American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

American Gods was on my pile of books to read for a very long time, but when I went back to England for Christmas it was the one I was most keen to read, so it’s the one I picked for the plane trip back. I read the rest of it slowly, and overall very much enjoyed the striking imagery, strong characters and evocative settings of the book.

At the same time, though, I felt a certain disappointment similar to my feelings at the end of Murakami’s novels. A lot happened, and some of the plot strands were tied up so neatly as to almost be pat, but I still felt like my expectations weren’t fulfilled. I wanted more to happen. I think the problem was that the stakes never seemed genuinely very high.

Conceptually, American Gods is strong. It has a lot in common with Gaiman’s friend and collaborator Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, only of course set not on a fantasy world but in a rather gritty modern America. In Discworld, it was belief that made a god strong while superficial worship was irrelevant, while that seems somewhat inverted in American Gods but the basic outline of an everyman figure assisting a god whose glory days are in the past while a large conflict approaches is clearly echoed. That said, the books are of course very different beasts and Gaiman is in full adult-writer mode, not shying away from the profane, darkly violent, sexual or indeed hypersexual. Not advised as a Coraline follow-up.

The novel revolves around Shadow, a big guy of indeterminate brown-skinned race who is a very engaging main character, being big and quiet but also inquisitive, loyal, intelligent and unfailingly self-sacrificing. The novel opens with him being released from prison, where he is serving time for a somewhat self-sacrificial crime, expecting life to be much better once he’s released. However, he finds that the life he wanted to return to has crumbled, but has a chance at a new job with a strange old man with the air of a con artist who introduces himself as ‘Wednesday.’

One of my problems with American Gods was that many parts of it were too obvious. I liked Wednesday’s name, as I know not everyone knows the origin of the English names for days, but another character introduced very early but properly revealed much later had a name that was far too blatant. Shadow’s own background was signposted far off, too, as was the overarching plot and the tacked-on murder mystery was so obvious as to feel to me like it shouldn’t have been included at all. Part of my feeling of being unsatisfied, I suppose, derived from this feeling of the big reveals not being at all surprising.

I loved the first third of the book. I enjoyed the bleak vision of modern America Gaiman drew up, of ex-cons and small-town rumours and at the same time, the mysteries of an underworld of gods living amongst us. I loved that the lore of America was tied up in its kitschy roadside attractions, and that traveling around the country was obviously an important part of this story. And I enjoyed both Shadow’s and Wednesday’s characters and their relationship.

But then things meandered. Far too long was spent with Shadow fitting into the community of a small, quiet northern town where everybody knows everybody and yet every year some kid goes missing in the snow. This whole section of the book felt very weak for me, labouring the point that an ordinary everyday existence had appeal to Shadow but he was caught up in some bigger issues. This was also where the over-obvious murder mystery came in, with the added layer of bathos coming from the fact that nobody thought there was any murder.

This part felt like it was give Shadow a real moral dilemma, weighing up a fantastical world against a real, rooted one where people value him for what he is, but in the end that wasn’t the point, the point was simply stalling. And that left me feeling unsatisfied. I suppose that middle act wouldn’t have mattered if the last part had been really satisfying, but in the end even a climactic clash of epic proportions didn’t seem very satisfactory at all. The antagonists weren’t a well thought-out force to be reckoned with, and there were too few identifiable individuals to care for. At that stage there didn’t seem to be much real threat to Shadow, so there was very little sense of suspense or urgency at the end.

I don’t want to give the impression I thought this was in any way a bad book. It was enjoyable, full of strong images and excellent characterisation. I will certainly watch the adaptation when it comes out. But it was another case of me expecting more than I really got.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

I seem to mostly read Murakami’s books while I’m travelling. I started this book on the way to Japan and finished it when back home for a while. Murakami’s breakthrough book and seemingly his most widely-read, I thought this could be more exciting and engaging than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. However, I found it very similar – but lacking the charms or intriguing strangeness of that book. And I can’t say it was my favourite. So no, I wouldn’t say I recommend Norwegian Wood, either.

It seems that Norwegian Wood is actually Murakami’s plainest story. No passing through possibly-figurative walls at the bottoms of wells here, nor peculiar psychic powers. No odd gruesome war stories or mysterious dirty phone calls.

