre-stage – and enchant and mesmerise the audience.
Before I go on, I’d just like to mention as an aside that I know about all the hullabaloo in Europe over a prior Lolita, a short story by a German writer with a plot remarkably similar to Nabokov’s The Enchanter, itself the short story that would later be fleshed out into Lolita. I care not if Nabokov refused to credit his source because he so hated Nazi sympathisers, or if he simply absorbed the story and (buzzword: cryptomnesia) later it trickled out of that vast lake in his head with all the freshness of our own second- (or sixth-) hand water, or even if it was just another work of McFate, which would no doubt appeal to Nabokov greatly. Frankly, it’s the style that is important here, and neither name nor story are great works of original thought.
Now, onto the book proper: a real masterpiece of vocabulary, eloquence and cynicism. Our narrator is Humbert Humbert, a monster, true, but a seductive one.
Humbert’s faults are many and extreme: he is a murderer, a wife-beater, a solipsist; he is entirely ignorant of the emotions and desires of other people. He is hideously selfish, for all his protestations. He treats Lo horrifically. I could blame his actions on a society that has backed him into a corner, made him a pariah, but he is simultaneously a hideous human being. He never loves Lolita, because he always puts his own desires first, desperate and ardent as they are.
When Lolita seduces him, almost a game, I would find it difficult to label him a rapist, despite legal terminology. But in continuing to abuse her, paying her like a whore, listening to her cry herself to sleep: his morals are challenged, but he can’t resist. He is weak, and ultimately destroys more lives than Lolita’s. Humbert isn’t a monster because he is a paedophile. Humbert is a monster because he is a selfish, blind fool, and mistakes lust for love. Lolita has her flaws, but she is after all a child, and her primary role-model is just as deceptive as she, and what Humbert does to her is unforgivable. But falling in love with a nymphet, in and of itself, is not.
Horrific, Horrible as he is, I see more of myself in him than I would like to, but then, it is difficult not to look at Hum the Hummer and see Nabokov the trickster staring back at you. This is perhaps the most important thing to note in the book – despite the slight imposed ignorance, Humbert (as well as Quilty, and, I’m increasingly suspecting, ALL Nabokov’s protagonists) simply IS Nabokov. Filtered, perhaps, distorted, maybe – but nonetheless Nabokov. I would have taken objection to Lolita’s dialogue, if not for the certainty that Nabokov spoke in just such a way.
Humbert and Quilty’s games centre impossibly on Nabokov’s literary knowledge (though to an extent, his references are ‘canon’, particularly those that are in French). The allusions are thick and often nigh-on invisible – so how cruel to insert the occasional fabricated quote or imagined reference! Always wanting to appear one step ahead of even the most educated reader, Nabokov never lets us forget it is HE who is writing the novel, HE who inserts Vivian Darkbloom (his anagrammatised alter-ego) and countless other little references, HE whose butterflies, unidentifiable to Humbert, flutter into view where no other writer would have turned their minds. This is my concern: Nabokov is a genius, a master craftsman, a wonderful artist – but he appears limited to himself, his own interests, his own obsessions, which happily coincide with Humbert’s (though I couldn’t say the same of ‘pederosis’; who knows?), and Pnin’s, and Van’s, and Kinbote’s.
An artist must be a chameleon. A writer must be prepared to take risks, to adopt another creature’s skin, even if that creature is a snake, and not just lie inside but amalgamate, assimilate, learn to BE a snake – or a bird – or a butterfly.
Humbert is surrounded by flimsiness, which he observes with an aloof eye and rebukes with a sarcastic tongue. It works beautifully for Lolita, and Humbert, which makes a masterpiece. But whether it can work for an entire body of work I am less sure.
Before I go on, I’d just like to mention as an aside that I know about all the hullabaloo in Europe over a prior Lolita, a short story by a German writer with a plot remarkably similar to Nabokov’s The Enchanter, itself the short story that would later be fleshed out into Lolita. I care not if Nabokov refused to credit his source because he so hated Nazi sympathisers, or if he simply absorbed the story and (buzzword: cryptomnesia) later it trickled out of that vast lake in his head with all the freshness of our own second- (or sixth-) hand water, or even if it was just another work of McFate, which would no doubt appeal to Nabokov greatly. Frankly, it’s the style that is important here, and neither name nor story are great works of original thought.
Now, onto the book proper: a real masterpiece of vocabulary, eloquence and cynicism. Our narrator is Humbert Humbert, a monster, true, but a seductive one.
Humbert’s faults are many and extreme: he is a murderer, a wife-beater, a solipsist; he is entirely ignorant of the emotions and desires of other people. He is hideously selfish, for all his protestations. He treats Lo horrifically. I could blame his actions on a society that has backed him into a corner, made him a pariah, but he is simultaneously a hideous human being. He never loves Lolita, because he always puts his own desires first, desperate and ardent as they are.
When Lolita seduces him, almost a game, I would find it difficult to label him a rapist, despite legal terminology. But in continuing to abuse her, paying her like a whore, listening to her cry herself to sleep: his morals are challenged, but he can’t resist. He is weak, and ultimately destroys more lives than Lolita’s. Humbert isn’t a monster because he is a paedophile. Humbert is a monster because he is a selfish, blind fool, and mistakes lust for love. Lolita has her flaws, but she is after all a child, and her primary role-model is just as deceptive as she, and what Humbert does to her is unforgivable. But falling in love with a nymphet, in and of itself, is not.
Horrific, Horrible as he is, I see more of myself in him than I would like to, but then, it is difficult not to look at Hum the Hummer and see Nabokov the trickster staring back at you. This is perhaps the most important thing to note in the book – despite the slight imposed ignorance, Humbert (as well as Quilty, and, I’m increasingly suspecting, ALL Nabokov’s protagonists) simply IS Nabokov. Filtered, perhaps, distorted, maybe – but nonetheless Nabokov. I would have taken objection to Lolita’s dialogue, if not for the certainty that Nabokov spoke in just such a way.
Humbert and Quilty’s games centre impossibly on Nabokov’s literary knowledge (though to an extent, his references are ‘canon’, particularly those that are in French). The allusions are thick and often nigh-on invisible – so how cruel to insert the occasional fabricated quote or imagined reference! Always wanting to appear one step ahead of even the most educated reader, Nabokov never lets us forget it is HE who is writing the novel, HE who inserts Vivian Darkbloom (his anagrammatised alter-ego) and countless other little references, HE whose butterflies, unidentifiable to Humbert, flutter into view where no other writer would have turned their minds. This is my concern: Nabokov is a genius, a master craftsman, a wonderful artist – but he appears limited to himself, his own interests, his own obsessions, which happily coincide with Humbert’s (though I couldn’t say the same of ‘pederosis’; who knows?), and Pnin’s, and Van’s, and Kinbote’s.
An artist must be a chameleon. A writer must be prepared to take risks, to adopt another creature’s skin, even if that creature is a snake, and not just lie inside but amalgamate, assimilate, learn to BE a snake – or a bird – or a butterfly.
Humbert is surrounded by flimsiness, which he observes with an aloof eye and rebukes with a sarcastic tongue. It works beautifully for Lolita, and Humbert, which makes a masterpiece. But whether it can work for an entire body of work I am less sure.
Pnin
Nabokov’s Pnin is only a very short book – ideal reading for a rainy, cheerless day…and I would recommend it to anyone, because bringing about smiles of both laughter and wistfulness is a sure sign of success.
Yes, Pnin has greatly impressed me – and because it was such a success, it’s buoyed up my estimation of all the rest of Nabokov’s work, too. To be silly and florid, all I had seen was a flat landscape, with beautiful flora but no undulation, but now I perceive in his talent great hills and valleys, and I am greatly relieved – my faith restored!
