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.

A Feast for Crows, by George R.R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire book 4)

The fourth of the Ice and Fire books was the first one I didn’t read excitedly, or with any great desire to pick up again once I’d put it down. By this point the series was selling enough to top the New York Times bestsellers list, even without help of the excellent HBO series, but it would be a further six years before book 5 would come out.

And, as I found out at the end of this book, A Dance with Dragons is really this book, part 2. Even though the last one was big enough to need splitting into two for these shores, apparently that idea did not agree with Martin’s plans at all, so he wrote this book to focus on events in King’s Landing – with a few other strands thrown in – while the next will deal with Dany, Stannis, Bran and the rest.

I’m not sure whether it was because once the split happened this book needed padding or because Martin just has plans that require a lot of set-up here, but it really felt as though he decided to just tread water with this book. Far too much is given over to dull new (or previously peripheral) characters like the Krakens and the Dornish, without whom the central story would thus far be no different at all. Neither Jaime nor Cersei interest me all that much, and Samwell’s chapters are always very, very slow. This left only Brienne and a few chapters with the Stark daughters to spice up an otherwise turgid volume. The prose remains slightly painful, and there was one horrible attempt to make Cersei use some British vernacular that Martin got totally wrong – which I don’t believe was a printing error. I don’t mind there being Americanisms in a medieval England-style fantasy world – after all, it is a fantasy world – and the likes of ‘I wrote him’ I can happily let slide, but trying to have an English tone and getting it wrong ('He had bloody well think again') is in the realm of terrible fanfic. At least Martin has moved beyond using ‘merlon’ and ‘whicker’ every few pages, though.

After the fascinating cliffhangers of the last book, this was a real let-down. The hideous figure from the end of A Storm of Swords doesn’t even show up again until near the end of this one, the most interesting characters Tyrion, Bran and Dany are barely mentioned, and to add injury to it all, looking now at the Wikipedia, I see this is where Martin had intended there to be the time-skip I’ve been hoping for since the end of the first book, but he’s put it off because otherwise the next one would be all flashbacks.

It struck me at the end of the book, where Martin all but apologises to his readers for this, that while I’ve seen he can write great characters, great twists and great bits of political machination, I have no evidence at all that he can write a good, solid story with a powerful ending. Now I fear what the rest of the books will give us. Time to read something else for a bit.

The Subtle Knife

If I were to be unkind, I could summarise The Subtle Knife really quite adequately by simply saying, ‘Some people go some places – and this boy finds a knife’. Because that is basically all that happens. No wonder I didn’t remember anything about it from the first time I’d read it! Yes, Lyra was very sweet, even if she seemed to be regressing rather than growing up, and yes, it’s good to see a wound that actually bothers someone properly in a children’s book, but it really wasn’t especially interesting.

And to be honest, the links to Paradise Lost and the story of the Fall, as well as almost all the cod-philosophical musings on Dark Matter and puberty are inelegant and really rather arbitrary.

Still, it’s better than almost any children’s literature out there, and I had a pretty enjoyable read. I’m not going to complain.

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.

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.