Norwegian Wood is a simple, melancholy love story. Watanabe’s best friend dies, and he has a brief romance with the dead friend’s former girlfriend. She ends up institutionalised, while Watanabe drifts – seemingly like all Murakami’s protagonists. He muses on how ordinary he is while enjoying the arts, and meets several intriguing girls. All the girls fall for him and talk to him in very quirky ways, often about sex. This, too, seems a staple of Murakami, and again strikes me as the very same sort of wish-fulfilment for lonely, horny young men that is seen so often in seinen manga.

If I thought that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was frustrating because it always seemed like exciting events were on the brink of happening but never really did, Norwegian Wood is worse. There isn’t really any drive to the story, none of Watanabe’s relationships seem to get beyond superficial games of intrigue and the climactic final action has been coming all along and unfolds with turgid inevitability, neither causing the reader any surprise nor sadness.

I must say, I don’t understand the fuss around Murakami. His characters constantly have to tell one another how interesting they are so that they actually seem that way. They always get told how odd their way of thinking is, how charming their speech is, how they have a special and intriguing outlook, but other than a few pleasingly poetic musings, I don’t see the evidence for it. I could understand if Murakami championed the ordinary, overlooked sorts in life and made the reader empathise with a dull character who in fact had great hidden strength, but he instead seems to just have these ordinary men suffering from sad pasts yet constantly surrounded by attractive women who find their plain speech, simple favours and occasional compliments terribly fascinating and interesting.

Occasionally Murakami does bring up interesting questions. I did have an emotional reaction to the utterly horrible friend of Watanabe’s who has great ambition but a callous mind and is constantly torturing his poor girlfriend, but his part in the book is very minor. Some musings about sex and loyalty also resonated with me, even if my conclusions were essentially opposite from Watanabe’s.

Otherwise, I must confess I was bored. Almost nothing happens in this book. It’s a collection of unrealistic conversations with unrealistic women. As a translation, like most readers I forgive stilted dialogue, awkward pacing and peculiar sentence structure, as condemning the style of a writer isn’t fair when it comes through the filter of another writer from another language altogether, but it’s the substance of this book that I found lacking.

My defining impression of Murakami novels, one that will likely prevent me reading another, is that he shows us an engaging everyman, clever but innocuous and always good with the girls, and puts them in a situation where it seems that something interesting is just about to happen to them. But at the end of the book, nothing very interesting ever does. Or if interesting things do happen, the character simply drifts on in the same manner. I don’t want melodrama or wailing and gnashing of teeth – but I do want some kind of impact on character and narrative. But once again I was left unsatisfied. 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

I’ve been meaning to actually read one of Murakami’s novels for years, since I read his After the Quake short stories some time ago. But it never really felt like a priority until a few weeks ago, I felt like reading something more contemporary and he seemed ideal. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, his breakthrough novel, was the one I found first. I found Norwegian Wood a little later and get the impression it may be a better place to start with him, but it was too late. And I will get to Norwegian Wood next anyway – for while I can’t say I think Murakami is the genius he’s often made out to be, nor that I truly loved this book, there’s something about his writing voice that is incredibly compelling and makes him eminently readable. That’s a rare and intersting thing.

That said, the thing that struck me most about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is that it’s really not worlds away from the kind of thing you find in light novels. The kind that get adapted into anime series and get lots of fanservice-heavy merchandise. In fact, early on in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I was strongly reminded of Bakemonogatari. Sound far-fetched? I don’t think it is.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle centres on a very normal everyman character named Okada. When first his cat and then his wife go missing, he begins to meet a whole lot of girls, many of whom have special powers or hidden oddities about them. There’s the mysterious and standoffish clairvoyant. There’s the clairvoyant’s little sister, a beauty with an odd story about being born in extreme pain until she tried to kill herself, whereupon she could feel nothing. Then there’s the precocious loli, who at sixteen is too young for Okada but teasingly flirtatious. Then an older woman with a lot of money and the means to advance Okada’s needs. And of course, quite passively, Okada begins to develop strange powers of his own, powers that actually seem to transcend those of the women around him and make him necessary to them. Trust me when I say that this is all very typical stuff for light novels. There’s a lot of the same set-up in To Aru as well.

But of course much happens here that is not the territory of such light entertainment. There are long and detailed passages about Japanese military actions in the puppet state of Manchukuo, which include quite brutal violence. There is a lot of sexually explicit description and erotic writing, although invariably presented rather clinically. There is much musing about metaphysical matters, the meaning of life, how events in childhood deeply affect a person’s story, and discussion about people’s place in one another’s existences. And of course, Okada being in his thirties there is a different outlook from teenaged protagonists, a far greater sense of impotence and ennui.