Because Pnin is very funny. Nabokov has made me laugh before, of course – I laughed when I read Lolita at 15 or 16 at Humbert’s wicked abuse of sleeping pills on Charlotte (before his far more wicked and chilling planned abuse of them later). It made me giggle to read how Humbert ‘had put the radio at full blast […] had blazed in her face an olisbos-like flashlight […] had pushed her, pinched her, prodded her’ and still she would not wake, until he kisses her, whereupon she ‘awakened at once, as fresh and strong as an octopus (I barely escaped).’ It makes me giggle now. But Pnin’s humour is very different. It is sweet, and endearing, and his character is almost bereft of darkness. As Nabokov himself wrote, writing Pnin was a ‘brief sunny escape from [Lolita’s] intolerable spell’. Indeed, Pnin is strangely interwoven with that work, written at the same time, and both helping to promote its deliciously sensual sister (when Pnin was serialised) and being bourn along in her contrails (after Lolita finally became a great success). They are so different that finally I unreservedly admire Nabokov and his art. This is the chameleonic quality I hoped for, and there is much to admire – and envy – in these two works, especially when side-by-side.
A collection of short stories or sketches more than a novel, Pnin is entirely character-driven. I expected Timofey Pnin (himself) to be a stereotyped, flat character like so many of Nabokov’s comic creations – but he is not. Nabokov puts himself in the story as a narrator (which I don’t think causes any great problems – the narrator-Nabokov is just a character, no different from any other historical figure placed in fiction; he just happens to be being written by himself), but it is clear that however much Pnin is created from observation, he is also created from deep familiarity – and he is by no means stupid; he simply has little English, which makes him seem less intelligent than he is.
Indeed, I saw a lot of myself in Pnin. I found him a far more sympathetic character than I had expected. His awkward affection towards his ‘son’ (and that awful moment where he thinks he has broken his beautiful gift from him), the way he goes on being utterly devoted to Liza despite knowing that she is only manipulating him, hurting him – that I understand, and for it, and for his countless other hapless, endearing traits, I really warmed to Tim Pnin, and the little world briefly built about him.
Yes, Pnin has greatly impressed me – and because it was such a success, it’s buoyed up my estimation of all the rest of Nabokov’s work, too. To be silly and florid, all I had seen was a flat landscape, with beautiful flora but no undulation, but now I perceive in his talent great hills and valleys, and I am greatly relieved – my faith restored!
Because Pnin is very funny. Nabokov has made me laugh before, of course – I laughed when I read Lolita at 15 or 16 at Humbert’s wicked abuse of sleeping pills on Charlotte (before his far more wicked and chilling planned abuse of them later). It made me giggle to read how Humbert ‘had put the radio at full blast […] had blazed in her face an olisbos-like flashlight […] had pushed her, pinched her, prodded her’ and still she would not wake, until he kisses her, whereupon she ‘awakened at once, as fresh and strong as an octopus (I barely escaped).’ It makes me giggle now. But Pnin’s humour is very different. It is sweet, and endearing, and his character is almost bereft of darkness. As Nabokov himself wrote, writing Pnin was a ‘brief sunny escape from [Lolita’s] intolerable spell’. Indeed, Pnin is strangely interwoven with that work, written at the same time, and both helping to promote its deliciously sensual sister (when Pnin was serialised) and being bourn along in her contrails (after Lolita finally became a great success). They are so different that finally I unreservedly admire Nabokov and his art. This is the chameleonic quality I hoped for, and there is much to admire – and envy – in these two works, especially when side-by-side.
A collection of short stories or sketches more than a novel, Pnin is entirely character-driven. I expected Timofey Pnin (himself) to be a stereotyped, flat character like so many of Nabokov’s comic creations – but he is not. Nabokov puts himself in the story as a narrator (which I don’t think causes any great problems – the narrator-Nabokov is just a character, no different from any other historical figure placed in fiction; he just happens to be being written by himself), but it is clear that however much Pnin is created from observation, he is also created from deep familiarity – and he is by no means stupid; he simply has little English, which makes him seem less intelligent than he is.
Indeed, I saw a lot of myself in Pnin. I found him a far more sympathetic character than I had expected. His awkward affection towards his ‘son’ (and that awful moment where he thinks he has broken his beautiful gift from him), the way he goes on being utterly devoted to Liza despite knowing that she is only manipulating him, hurting him – that I understand, and for it, and for his countless other hapless, endearing traits, I really warmed to Tim Pnin, and the little world briefly built about him.
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
The Da Vinci Code
(P528): Please tell me the Teacher isn’t going to be Teabing…
(P532): Oh god…
(P533): Yes…yes, he is.
Those are the notes I scrawled to myself as I read some of the latter chapters of The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. Now that I’ve had a little time to look up some of the references I wasn’t sure about and find out some of the true history behind the organisations described, I think it’s high time to put down some of my thoughts on this minor publishing phenomenon, since I finished it a little while back, now.
It was an entertaining little page-turner, no better or worse written than the average children’s book, and if it inspires some interest in art and religious history (both areas of great fascination for me since I was a small boy – a much smaller boy than I am now, I mean!), then that is surely something positive. However, the book is also an extremely frustrating one.
Firstly, we have to fully accept that the characters are all incredibly stupid. Harvard Professors, Police Chiefs and professional cryptographers alike are idiots. Not only are they incapable of detecting a blindingly obvious anagram like ‘O Draconian Devil’ beside a mimicry of the Vitruvian Man, but they quite fail to notice what is blatantly mirror-writing for several pages. Even worse, a man who keeps the most important secret in the world encodes his ‘cryptex’ with the name of his own granddaughter! That’s not good encryption practice, now, is it? This would all be much more forgivable if Dan Brown did not insist on having his idiotic characters marvelling at how terribly clever all this is at every new revelation.
As you can tell from my little notes, I figured out who the ‘bad guy’ was going to be a few pages before he was revealed. I hoped it wouldn’t be him, and the French accent threw me off the scent for a while, but his pulling rank, and his blatant ‘last-person-you’d-suspect’ status made it inevitable – and rather underwhelming. Not only this, but I wish Brown had bothered to do some research into English speech. Sure, he throws in some todgers, some crisps, but really – no Brit refers to university as ‘school’, and these Anglophile French would be very unlikely to say anyone has got ‘mad’ instead of ‘angry’. Add to this a tea obsession and some very melodramatic bad-guy ‘monologuing’ (as they put it in ‘The Incredibles’) and we have a very British bad guy. Seems very old-fashioned in such an à la mode piece, full of exophoric references to Smart Cars and suchlike. Perfect for the zeitgeist; I doubt it will endure.
What kind of name is ‘Teabing’, anyway? That’s NOT a good anagram for ‘Baigent’!
The countless inaccuracies in the background to the story are barely worth mentioning. It’s a work of fiction, after all. But when Brown begins the novel with a big heading, ‘FACTS’, and then brings up the Priory of Sion, his taking ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ as apparently his only source makes him look like a fool. It’s not hard to find out who Pierre Plantard really was, or what an easily-dismissed piece of esoteric fluff his Priory really is. Worse than that, though, is his treatment of Da Vinci and the story of Christ.
I was surprised, in a book called ‘The Da Vinci Code’, to see so few mentions of Da Vinci himself, and so little reflection on his paintings. And to say that Paul in The Last Supper must be Magdelene because he’s got no beard is nonsense. After all, Paul was often painted as quite feminine and beardless by contemporary artists – as in The Last Supper of Ghirlandaio.
Brown also seems to neglect to mention that Gnosticism, while supporting his ideas on Christ as an ordinary human in many texts, also contain far more evidence for Christ being seen as a super-powered deity than the canonical Gospels do – as in The Acts of Thomas, which I remember reading in part in year 10 at school. His claims that the Counsel of Nicene heavy-handedly censored everything that they disliked in writings about Jesus, on values that were totally new, are also easily dismissed when we see how similar the Muratorian Fragment’s list of gospels is to the one established at Nicene, which it predates by a century or more, if I remember correctly.
