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. 

A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire book 5, by George RR Martin

A Dance with Dragons is essentially part two of the half-book that was A Feast for Crows, although long enough that it has been split in two for its paperback release, confusingly enough. With a few little exceptions like chapters for Jaime and Cersei, it fills in the story of all the characters conspicuously absent from the previous book – Tyrion, Daenerys, Arya, Jon Snow, Bran, Davos and a certain Ironborn thought dead. As the first two tended to have the chapters I found most interesting in the first three books, I looked forward to this, and while it was indeed a rather more interesting book than its predecessor, I have to say that it chiefly featured more treading water and unnecessary padding. It began in an interesting fashion – Reek is the most iconic development in a long while, and it was good to see what happened to Tyrion – but then the book went as flat as its predecessor. Daenerys’ story really stalled when she decided her dragons had to be locked away underground, and until the last few chapters I was worried that her story would not get out of that rut at all. Even when it did, the aftermath slowed back to a crawl again. Tyrion remains an interesting character but apart from the little irony of Dany saving him without knowing it and the clever way Mormont enters his story, the way he drifts about meeting uninteresting new characters is frustrating. Arya’s story arc has her just having to train very hard at this juncture, so little of much interest happened there, and Bran was in a similar position: they in particular were noticeably given chapters that were noticeably just stalling any interesting action.

Essentially, I’m finding these books frustrating. This isn’t what I hoped for when I eagerly got the second book to continue the story. I thought that four books later, characters would be very far from where they began. I didn’t expect Bran to have only just met his three-eyed crow, or for Jon to be interminably trying to please different factions while nothing of any interest at all happens at the Wall. I didn’t expect the Lannisters to just be lingering and for any possibility of the Starks’ return to power to still be years and years off. I didn’t expect Dany to just be sitting around thinking about who to marry or shitting and bleeding all over the place in the wilderness with her return to her country potentially years off. And to be honest, I can’t see how almost the entirety of Westeros except perhaps The Vale will manage to escape mass death in the winter that is to come. As I said with the last book, it’s not actually in any way proven that Martin is any good at all at ending a story – it’s all taken on trust. Even this one didn’t end with a bang – just with the incipit return of a character I’d expected to remerge for the entire book (though admittedly for most of it I thought he was hidden amongst the Dany’s flatterers having changed his face enough that Ser Barristan didn’t recognise it). Well, we’ll have to see.

And I’ll likely be waiting a long while. It’s been taking Martin long and longer to write his books, and this is the first time I’ve been there for one of the looooong gaps.

The Fry Chronicles, by Stephen Fry

It’s been quite a few years now since Stephen Fry’s first volume of autobiography, the excellently-titled Moab is my Washpot - though apparently in light of the fact nobody got it, this new release has a simpler name. It was released to great fanfare about being the first book to be released in so many ways – in bookshops, as ebook download, as an iOS app etc – and shot to the top of the non-fiction charts. And I was well-pleased, because Stephen Fry is amongst my favourite public figures, being educated, eloquent, and also very funny, a non-threatening example of what much of modern England seems to have grown to fear and resent, yet also remains venerated by thousands who are perhaps less vocal about it. I thought him superb in Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster, better in Wilde and read most of his novels. I love QI despite occasionally being annoyed by it, and his is one of only three Twitter accounts I follow. I like that he represents the old world but is so tech-savvy. I like that he is vulnerable and happy to talk about his flaws and that he is also very much an aspirational figure, and have read most of his novels, which while really no classics were well-written and highly memorable.

So though I was far from a day-one reader, I was very interested in this release once I was reminded it existed, and even put other books on hold for it, which (Anna Karenina – which I have read on and off for years now – aside) I rarely do. I had been very eager for this book after finding Moab is my Washpot so compelling yet stopping short of the most interesting parts of Fry’s life. Maybe it is because I had been so eager that I was so disappointed.

I wanted to read about Fry’s realisation that he was bipolar and his infamous disappearance. I wanted to hear about how his first love made him feel and the fear and the desire of beginning a first serious relationship. I wanted to know how his public school sexual experiences affected him later. I wanted to know about his creative process and his struggles to write books. I wanted him to talk about why almost all his books have pretty boys in their early teens in pseudo-innocent sexual situations. I wanted to hear about the rebellious side of his life at Cambridge. Instead…where the first book seemed to have Fry bear his soul about his difficult adolescence, this one seemed very much to be keeping up a screen, despite the times he consciously says that he is revealing more than, perhaps, he would like to. Oh, and it said ‘autres maeurs’ instead of ‘autres moeurs’.

It’s a short book, and there are some very pleasant anecdotes about Emma Thompson, about Alan Bennett and about Douglas Adams, all drawn in the shorthand needed for such public figures. There’s some interesting little paragraphs about Blackadder and I derived some personal satisfaction from seeing how similar Fry’s attitude to his Cambridge education was to my own, except when it came to writing exams: he apparently developed a winning essay that he could bend to answer any question, largely based on an Anne Barton essay (my own wonderful old skeleton of a supervisor as an undergrad).

But by and large, this book was dull and totally lacking in insight. Some anecdotes had been told on QI. Others were covered in documentaries about Blackadder. All were the sort of thing suitable for those platforms – light, entertaining and at arm’s length from the actual man and his actual beliefs. His endless hand-wringing and emphasising the fact that he knows he’s very lucky and doesn’t want to come over as a prick but inevitably will gets very tiresome, too.

Perhaps it’s time to expect the safe and sanitary from Fry. But I wanted so much more than a book full of the padding of funny little stories and the repetition of the fact he really just got very lucky writing a play for Edinburgh, being in Footlights at the right time and getting an agent out of it, with everything else just tumbling out of that. This felt like an inflated encyclopaedia entry written by the subject. I wanted to know not just what happened, but how it felt.

Well, there’s still another volume to come – or even, perhaps, two. I will still read them, but my keenness has faded.