I resent the book a little. As seems to be the trend for Murakami books, very little happens. The ending is contrived and could have happened at any point previously, meaning there’s not really any sense of true progression. Though I’m reading in translation, there’s also the fact that we get so many voices in this book, so many storytellers, yet except for the easy imitation of teenage speech given to Kasahara Mei, they all express themselves in the same, slightly off-kilter way, a prim and matter-of-fact style given to metaphysical tangents.

Yet the fact is that Murakami definitely has the quality a writer should prize most highly, which is readability. He can have his character meander and think trite philosophical thoughts at great length, and he can have next to nothing happen for chapters on end, yet I still wanted to go back to the story. Only in the old man’s stories about his army life did I get bored, and yet they might be the part that endures most clearly in my mind. Okada is not a blank slate, nor is he incredibly ordinary, but he is extremely easy to identify with and even like. That’s a rare gift, and I suspect what makes Murakami the success that he is. Okada is not like me, his interests are not like mine and nor is his life, and he does a whole lot of things that I would never do. Yet he never seems strange or hard to understand. He is always sympathetic, even when psychotically violent or completely irrational.

Very little happens in the book, and much of what does happen defies explanation. A lot is purposely vague, and the fact is that making something random seem significant by having something that parallels it popping up in a flashback is just smoke and mirrors. I dislike open-ended meanings and bizarre supernatural events that can be explained away by saying ‘oh, this is magical realism’. And yet I still liked the book, and its writer. I think that is Murakami’s trump card, his own magic power. I don’t think he needs to write a good story to write well.

So I will at the very least read another Murakami book. I don’t think I will call myself a fan, but I certainly don’t regret the time I gave to this book, or think I should be cautious with giving my time to another. Murakami has an undeniable gift, of making his reader feel they’re very like the character narrating the book even if he is thinking or doing the strangest things, and I find that undeniably fascinating. 

Joe the Barbarian, by Grant Morrison

Of the big names of comic writing, I always struggled to get into Grant Morrison's work. I remember when I was reading a lot of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, giving his best-known books a try. I enjoyed Arkham Asylum but felt the writing was a little haphazard and overly concerned with being edgy in an attempt to seem terribly grown-up. I read a fair chunk ofThe Invisibles but just couldn't engage with any of the characters. So while it was Morrison's name that made me pick up Joe the Barbarian in the comic book store, it also made me cautious. Opening it to a random page near the end, though, and seeing the intriguing image of Joe and his two companions standing in front of an army that included Robin sitting on top of a (ahem, very much non-DC) Transformer while Superman hovers above and some sort of battle-scarred Care Bear cowered in the background, I was intrigued. 

As it turns out, the presence of these sort of cameos is minimal, but the comic itself is quite brilliant, easily my favourite of Morrison's works and actually one of my favourite limited comics overall. It has been optioned for a film, and it would make quite a brilliant one. 

The set-up is a simple one that allows for the full flow of Morrison's imagination. Joe is a young teen with diabetes, and when some unfortunate events around him visiting his father's grave lead to severe hypoglycaemia, he begins to hallucinate - and getting down from his attic room to the refrigerator in order to get a soda and then find the fusebox to get the lights back on becomes an epic fantasy populated by his toys and the people in his life who seem to represent the difference civilisations he meets in the world that struggles against King Death. 

It's a classic multiple-levels-of-reality story, recalling Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, with the various civilisations found in different parts of the house reminding me of Terry Pratchett's The Carpet People, but that angle of low blood sugar leading to hallucinations and the constant interpolations of reality that remind us that this is a serious medical situation that could lead to Joe's death, as well as the obvious abandonment issues he has, give layers of urgency and grit that take it away from being twee and keep it thoroughly modern. 

In his hallucinated world, Joe's pet rat seems like a huge warrior and becomes one of the best companion characters in this style of story I've ever seen, brave despite his reputation as a coward and a fine guardian. Together, they travel via the bathroom - populated by toilet dwarfs - down the vast mountains of the staircase, battle a monstrous dog that has wandered through the open door, receive aid from cowardly scientists, become tempted by the comfortable warmth of the hearth that is of course only a distraction, to the waters of life, but then before they are drunk, down into the basement where King Death dwells - in the clothes Joe's father left behind. 