Still, the book is a fun one, a good momentary distraction. I would just hate to think that some gullible people might believe what they read there. It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s fanciful The Portrait of Mr. W.H., where fabricated evidence is playfully used to identify Shakespeare’s male lover, only not so charming and having rather more ideas above its station. Brown’s work is entertaining, but a frustration.
(P532): Oh god…
(P533): Yes…yes, he is.
Those are the notes I scrawled to myself as I read some of the latter chapters of The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. Now that I’ve had a little time to look up some of the references I wasn’t sure about and find out some of the true history behind the organisations described, I think it’s high time to put down some of my thoughts on this minor publishing phenomenon, since I finished it a little while back, now.
It was an entertaining little page-turner, no better or worse written than the average children’s book, and if it inspires some interest in art and religious history (both areas of great fascination for me since I was a small boy – a much smaller boy than I am now, I mean!), then that is surely something positive. However, the book is also an extremely frustrating one.
Firstly, we have to fully accept that the characters are all incredibly stupid. Harvard Professors, Police Chiefs and professional cryptographers alike are idiots. Not only are they incapable of detecting a blindingly obvious anagram like ‘O Draconian Devil’ beside a mimicry of the Vitruvian Man, but they quite fail to notice what is blatantly mirror-writing for several pages. Even worse, a man who keeps the most important secret in the world encodes his ‘cryptex’ with the name of his own granddaughter! That’s not good encryption practice, now, is it? This would all be much more forgivable if Dan Brown did not insist on having his idiotic characters marvelling at how terribly clever all this is at every new revelation.
As you can tell from my little notes, I figured out who the ‘bad guy’ was going to be a few pages before he was revealed. I hoped it wouldn’t be him, and the French accent threw me off the scent for a while, but his pulling rank, and his blatant ‘last-person-you’d-suspect’ status made it inevitable – and rather underwhelming. Not only this, but I wish Brown had bothered to do some research into English speech. Sure, he throws in some todgers, some crisps, but really – no Brit refers to university as ‘school’, and these Anglophile French would be very unlikely to say anyone has got ‘mad’ instead of ‘angry’. Add to this a tea obsession and some very melodramatic bad-guy ‘monologuing’ (as they put it in ‘The Incredibles’) and we have a very British bad guy. Seems very old-fashioned in such an à la mode piece, full of exophoric references to Smart Cars and suchlike. Perfect for the zeitgeist; I doubt it will endure.
What kind of name is ‘Teabing’, anyway? That’s NOT a good anagram for ‘Baigent’!
The countless inaccuracies in the background to the story are barely worth mentioning. It’s a work of fiction, after all. But when Brown begins the novel with a big heading, ‘FACTS’, and then brings up the Priory of Sion, his taking ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ as apparently his only source makes him look like a fool. It’s not hard to find out who Pierre Plantard really was, or what an easily-dismissed piece of esoteric fluff his Priory really is. Worse than that, though, is his treatment of Da Vinci and the story of Christ.
I was surprised, in a book called ‘The Da Vinci Code’, to see so few mentions of Da Vinci himself, and so little reflection on his paintings. And to say that Paul in The Last Supper must be Magdelene because he’s got no beard is nonsense. After all, Paul was often painted as quite feminine and beardless by contemporary artists – as in The Last Supper of Ghirlandaio.
Brown also seems to neglect to mention that Gnosticism, while supporting his ideas on Christ as an ordinary human in many texts, also contain far more evidence for Christ being seen as a super-powered deity than the canonical Gospels do – as in The Acts of Thomas, which I remember reading in part in year 10 at school. His claims that the Counsel of Nicene heavy-handedly censored everything that they disliked in writings about Jesus, on values that were totally new, are also easily dismissed when we see how similar the Muratorian Fragment’s list of gospels is to the one established at Nicene, which it predates by a century or more, if I remember correctly.
Still, the book is a fun one, a good momentary distraction. I would just hate to think that some gullible people might believe what they read there. It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s fanciful The Portrait of Mr. W.H., where fabricated evidence is playfully used to identify Shakespeare’s male lover, only not so charming and having rather more ideas above its station. Brown’s work is entertaining, but a frustration.
Persians
Aeschylus’ Persians is not a famous play, with no great, memorable archetypes, and is unusual in having subject matter concerning recent events rather than mythology, but it’s one of the best Greek plays I’ve yet read. Around two and a half thousand years ago (astonishing to think of texts surviving so very long), Aeschylus fought in a battle against the Persians at Salamis (no, AT Salamis, not with salamis!), where according to popular legend, young Sophocles was in the chorus for the victory song, and Euripides was being born.
The play concerns not the victorious Greeks but the defeated Persians. A messenger brings news of King Xerxes’ crushing defeat, his mother weeps and summons the spirit of her husband, who warns against going against Greece, for it is protected by gods, and also cautions mortals not to be vain or proud. Xerxes appears in tatters, and with the chorus, weeps for his dead countrymen.
For a soldier who fought against these people, writing for an audience who must have lost family and friends in the battle, the sympathy and respect for the enemy is astonishing. In an age where we are so used to propaganda and the dehumanising of enemies, such respect and empathy for enemies seems remarkably noble and admirable.
Wilfred Owen’s sympathy for his foe in ‘Strange Meeting’ is powerful for it seeming to be a great exception. But for such an attitude to be the norm, and for a popular play to be written expressing the sadness of the enemy’s situation, with no possible way that the writing could be interpreted as mocking, or designed to make the audience jeer at the defeated mourners, really appeals to me. There is much to learn from ancient attitudes.
The play concerns not the victorious Greeks but the defeated Persians. A messenger brings news of King Xerxes’ crushing defeat, his mother weeps and summons the spirit of her husband, who warns against going against Greece, for it is protected by gods, and also cautions mortals not to be vain or proud. Xerxes appears in tatters, and with the chorus, weeps for his dead countrymen.
For a soldier who fought against these people, writing for an audience who must have lost family and friends in the battle, the sympathy and respect for the enemy is astonishing. In an age where we are so used to propaganda and the dehumanising of enemies, such respect and empathy for enemies seems remarkably noble and admirable.
Wilfred Owen’s sympathy for his foe in ‘Strange Meeting’ is powerful for it seeming to be a great exception. But for such an attitude to be the norm, and for a popular play to be written expressing the sadness of the enemy’s situation, with no possible way that the writing could be interpreted as mocking, or designed to make the audience jeer at the defeated mourners, really appeals to me. There is much to learn from ancient attitudes.
Prometheus Unbound
Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound is a very exciting and fast-paced play, for one within the confines of Greek theatrical tradition. Hephaestus, with Zeus’ pushy mouthpiece Might, chain Prometheus to a rock in the mountains of Scythia at the edge of the world. When they leave, Prometheus rages about the injustice of his situation. The first of many visitors in this barren land arrives – in fact, a whole group of them (the chorus): the Daughters of Ocean. Prometheus tells them about his situation – a powerful Titan who helped Zeus gain power by telling him to topple Kronos by guile and not strength, he (like Eve) has been punished for disobeying orders and giving knowledge to mankind. He is proud and defiant, and it is later hinted that this has been exacerbated by his belligerence, and that submitting to Zeus would mean an end to his suffering. However, he will not hear of it, no matter how Ocean reasons with him. Zeus is a selfish tyrant and Prometheus will never acquiesce – and besides, he can see what will happen, and knows the secret of Zeus’ downfall.