It's consciously an archetypal hero's fantasy, and driven in part by the laziness of the ancient prophecy (of the 'Dying Boy'), but that is a large part of its charm. The presence of toys and various real-world interpolations are fun, and Joe himself is very likeable - he is bewildered by the world around him, trying to impress on these fantasy figures that there is a greater reality in which they don't really exist, with his square-jawed, wide-eyed design keeping him feeling grounded and ordinary rather than romanticised. 

This is perhaps something that a lot of other writers have done before. But it's done so well and with such exuberance - something I don't really associate with Morrison - that it's hard to resist. Highly recommended - and I certainly hope a film adaptation will eventually come. 

Avengers vs X-men

Drawn in by the Messiah War and the surrounding events, I wanted to see what became of young Hope after all the difficulties of getting her into the world – and besides, this event was part of the reason I read that one in the first place. They feel like they followed hot on the heels of one another to me, but in fact there were a couple of years to build up to this. Hope helped with the powers of other newly-awakened mutants, and then in a schism involving Cyclops sending his youngest out to battle against a powerful sentinel made by the new kiddy Hellfire club (who are thoroughly lame and unbelievable), Wolverine left to found his own institute to keep them safe and out of battle. Of course, that couldn’t last too long, and when it becomes apparent that Hope is attracting the powerful and destructive Phoenix Force, Cyclops’ desire to protect her and Wolverine preferring to let his fellow Avengers take charge of the situation bring things to a head.

Yes, once again it goes back to the Phoenix. Too many major events in the X-Men’s canon go back to it, as do adaptations like the cartoon series, when in all honesty it wasn’t that interesting a plot in the first place. That said, my distaste for the idea didn’t last all that long when it soon became clear that going back to themes prodded at a few decades ago through the cynical, gritty, trying-to-show-maturity filter of present-day comics allowed for some interesting new angles. And honestly, if the underlying concept is Avengers vs X-Men, there isn’t really that much of a contest unless the mutants get a bit of a power-up. Several of the most powerful X-Men (and former X-Men villains) are Avengers anyways, and the X-Men are after all not made up largely of characters powerful enough to each carry a title since the silver age and compete alone against major cosmic forces. On the other hand, the phoenix power-up was if anything too far the other way, making the X-Men far too powerful to be opposed until inevitably it’s the corrupting influence of the bird that makes them lose their way. If anything, this was my major complaint with the event – the most interesting questions it raised, like what the Avengers could do if the X-Men genuinely were making Earth perfect and forcing them to stand down, or whether power must be earned (as if most of the Marvel roster earned their power when it first appeared) – get left by the wayside for the easy ending offered by absolute power corrupting absolutely.

But still, everyone loves heroes turning against their fellow heroes – just look at Civil War – and this is Marvel’s most broad attempt at that yet. The decimated X-Men stayed out of the War, but now pretty much everyone who fought in it – as well as several of their former friends – are against them. And I have to say, I found it very compelling reading, and yet again asked myself why the big Hollywood adaptations couldn’t take on this sort of plot, based on betrayal and comradeship.

Not everything works. The clash between the Avengers Academy and the mutant captives was rushed and unconvincing. The Hellfire kiddies I definitely could have done without – as I said, they are very unconvincing, like when the kid promises money for prestige in prison, as if that wouldn’t just get him assaulted. Xavier deserved a greater presence, only shining in a brilliant chapter where a secret council meets, and most of the miniseries of one-on-one fights were terrible, either ending with one person getting distracted or just leaving, with one of the last ones, a series of gag comics, just the sheer laziness of a studio throwing things at a comic to see what stuck. The Iron Fist side-story was boring and Iron Man was a bit irritatingly too capable of doing anything with some nonsense built into his suit.

Still, overall I got very carried away with this and very much enjoyed the moments where the world-destroying firey force was forgotten and two people dug into one another’s pasts and the differences in their approaches. Luke Cage in particular got very much humanised and I like how modern Marvel doesn’t shy from sex, drugs, infidelity or decadence. Though having Namor as some sort of sex-pest only made me snort in derision. 