After Ocean leaves, Io wanders on, still in the form of a cow, tortured by a Gadfly. She is another victim of cruel Zeus – he tried to seduce her, she refused, Hera was jealous anyway and transformed her. She and psychic Prometheus tell her story, Prometheus foretelling her journey to the Nile, where Zeus will swoop on her and she will bear his child. One of this child’s descendents will be Heracles, who of course is the one to finally free Prometheus. Io exits with a brilliantly unhinged final expression of the woe of the toil ahead of her. Prometheus’ next guest is Hermes, who comes with an ultimatum from Zeus – tell him the secret of his downfall or have his eagle peck at his innards every day.
Proud Prometheus patronises the sarcastic Hermes and sends him back to Olympus. The chorus, despite knowing that if they stay, they will get caught up in the splitting of the mountain that will signal the beginning of Prometheus’ punishment, stand by Prometheus’ side, supporting his decision and signalling their agreement that Zeus is a tyrant, his downfall much to be wished for.
Coo, try rearranging THAT sentence so that it doesn’t end with a preposition!
I believe that in mythology, Io WAS the lover of Zeus, and bore his child willingly when she was turned back into a human in Egypt. I believe that it was Zeus who turned her into a cow, trying to hide her from Hera, who wasn’t fooled. Hermes was the one who killed her guardian, many-eyed giant Argus (Nabokov’s favourite). Although of course all myths are malleable, I expect Aeschylus skimmed over the first details of Io’s story in order to make Zeus more culpable, and Io purer, therefore more of a victim.
After Ocean leaves, Io wanders on, still in the form of a cow, tortured by a Gadfly. She is another victim of cruel Zeus – he tried to seduce her, she refused, Hera was jealous anyway and transformed her. She and psychic Prometheus tell her story, Prometheus foretelling her journey to the Nile, where Zeus will swoop on her and she will bear his child. One of this child’s descendents will be Heracles, who of course is the one to finally free Prometheus. Io exits with a brilliantly unhinged final expression of the woe of the toil ahead of her. Prometheus’ next guest is Hermes, who comes with an ultimatum from Zeus – tell him the secret of his downfall or have his eagle peck at his innards every day.
Proud Prometheus patronises the sarcastic Hermes and sends him back to Olympus. The chorus, despite knowing that if they stay, they will get caught up in the splitting of the mountain that will signal the beginning of Prometheus’ punishment, stand by Prometheus’ side, supporting his decision and signalling their agreement that Zeus is a tyrant, his downfall much to be wished for.
Coo, try rearranging THAT sentence so that it doesn’t end with a preposition!
I believe that in mythology, Io WAS the lover of Zeus, and bore his child willingly when she was turned back into a human in Egypt. I believe that it was Zeus who turned her into a cow, trying to hide her from Hera, who wasn’t fooled. Hermes was the one who killed her guardian, many-eyed giant Argus (Nabokov’s favourite). Although of course all myths are malleable, I expect Aeschylus skimmed over the first details of Io’s story in order to make Zeus more culpable, and Io purer, therefore more of a victim.
Women of Trachis
Sophocles’ Women of Trachis shows Heracles’ wife, Deianira, waiting for her husband’s triumphant return. However, she learns that he is bringing back a mistress, so sends Heracles a coat soaked in what she believes is love potion to keep him loyal. However, she was tricked by a centaur Heracles killed, and the potion is actually poison from the Hydra.
Hyllus (different from Hylas), Heracles’ son, comes and curses his mother, for the poison is causing Heracles great pain. Distraught, Deianira kills herself. Heracles is brought on and in agony, charges his son to burn him alive on a mountaintop, and marry the mistress who caused all this strife. Fearing his father’s curses, he agrees.
It’s certainly a tragic play, and evokes pity both for misled Deianira, for suffering Heracles, despite all his philandering, and for Hyllus, who loses both his parents on one day.
Hyllus (different from Hylas), Heracles’ son, comes and curses his mother, for the poison is causing Heracles great pain. Distraught, Deianira kills herself. Heracles is brought on and in agony, charges his son to burn him alive on a mountaintop, and marry the mistress who caused all this strife. Fearing his father’s curses, he agrees.
It’s certainly a tragic play, and evokes pity both for misled Deianira, for suffering Heracles, despite all his philandering, and for Hyllus, who loses both his parents on one day.
Philoctetes
Sophocles’ Philoctetes was a good play. The titular character was the man who burned Heracles when he was in great agony, for which he was given the great hero’s legendary bow. However, he was later bitten by a snake in a temple and cursed to suffer great agony but never die. Because the wound wept noisome pus and Philoctetes was crying out in such pain, the Greeks abandoned him, only to discover a decade later that they needed Heracles’ bow in order to win the war against Troy.
The great machintator Odysseus goes to find him, bringing along young Neoptolemos, Achilles’ son, to help with his plot. Neoptolemos is to win Philoctetes’ trust by saying he hates Odysseus (one on the ones who abandoned Philoctetes) and will take the stranded cripple home. Hugely grateful, Philoctetes trusts Neoptolemos and lets him hold the bow.
However, Achilles’ son is an honourable and honest young man, and hates having to lie, so finally admits his part in the deception. Odysseus storms on to intervene, but when Philoctetes gets his bow back, he runs off with his tail between his legs. The new companions decide to set off home, but then Heracles (now a god) appears ex machina to tell them to go to Troy and fight after all. Pure, virtuous Neoptolemos, whose conscience prevents him from following disseminating Odysseus’ advice, is a great character, and seeing him struggle with the dilemma obedience set against morality is both satisfying in its outcome and impressively modern.
The great machintator Odysseus goes to find him, bringing along young Neoptolemos, Achilles’ son, to help with his plot. Neoptolemos is to win Philoctetes’ trust by saying he hates Odysseus (one on the ones who abandoned Philoctetes) and will take the stranded cripple home. Hugely grateful, Philoctetes trusts Neoptolemos and lets him hold the bow.
However, Achilles’ son is an honourable and honest young man, and hates having to lie, so finally admits his part in the deception. Odysseus storms on to intervene, but when Philoctetes gets his bow back, he runs off with his tail between his legs. The new companions decide to set off home, but then Heracles (now a god) appears ex machina to tell them to go to Troy and fight after all. Pure, virtuous Neoptolemos, whose conscience prevents him from following disseminating Odysseus’ advice, is a great character, and seeing him struggle with the dilemma obedience set against morality is both satisfying in its outcome and impressively modern.
Cloud Atlas
a great read, and highly recommended. It was by no means perfect, but for something I picked up on a whim because it was a bestseller, it was excellently written, literary and good fun. Its only real problem is that it really is just six stories with only incidental connection. I think that David Mitchell could very well write a chameleonic masterpiece, but not until he has a great unifying idea, so this is not it. What I said before about it putting me in mind of a schoolboy doing all his best funny voices for his friends stands, but to be entertaining, those voices have to ring true. Mitchell’s impersonations are damn good, if not quite perfect (but impressionists are only fun when you can recognise the face behind the voice).
Metatextual playfulness and pastiche always give the rather irritating shield of putting the work above criticism (What is an intended flaw and what is a genuine one? Is a man who has never heard of Poker using an expression from that game a slip or a statement about how elements survive while the whole is lost? Is the Britishness of the invented manners of speaking in the sci-fi segments intentional? What does this mean?), but the different genres are all taken seriously enough to be entertaining in their own right. None of these stories would be particularly good alone, but the contrast between them gives the pleasure of showmanship to the display of versatility. A trick has limited satisfaction, though; what was missing was unity.
‘Six interlocking lives – one amazing adventure’ boasts the blurb. But the connections are extremely tenuous, and the appearances of each work in the next are contrived and could be allusions to anything, real or fictional, without the effect being changed one bit. Adam Ewing is a 19th-c diarist who describes his stay on the Chatham Islands and the plight of the Moriori natives while a conman doctor makes him sicker so that he pays for the cure.
This diary is read by the superbly arrogant and snobbish Frobisher, who goes to study under an august musician and soon lets his loins lead him into various inconveniences.
Frobisher’s letters are addressed to Sixsmith, who in his old age is a murder victim in the well-observed aping of pulpy thriller ‘Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery’, in which the eponymous journalist investigates corruption in a nuclear power plant in the 70s.
This thriller is sent to present-day publisher Timothy Cavendish, whose adventures are meant to be comedic but I found chilling (though rewarding in the end). I thought I’d imagined the similarity between this section and Nabokov’s writings, with its aloof, cantankerous narrator, literary allusions and instructions to cinematic directors, presuming I simply had Nabokov on the brain after my dissertation – but when Tim commands, ‘Speak, Memory!’, the allusion couldn’t be more direct (though Nabokov is not the only influence here). This homage, like the rest of Mitchell’s voices, is excellent, though of course not quite as inspired as its inspiration, as sparkling as that which sparked it, and I’m not sure Nabokov would have referred to such writers as Stevie Smith or J.D. Salinger, though Paddington Bear may well have held some appeal for him, too.
Cavendish’s life is made into a film, which is viewed by Sonmi~451, a mass-produced drone called a Fabricant from the not-so-distant future, where sinister consumerism holds the world in its corrupt grip.
This fabricant is then regarded as a god by the near-savage population of the final segment, where the civilised world has collapsed and a storyteller called Zachry tells his story about how he was host and guide for a visitor from a ship whose population had retained some of the old ‘Smart’ from before the ‘Fall’.
In other words, the connections don’t amount to a hill of beans and any crazy world you care to pick (‘Casablanca, Lars!’ I gleefully misquote).
There are other connections, frivolous and insignificant – a recurring birthmark, the ‘Cloud Atlas’ phrase, references to Nietzsche and especially the Will to Power – but really, drawing any connection between these would be as specious as saying there is great significance in the fact that the first and last tales both feature the buggery of little boys.
So with no message except perhaps that consumerism is bad in excess, and that racial equality is good (though some Scots beating up some English baddies can be a joyful thing), there is little to draw from this book. But that is not why it was written. It was written to be enjoyed, a playful and experimental piece of showmanship: art for art’s sake. In that, it is excellent, and is only very rarely dull or too self-indulgent. I loved it, though I sincerely hope that one day Mitchell will far out-do this and write something stylistically exemplary, playful AND significant.
The biggest lesson to learn is: every division for division’s sake can only push the onlooker one step further away.
Metatextual playfulness and pastiche always give the rather irritating shield of putting the work above criticism (What is an intended flaw and what is a genuine one? Is a man who has never heard of Poker using an expression from that game a slip or a statement about how elements survive while the whole is lost? Is the Britishness of the invented manners of speaking in the sci-fi segments intentional? What does this mean?), but the different genres are all taken seriously enough to be entertaining in their own right. None of these stories would be particularly good alone, but the contrast between them gives the pleasure of showmanship to the display of versatility. A trick has limited satisfaction, though; what was missing was unity.
‘Six interlocking lives – one amazing adventure’ boasts the blurb. But the connections are extremely tenuous, and the appearances of each work in the next are contrived and could be allusions to anything, real or fictional, without the effect being changed one bit. Adam Ewing is a 19th-c diarist who describes his stay on the Chatham Islands and the plight of the Moriori natives while a conman doctor makes him sicker so that he pays for the cure.
This diary is read by the superbly arrogant and snobbish Frobisher, who goes to study under an august musician and soon lets his loins lead him into various inconveniences.
Frobisher’s letters are addressed to Sixsmith, who in his old age is a murder victim in the well-observed aping of pulpy thriller ‘Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery’, in which the eponymous journalist investigates corruption in a nuclear power plant in the 70s.
This thriller is sent to present-day publisher Timothy Cavendish, whose adventures are meant to be comedic but I found chilling (though rewarding in the end). I thought I’d imagined the similarity between this section and Nabokov’s writings, with its aloof, cantankerous narrator, literary allusions and instructions to cinematic directors, presuming I simply had Nabokov on the brain after my dissertation – but when Tim commands, ‘Speak, Memory!’, the allusion couldn’t be more direct (though Nabokov is not the only influence here). This homage, like the rest of Mitchell’s voices, is excellent, though of course not quite as inspired as its inspiration, as sparkling as that which sparked it, and I’m not sure Nabokov would have referred to such writers as Stevie Smith or J.D. Salinger, though Paddington Bear may well have held some appeal for him, too.
Cavendish’s life is made into a film, which is viewed by Sonmi~451, a mass-produced drone called a Fabricant from the not-so-distant future, where sinister consumerism holds the world in its corrupt grip.
This fabricant is then regarded as a god by the near-savage population of the final segment, where the civilised world has collapsed and a storyteller called Zachry tells his story about how he was host and guide for a visitor from a ship whose population had retained some of the old ‘Smart’ from before the ‘Fall’.
In other words, the connections don’t amount to a hill of beans and any crazy world you care to pick (‘Casablanca, Lars!’ I gleefully misquote).
There are other connections, frivolous and insignificant – a recurring birthmark, the ‘Cloud Atlas’ phrase, references to Nietzsche and especially the Will to Power – but really, drawing any connection between these would be as specious as saying there is great significance in the fact that the first and last tales both feature the buggery of little boys.
So with no message except perhaps that consumerism is bad in excess, and that racial equality is good (though some Scots beating up some English baddies can be a joyful thing), there is little to draw from this book. But that is not why it was written. It was written to be enjoyed, a playful and experimental piece of showmanship: art for art’s sake. In that, it is excellent, and is only very rarely dull or too self-indulgent. I loved it, though I sincerely hope that one day Mitchell will far out-do this and write something stylistically exemplary, playful AND significant.
The biggest lesson to learn is: every division for division’s sake can only push the onlooker one step further away.
Midnight's Children
I finished re-reading Midnight’s Children. I really should have spend the time reading something else. It’s not the monumental work of literature so many profess it to be. It’s rather good, with a sophisticated but simple and playful narrative tone, some amusing circumstances and lashings of India, but I’m not sure it will endure. It’s just too specific, too limited, too personal. And I find magical realism quite tiresome, being neither one thing nor the other, and lacking the freedom of either. And to be honest, it all gets rather tiresome.
One thing I didn’t expect it to be is dated. But it is. Literature needs to move on, I feel, and I think the first step is cultural acceptance – which doesn’t mean writing lots of Eastern-influenced pseudo-esotericism (though admittedly I’m using that bandwagon as a hook in my attempts to get a literary agent – but it never influenced my writing, and my influences are the nicely mashed-up, non-specific works I’m propounding). It means not thinking that because something is influenced by another culture, it is mystical, superior and above editing. A good story is a good story, wherever and whenever it is set, by whomever it is told. Similarly, some books, like Midnight’s Children, are bloated and ponderous and in need of major cutting, even if they’re intertwined with the identity of a specific country.
Cultural acceptance is when we recognise the influences beneath the themes of a novel, absorb them, recognise them but do not dwell on them. If anything, pigeonholing Rushdie and any other writers from other cultures (including émigré Russian literature) is reductive, counterproductive and destructive: a twee rhyme that encapsulates how risible I find notions such as, ‘This must be good because this is ancient’, ‘It’s Chinese so it must have deep spiritual value’ or indeed, ‘It’s Japanese: it’s cool’. Each writer must be assessed on their merits. I for one am tired of hearing that because a writer is black, Indian, feminist, working-class, young or indeed a struggling single mother, their work must be above all criticism.
This has strayed a long way from Rushdie’s book, and I’m not criticising writers. It’s the zeitgeist, not some nefarious plot. Rushdie has talent, but his book did nothing for me emotionally, except occasionally raise a smile. I didn’t dislike it – nor is it the great masterpiece it’s supposed to be. I think that it hit a nerve, but then, so did dozens of forgotten Booker winners. Time will tell what endures. If Rushdie’s book does, I will be surprised.