X-men – Messiah War

I’m not entirely sure why I decided to read the Messiah War storyline – I think perhaps it was because I saw Hope in a glimpse at the Avengers Vs X-men comics (a gimmick no fan can quite resist, no matter how much they might roll their eyes), and thought I needed more context. There are a lot of mutants, even with the much-reduced post-decimation roster, that I don’t recognize here either, though – Pixie, Elixir and Vanisher sent me back to Wikipedia, and (the cameo from) Peepers made me remember a long-forgotten silly character, may he rest in peace.

Messiah War covers a major event in the wake of The Scarlet Witch very nearly depowering every mutant in her Marvel universe. Only a handful remained – though predictably just about all the established favourites either stayed mutants or regained their powers through twisted plot contrivances. Anyway, after a long period of searching, the X-men finally see what they had hoped for on Cerebro – the light of a new mutant life. Indeed, Hope’s birth causes the whole machine to shut down. Unfortunately, other factions also knew of her birth, and from the start Hope is both a symbol and a threat. After much carnage, it is Cable who saves her, and eventually he feels forced to take her into the future to keep her safe. However, she is anything but safe as Bishop chases him, determined to kill her, and besides, the future is full of numerous other threats, from cockroach people to a Stryfe risen to dominance. Marvel’s rather confusing view of timelines involves a definite confirmation of multiple possible futures, with time travellers coming from them, but one master timeline, so that when a character goes back and changes something, his future then no longer exists. Thus Bishop is determined to prevent his from coming to pass.

Young Hope gets to spend a fairly pleasant early childhood with a surrogate mother (from whom she gets her name) in a community hidden from the world, then learns survival and combat skills as a child frequently in a lot of danger, spends two years fending for herself in a dystopian city (and finding a taste of love), comes very close to death in an X-Force side-story that I have to say I enjoyed mostly for Apocalyse, then grows to young adulthood in a capsule, Lion-O stylee. As soon as she is back in the present, it’s very clear that the modern X-Men writers want to be gritty and hard-hitting, though if anything, their constant bloodiness, killing-off of fan favourite characters and - rather awkwardly given a long history of undoing deaths and heroes and villains alike surviving the most unlikely things - trying to make moral tensions between killing and not killing.

Ultimately, the Messiah War and Second Coming arcs feel rather more inconsequential than many such major events. But I certainly like Cable much more now, and find the new X-Force compelling – especially interacting with Deadpool, who for once was written in a very enjoyable way as a kind of long-suffering clown and extreme punching bag. Also nice knowing Doug and Warlock are still around, and that the stupid Predator X has finally died. Now it remains to be seen if Hope can be a likeable and important character beyond being a vulnerable child who needs protecting.

Every time I read a decent event like this one, though, even if it’s not a brilliant one, I wonder why the makers of the Hollywood adaptations never try to adapt one of these larger-scale stories, especially with the modern comic book mixture of sincerity, grit and ironic self-awareness (without being smug about it).  

Dunk and Egg (novellas 1-3)

After the last couple of Song of Ice and Fire books, the question that’s been mostly occupying me regarding George RR Martin is whether or not he can tell a story with a good ending. Because for all this world-building is compelling, his main novels have become a great sprawl with no end in sight – and when that end comes, will it satisfy? There are so many characters to root for who will ultimately be enemies…‘Is it all going to end with a whimper?’ I ask, trying to avoid directly quoting TS Eliot. And so I came to the (currently) three Dunk and Egg novellas, short stories from the same world, a little under a hundred years before Game of Thrones. The first made me think that yes, Martin knows how to craft a good, solid ending. The others made me wonder. After all, The Hedge Knight was kept so exaggeratedly simple it was almost cartoonish – and the others were more ambitious, but soon began to sprawl themselves, and now the larger tale feels very much unfinished.

What is remarkable about the stories is just how intricate Martin’s world-building is. These characters are mentioned in the main series, especially by Maester Aemon, who knew them, but what’s impressive is more subtle – characters talk of the entire era, of the political situation and the power struggles, of how men compared one king with the next, and the quirks of the men around the royalty.

Focusing on just one point-of-view character makes for neat, compelling storytelling – as long as there is a decent setting, which the two stories with tournaments have – and I very much liked Sir Duncan and his relationship with the cocky but still childlike squire with a secret. I care about them. I’m interested in Bloodraven and how he becomes what he is in the main series. Though we already know the ultimate end for Dunk and Egg, I quite possibly want to know what happens to them next more than any of the characters in the man series. These novellas had their flaws, but they still very much engaged me.