One thing I didn’t expect it to be is dated. But it is. Literature needs to move on, I feel, and I think the first step is cultural acceptance – which doesn’t mean writing lots of Eastern-influenced pseudo-esotericism (though admittedly I’m using that bandwagon as a hook in my attempts to get a literary agent – but it never influenced my writing, and my influences are the nicely mashed-up, non-specific works I’m propounding). It means not thinking that because something is influenced by another culture, it is mystical, superior and above editing. A good story is a good story, wherever and whenever it is set, by whomever it is told. Similarly, some books, like Midnight’s Children, are bloated and ponderous and in need of major cutting, even if they’re intertwined with the identity of a specific country.
Cultural acceptance is when we recognise the influences beneath the themes of a novel, absorb them, recognise them but do not dwell on them. If anything, pigeonholing Rushdie and any other writers from other cultures (including émigré Russian literature) is reductive, counterproductive and destructive: a twee rhyme that encapsulates how risible I find notions such as, ‘This must be good because this is ancient’, ‘It’s Chinese so it must have deep spiritual value’ or indeed, ‘It’s Japanese: it’s cool’. Each writer must be assessed on their merits. I for one am tired of hearing that because a writer is black, Indian, feminist, working-class, young or indeed a struggling single mother, their work must be above all criticism.
This has strayed a long way from Rushdie’s book, and I’m not criticising writers. It’s the zeitgeist, not some nefarious plot. Rushdie has talent, but his book did nothing for me emotionally, except occasionally raise a smile. I didn’t dislike it – nor is it the great masterpiece it’s supposed to be. I think that it hit a nerve, but then, so did dozens of forgotten Booker winners. Time will tell what endures. If Rushdie’s book does, I will be surprised.
Ghostwritten
I just finished David Mitchell’s first book – Ghostwritten, another book of variously-voiced fragments, with some impressively, chillingly prescient moments of reflection upon terrorism and world politics, given that it was written in 1999.
The book was in many ways just like Cloud Atlas: the same idea of having a series of stories set in different times and places that inform one another but are linked only by a recurrent idea here, a repeated character there (who could really have been a non-repeated character, much like Vincent Vega’s appearance in Butch’s story in Pulp Fiction – it’s done to raise a smile, to slightly inform); the same seriousness in moving into science fiction that surprised me in Cloud Atlas; even two characters who appear in both novels – the very same Timothy Cavendish and a rather different Luisa Rey. The final similarity is that it is tantalisingly close to being a brilliant book, but falls just short.
The advantage that Ghostwritten has over Cloud Atlas is that the different speakers are much less exaggerated, an exercise in different voices, rather than different generalised fictional genres. Where Cloud Atlas felt like the class clown doing his best impersonations of teachers and celebrities, Ghostwritten felt much more like fragments of well-developed novels with well-developed characters. Some stories were inevitably better than others: I enjoyed a sweet, plaintive love story between a Japanese boy who works in a record shop and a girl who is curious enough about him to come back after her first visit in order to speak to him far more than I enjoyed one about a simple woman living in a tea shop as politics in China alter the world around her but never her outlook. I thought the idea of a sentient defence system governed by four Asimov-influenced laws with the power to kill everyone on the planet taking moral cues from a radio talk show host much more compelling than the limp and long-winded section regarding the woman who made this system possible, and her empty digressions on some simplified ideas of quantum physics mostly made up of buzzword (though the link between these two passages was the strongest of any).
Where the stories were good, they were very good, and Mitchell writes in an elegant, concise and playful style that I very much enjoy, an identity that he allows to come through in these less grotesque characters far more than he does in his latest work. Two or three of the ephemeral characters in Ghostwritten will likely endure in my mind longer than those of Cloud Atlas.
However, Mitchell’s storytelling has two faults. One is that he tries too hard to stamp the identity of his chosen setting on each passage. He puts in far more local colour than it would occur to a resident of that particular place to mention. It’s just not quite subtle enough, and breaks the spell that otherwise keeps us enchanted, especially when other prime facets of his characters’ lives don’t ring true (despite one of his characters being a drummer, I very much doubt Mitchell knows a ride cymbal from a splash). Secondly, a problem that was bad in Cloud Atlas is even worse here: because he writes several tenuously linked stories, he does not quite manage to give a complete and satisfactory story in any one of them. Cloud Atlas at least revisited each of its stories and concluded them (to varying degrees of satisfaction), but in Ghostwritten, only one narrative is repeated, as a kind of epilogue.
Mitchell is a very talented writer, and his books are certainly worth reading. There is much to be admired in his creativity and eclecticism. However, so far, his disjointedness does not quite cohere: it is like listening to a greatest hits album – enjoyable in its own right, but sooner or later you want to hear the songs in the context of their original album: only there is none.
I shall read Number9dream, his second book, tomorrow; I think Mitchell has enormous potential, but so far, I don’t think he has realised it. However, I will be keen to read his work in the future, and hope something truly special will soon come from his fertile imagination.
The book was in many ways just like Cloud Atlas: the same idea of having a series of stories set in different times and places that inform one another but are linked only by a recurrent idea here, a repeated character there (who could really have been a non-repeated character, much like Vincent Vega’s appearance in Butch’s story in Pulp Fiction – it’s done to raise a smile, to slightly inform); the same seriousness in moving into science fiction that surprised me in Cloud Atlas; even two characters who appear in both novels – the very same Timothy Cavendish and a rather different Luisa Rey. The final similarity is that it is tantalisingly close to being a brilliant book, but falls just short.
The advantage that Ghostwritten has over Cloud Atlas is that the different speakers are much less exaggerated, an exercise in different voices, rather than different generalised fictional genres. Where Cloud Atlas felt like the class clown doing his best impersonations of teachers and celebrities, Ghostwritten felt much more like fragments of well-developed novels with well-developed characters. Some stories were inevitably better than others: I enjoyed a sweet, plaintive love story between a Japanese boy who works in a record shop and a girl who is curious enough about him to come back after her first visit in order to speak to him far more than I enjoyed one about a simple woman living in a tea shop as politics in China alter the world around her but never her outlook. I thought the idea of a sentient defence system governed by four Asimov-influenced laws with the power to kill everyone on the planet taking moral cues from a radio talk show host much more compelling than the limp and long-winded section regarding the woman who made this system possible, and her empty digressions on some simplified ideas of quantum physics mostly made up of buzzword (though the link between these two passages was the strongest of any).
Where the stories were good, they were very good, and Mitchell writes in an elegant, concise and playful style that I very much enjoy, an identity that he allows to come through in these less grotesque characters far more than he does in his latest work. Two or three of the ephemeral characters in Ghostwritten will likely endure in my mind longer than those of Cloud Atlas.
However, Mitchell’s storytelling has two faults. One is that he tries too hard to stamp the identity of his chosen setting on each passage. He puts in far more local colour than it would occur to a resident of that particular place to mention. It’s just not quite subtle enough, and breaks the spell that otherwise keeps us enchanted, especially when other prime facets of his characters’ lives don’t ring true (despite one of his characters being a drummer, I very much doubt Mitchell knows a ride cymbal from a splash). Secondly, a problem that was bad in Cloud Atlas is even worse here: because he writes several tenuously linked stories, he does not quite manage to give a complete and satisfactory story in any one of them. Cloud Atlas at least revisited each of its stories and concluded them (to varying degrees of satisfaction), but in Ghostwritten, only one narrative is repeated, as a kind of epilogue.
Mitchell is a very talented writer, and his books are certainly worth reading. There is much to be admired in his creativity and eclecticism. However, so far, his disjointedness does not quite cohere: it is like listening to a greatest hits album – enjoyable in its own right, but sooner or later you want to hear the songs in the context of their original album: only there is none.
I shall read Number9dream, his second book, tomorrow; I think Mitchell has enormous potential, but so far, I don’t think he has realised it. However, I will be keen to read his work in the future, and hope something truly special will soon come from his fertile imagination.
A Storm of Swords, by George R.R. Martin
A book long enough to be divided into two separate volumes in many bookshops, it is more of the same from George R.R. Martin. The whole Song of Ice and Fire saga is, it’s becoming apparent, basically one extended novel, with lots of cliffhangers and only the changes in point-of-view characters to break up the overall structure – as well as the short opening and closing chapters that give one-off characters a brief voice.
At the end of A Clash of Kings, the Lannisters have overpowered Stannis Baratheon and are in a position of strength. Robb is still a threat, and Catelyn Stark wants nothing more than to get her daughters back. As ever, trouble is brewing in the North, beyond the wall, and winter, true to form, continues to be coming.
I always expect to dislike the next book in this sequence. I start to get bored, especially with the chapters dealing with the Night’s Watch (here we get Samwell’s story as well as Jon Snow’s – and despite little flecks of romance, neither is very interesting). I find Martin’s writing style tiresome and smirk at how now that he’s discovered the word ‘merlon’ he’s damn well going to use it whenever he can, almost as much as ‘whickered’.
And then he smack me in the face with brilliant storytelling and very unexpected twists that really hit home emotionally, and I read the rest of the book ravenously, and with a faint sense of guilt for underestimating his skill. Because he can write a very, very compelling narrative and serves up some real shockers. I have certain expectations of conventional storytelling. This character has to at least find out what happened to his family before he’s in any real danger. That character will definitely be safe until these various plot strands are tied up. But these things are nothing to Martin, and probably the saddest a book has ever made me has been when this one abruptly brought an end to the possibility of some plot strands being resolved, or characters to meet what had seemed to be their destinies. (Although a final twist reverses this to a degree.) The stories I looked forward to don’t get told – but that only makes me more emotionally invested and appreciative of the cleverness of the decision. Great stuff.
And anyone who comes up with such a fantastic character as Petyr Baelish cannot be a poor writer.
At the end of A Clash of Kings, the Lannisters have overpowered Stannis Baratheon and are in a position of strength. Robb is still a threat, and Catelyn Stark wants nothing more than to get her daughters back. As ever, trouble is brewing in the North, beyond the wall, and winter, true to form, continues to be coming.
I always expect to dislike the next book in this sequence. I start to get bored, especially with the chapters dealing with the Night’s Watch (here we get Samwell’s story as well as Jon Snow’s – and despite little flecks of romance, neither is very interesting). I find Martin’s writing style tiresome and smirk at how now that he’s discovered the word ‘merlon’ he’s damn well going to use it whenever he can, almost as much as ‘whickered’.
And then he smack me in the face with brilliant storytelling and very unexpected twists that really hit home emotionally, and I read the rest of the book ravenously, and with a faint sense of guilt for underestimating his skill. Because he can write a very, very compelling narrative and serves up some real shockers. I have certain expectations of conventional storytelling. This character has to at least find out what happened to his family before he’s in any real danger. That character will definitely be safe until these various plot strands are tied up. But these things are nothing to Martin, and probably the saddest a book has ever made me has been when this one abruptly brought an end to the possibility of some plot strands being resolved, or characters to meet what had seemed to be their destinies. (Although a final twist reverses this to a degree.) The stories I looked forward to don’t get told – but that only makes me more emotionally invested and appreciative of the cleverness of the decision. Great stuff.
And anyone who comes up with such a fantastic character as Petyr Baelish cannot be a poor writer.
Monday, 3 October 2011
Number9dream
I finished Number9dream last night, so have now read all Mitchell’s published works.
The structure of the book is what I had hoped Mitchell’s other books would be – a single story, interspersed with different voices. Eiji Miyaki, a country boy from Japan, comes to Tokyo in search of his father, but this soon becomes complicated enough to involve several different jobs, a love affair and more than one run-in with the Yakuza.
Mitchell’s greatest asset is disorientation. The boundaries between truth and fantasy are clearly demarcated, but of course, when you begin the book, you can’t see the pattern, so suddenly you don’t know whether what you’re reading is sci-fi, a spy thriller or a wild fantasy. Of course, it turns out to be the latter. Eiji is a vivid daydreamer.
Parallels have been drawn by reviewers to Billy Liar, but Eiji does not lie, he simply imagines fantastical scenarios, and keep them to himself. As Number9dream progresses, the sections that weave around the narrative change: dreams, diaries – even a collection of children’s stories about a goat, a chicken and The Missing Link (later compared to the superego, ego and id, though the analogy doesn’t quite work). These stories, all on the subject of being a writer, are rather incongruous; I suspect Mitchell has included them despite their being written quite outside the composition of this novel, especially as they are so utterly British. Still, they are entertaining enough to be welcome additions. This bravura literary acrobatics display sometimes makes the book drag, with a little too much indulgence, particularly towards the end, where inspiration seems to dribble one to the floor, where Mitchell tries to mop it up with feeble poeticism in an attempt to give a dreamlike state. Really, the novel should have ended fifty pages earlier.
It’s a shame, because I really thought this would be the novel I liked the most, but it wasn’t as satisfying as the other two disjointed books because despite the fact that my hopes for one single, unified story were answered, it just isn’t a very good story at all.
Reality soon becomes stranger than fiction, and the sections of ‘real’ narrative get more and more outlandish. The yakuza segments are totally bizarre and outrageous, with lots of death and fireballs and life-on-the-line card games, the drug-fuelled double date Eiji is drawn into seems like an adolescent fantasy, but is just about passable, and when what seemed to be a deranged computer hacker’s delusion of grandeur and ridiculous false hope turns out to be a reality, the whole thing is too ridiculous to believe. Which is, essentially, the point.
We’re supposed to be questioning the reality of what we read because of the dreamlike nature of the narrative. But this is no excuse for a weak and rambling story. Add to this a dull love story, in which I wanted to tell Eiji that he deserves better (since beyond a nice neck and an appealing intelligence, Ai did not strike me as at all an attractive character – but hey, different strokes for different blokes!), and the book just seemed to be a jamming together of different ideas that Mitchell wanted to write into a story that didn’t really accommodate them.
Still there were some moments that I very much enjoyed. The flashbacks to Eiji’s childhood with his twin sister were poignant, elegant and rang true to my own memories of what being a child was like. They also had a scenario that seemed to be straight out of anime! Indeed, alongside a reference to Miyazaki’s Laputa, I DID wonder whether Eiji mentioning an ‘Unfamiliar Ceiling’ was a reference to Evangelion. I wouldn’t be surprised.
There was more self-reference in this book. The foul Mongolian gangster from Ghostwritten reappears, and I finally get to know why such an incongruously Japanese idol-type name as ‘Zizzi Hikaru’ popped up in the thoroughly Korean segment of Cloud Atlas. I’m not a big fan of these show-off’s self-references, but they don’t do any harm. Even the overused ‘Cloud atlas’ imagery comes from one of Eiji’s musings.
So the book had moments that were very entertaining, and the pure, naïve young protagonist was certainly appealing, but as a story, it didn’t really work, and the feeble ending was a real let-down.
Apparently it’s all very derivative of Murakami. Suddenly, the Murakami books sitting waiting for me to pick them up and read them have lost a fair chunk of their appeal.
The structure of the book is what I had hoped Mitchell’s other books would be – a single story, interspersed with different voices. Eiji Miyaki, a country boy from Japan, comes to Tokyo in search of his father, but this soon becomes complicated enough to involve several different jobs, a love affair and more than one run-in with the Yakuza.
Mitchell’s greatest asset is disorientation. The boundaries between truth and fantasy are clearly demarcated, but of course, when you begin the book, you can’t see the pattern, so suddenly you don’t know whether what you’re reading is sci-fi, a spy thriller or a wild fantasy. Of course, it turns out to be the latter. Eiji is a vivid daydreamer.
Parallels have been drawn by reviewers to Billy Liar, but Eiji does not lie, he simply imagines fantastical scenarios, and keep them to himself. As Number9dream progresses, the sections that weave around the narrative change: dreams, diaries – even a collection of children’s stories about a goat, a chicken and The Missing Link (later compared to the superego, ego and id, though the analogy doesn’t quite work). These stories, all on the subject of being a writer, are rather incongruous; I suspect Mitchell has included them despite their being written quite outside the composition of this novel, especially as they are so utterly British. Still, they are entertaining enough to be welcome additions. This bravura literary acrobatics display sometimes makes the book drag, with a little too much indulgence, particularly towards the end, where inspiration seems to dribble one to the floor, where Mitchell tries to mop it up with feeble poeticism in an attempt to give a dreamlike state. Really, the novel should have ended fifty pages earlier.
It’s a shame, because I really thought this would be the novel I liked the most, but it wasn’t as satisfying as the other two disjointed books because despite the fact that my hopes for one single, unified story were answered, it just isn’t a very good story at all.
Reality soon becomes stranger than fiction, and the sections of ‘real’ narrative get more and more outlandish. The yakuza segments are totally bizarre and outrageous, with lots of death and fireballs and life-on-the-line card games, the drug-fuelled double date Eiji is drawn into seems like an adolescent fantasy, but is just about passable, and when what seemed to be a deranged computer hacker’s delusion of grandeur and ridiculous false hope turns out to be a reality, the whole thing is too ridiculous to believe. Which is, essentially, the point.
We’re supposed to be questioning the reality of what we read because of the dreamlike nature of the narrative. But this is no excuse for a weak and rambling story. Add to this a dull love story, in which I wanted to tell Eiji that he deserves better (since beyond a nice neck and an appealing intelligence, Ai did not strike me as at all an attractive character – but hey, different strokes for different blokes!), and the book just seemed to be a jamming together of different ideas that Mitchell wanted to write into a story that didn’t really accommodate them.
Still there were some moments that I very much enjoyed. The flashbacks to Eiji’s childhood with his twin sister were poignant, elegant and rang true to my own memories of what being a child was like. They also had a scenario that seemed to be straight out of anime! Indeed, alongside a reference to Miyazaki’s Laputa, I DID wonder whether Eiji mentioning an ‘Unfamiliar Ceiling’ was a reference to Evangelion. I wouldn’t be surprised.
There was more self-reference in this book. The foul Mongolian gangster from Ghostwritten reappears, and I finally get to know why such an incongruously Japanese idol-type name as ‘Zizzi Hikaru’ popped up in the thoroughly Korean segment of Cloud Atlas. I’m not a big fan of these show-off’s self-references, but they don’t do any harm. Even the overused ‘Cloud atlas’ imagery comes from one of Eiji’s musings.
So the book had moments that were very entertaining, and the pure, naïve young protagonist was certainly appealing, but as a story, it didn’t really work, and the feeble ending was a real let-down.
Apparently it’s all very derivative of Murakami. Suddenly, the Murakami books sitting waiting for me to pick them up and read them have lost a fair chunk of their appeal.
Saturday, 1 October 2011
The Child in Time
Slow and stately, this was closer to Atonement than the other McEwan books I’ve read (Enduring Love, which I will shortly have to try to recall in detail, and The Cement Garden) in terms of tone, but certainly distinct in its own right.
I enjoy McEwan’s directness and emphasis on story and ideas over style, but he can be rather ponderous at times, and this book sometimes dragged.
However, it had moments of real magnificence. Stephen Lewis is a published writer who wrote his debut novel intending it for serious literary readers, only to have it published to great acclaim as a children’s book. This amusing history, however, gives way to a truly horrifying fate. One day Lewis takes his little daughter Kate to the supermarket. While he is distracted, she vanishes – almost certainly abducted. This truly chilling event of course has huge implications, and Lewis’ life is irrevocably changed. His relationship with his wife crumbles and they drift apart, unable to communicate their loss. He becomes obsessed, constantly looking for his daughter in groups of children, or getting lost in memories of her. Stephen’s journey is painful and arduous, but the inevitable conclusion to the story comes in a truly memorable sequence that brings renewed hope, changing Stephen’s view that time ‘forbids second chances’ and bringing a real sense of optimism in a perhaps obvious but still uplifting fashion.
Written in the 80s, the story is set in the near future, with a thinly-veiled Thatcher still in power. Along with licensing beggars, Mrs. Thatcher has assembled a group of impressive-sounding spokespeople to attach their names to a report on how best to raise children, even though their input will be totally disregarded. The political commentary was an unwelcome addition, mostly because it seemed petty and reductive, and only pointed out the obvious flaws in bureaucracy. Similarly the compacted explorations of (now dated, naturally) theoretical physics. But both are necessary because McEwan wants to examine his two major themes – the child and time – in as many ways as possible. However, these asides are almost entirely irrelevant to the main story, and most affecting statement: that of a man coping with the loss of a child, the desire to live in the past and the impression that time has ceased for those who lose the most important things in their lives.
Additional complications, like a friend of the protagonist’s who regresses with alarming physical adequacy to childhood and an exciting but arbitrary motorway accident added only to show time slowing to a crawl in an emergency seem like padding, detracting from the far more striking scenes, such as the memory of the day Kate goes missing, Stephen’s own childhood and a delusional Stephen’s surreal invasion of a school when he thinks he has seen his daughter, but in the end, the book was satisfying and melancholy, and haunting for anyone, especially parents.
I enjoy McEwan’s directness and emphasis on story and ideas over style, but he can be rather ponderous at times, and this book sometimes dragged.
However, it had moments of real magnificence. Stephen Lewis is a published writer who wrote his debut novel intending it for serious literary readers, only to have it published to great acclaim as a children’s book. This amusing history, however, gives way to a truly horrifying fate. One day Lewis takes his little daughter Kate to the supermarket. While he is distracted, she vanishes – almost certainly abducted. This truly chilling event of course has huge implications, and Lewis’ life is irrevocably changed. His relationship with his wife crumbles and they drift apart, unable to communicate their loss. He becomes obsessed, constantly looking for his daughter in groups of children, or getting lost in memories of her. Stephen’s journey is painful and arduous, but the inevitable conclusion to the story comes in a truly memorable sequence that brings renewed hope, changing Stephen’s view that time ‘forbids second chances’ and bringing a real sense of optimism in a perhaps obvious but still uplifting fashion.
Written in the 80s, the story is set in the near future, with a thinly-veiled Thatcher still in power. Along with licensing beggars, Mrs. Thatcher has assembled a group of impressive-sounding spokespeople to attach their names to a report on how best to raise children, even though their input will be totally disregarded. The political commentary was an unwelcome addition, mostly because it seemed petty and reductive, and only pointed out the obvious flaws in bureaucracy. Similarly the compacted explorations of (now dated, naturally) theoretical physics. But both are necessary because McEwan wants to examine his two major themes – the child and time – in as many ways as possible. However, these asides are almost entirely irrelevant to the main story, and most affecting statement: that of a man coping with the loss of a child, the desire to live in the past and the impression that time has ceased for those who lose the most important things in their lives.
Additional complications, like a friend of the protagonist’s who regresses with alarming physical adequacy to childhood and an exciting but arbitrary motorway accident added only to show time slowing to a crawl in an emergency seem like padding, detracting from the far more striking scenes, such as the memory of the day Kate goes missing, Stephen’s own childhood and a delusional Stephen’s surreal invasion of a school when he thinks he has seen his daughter, but in the end, the book was satisfying and melancholy, and haunting for anyone, especially parents.
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