Hochelaga Depicta

Catching Up

2011-02-06T17:33:00.002-05:00

I’ve been silent on this blog for a while, mostly because I’d been using it to write about books I’ve been reading, and somehow my attitude toward writing about books changed when I began reviewing regularly for Roverarts and Black Gate. It’s still fun, but I find I approach it with more seriousness, more weight — so writing becomes more time-consuming as a result. Add that to the fact that a lot of what I’m reading I’m also writing about for those sites, and I think it’s time that I rethought the purpoose of this blog. I haven’t come to any firm conclusions yet, but we’ll see what transpires.

Mewanwhile, I do still want to keep track of my reading, at least in terms of raw numbers. So let’s see: in October I read four books, one of them from the library, and due to the presence of two book fairs I added forty-three. So down forty on the month. In November I read two, and added thirteen; down eleven. In December I read four, and added nine; down five. In January I read seven, and added one; up six.

So in 2010 I read a hundred and two books, and added a total of thirty-three. That’s mostly due to three book fairs (Concordia, McGill, and the Friends of the Westmount Library) in October and November. Add my birthday in September and Christmas, and the trend here seems to be that I have to read a lot early in the year to have any hope of balancing out the amount of new books I get later on. Something to remember.

Concordia book fair

2010-10-05T14:33:00.002-04:00

Concordia University held a used book fair yesterday and today. I went not expecting much, but came away laden down with books. They had a lot of fine stuff which I already had too, including John Myers Myers' Silverlock and a collection of the first three novels by John Crowley.

So what I bought:

Iain M. Banks / Inversion

Iain M. Banks / Look to Windward

John Barth / The Tidewater Tales

Christopher Brooke / The Twelfth Century Renaissance

R.H.C. Davis / The Normans and their Myth

Philip K. Dick / Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

Eleanor Shipley Duckett / Carolingian Portraits

Linda Haldeman / The Lastborn of Elvinwood

Tanith Lee / Black Unicorn

Tanith Lee / Days of Grass

Madelaine L'Engle / Walkng on Water

Iris Murdoch / The Nice and the Good

Ignazio Silone / Fontamara

Judith Tarr / Ars Magica

Lynn White, Jr. / Medieval Technology and Social Change

Austin Tappan Wright / Islandia

Douglas Young / Edinburgh in the Age of Sir Walter Scott

Three Greek Romances (Daphnis and Chloe, An Ephesian Tale, The Hunters of Euboea) trans. Moses Hadas

Eighteen books, plus two more bought as gifts; twenty books for twenty dollars. Not bad.

September 2010 Reading Summary

2010-10-05T14:31:00.002-04:00

So in September I read eleven books, one of them a library book. I added eleven to the apartment, leaving me down one. That's now ninety-two books read, twenty-three fewer about the place.

But the McGill book fair's coming up this month ...

August 2010 Reading Summary

2010-09-17T18:17:00.003-04:00

Again, a tardy post. I've been a bit busy, with some writing appearing at Blackgate.com and at The Rover. In particular, I've had a long critical piece being serialised at Black Gate over the past few weeks, as I talk about fantasy worlds and uncover who the first writer was to set a novel entirely in a fantastic otherworld; the big wrap-up, in which I name that writer, goes this Sunday.

I've also been reading a fair bit. I read eleven books in August. Two of them were library books, and one was borrowed. I also added one book to the apartment. So seven up on the month. Year-to-date, I'm looking at eighty-one books read so far this year, twenty-four fewer unread books about the apartment.

It has occurred to me that if I accept that I've got about a thousand unread books, then if I whittle that figure down at the rate of twenty per year I can get through them all in fifty years. I'd be eighty-seven. That sounds about right. What I really ought to do is make a precise count. Maybe next month.

July 2010 Reading Summary (Okay, it's a Little Late)

2010-08-19T17:58:00.002-04:00

I read eight books in July, one of them a library book, one of them a book borrowed from a friend. I added sixteen. Meaning I finished the month with ten more unread books in the apartment. Which makes the third straight month the number of unread books around here has increased.

Year-to-date totals: seventy books read, seventeen fewer unread books in the apartment. Oh well. At least the blogging at Black Gate has been going well.

June 2010 Reading Summary, and Future Blogging Activity

2010-07-09T18:51:00.003-04:00

I read eleven books in June, which is good, but added fourteen—which is good in most ways, but does mean that I now have three more unread books around the apartment. Twenty-seven fewer on the year, sixty-two books read so far this year.

In other news, I do intend to start posting here more frequently. For some reason, I've been stuck coming up with thoughts about Thornton Wilder's book The Cabala.

In other other news (and more important news, too), I'm going to be posting regularly on the blog for Black Gate magazine. I've got two posts up already, here and here. I'll be posting every other Sunday, writing about stories and fantasy. I am quite looking forward to this.

And, speaking of things I'm looking forward to:

This and this, coming on an album next spring; but first, there's this from an album coming out in fall. Good days ahead.

May 2010 Reading Summary

2010-06-01T12:20:00.002-04:00

Only completed four books this month (one of which was from the library). And bought thirteen. So ten more unread books in the apartment, leaving me thirty fewer on the year. Fifty-one books read in 2010 so far.

April 2010 Reading Summary

2010-05-07T17:21:00.002-04:00

I managed to read 30 books in April. All of them mine, none from a library. Didn't add any to the apartment, either. So ... forty fewer unread books in the apartment this year, forty-seven read in total.

Readings — The Wood is Sweet

2010-04-26T14:50:00.000-04:00

The Wood is Sweet

by John Clare

selected by David Powell

This is a selection of poems by Clare, chosen by Powell. Powell (presumably it was he) also edited them, adding punctuation and normalising spelling. The result is a curiously sedate Clare, a partially domesticated Clare. Much of Clare’s distinctive wildness is lost, and the poems acquire a chiming sameness.

These are still fine nature poems, perhaps especially for young readers. Edited or not, Clare’s obviously capable of striking images, as when he imagines ants as deformed fairies. The book’s divided into sections by subject, which works for poems about times of the year or about times of the day, but not as much for others; again, a monotony sets in. Still, a sequence of poems about animals helps point up the intensity of Clare’s empathy with the wild, and his observation of the life around him. This is, in the end, a book that couldn’t help but be good — it is still Clare, at the end of the day — but which is not to be preferred to more faithful reproductions of Clare’s work.

Readings — The Zombie Survival Guide

2010-04-26T11:56:00.002-04:00

The Zombie Survival Guide

by Max Brooks

Turns out, not being a zombie fan, I’m not the ideal reader for this book. Go figure. I’d quite liked Brooks’ other zombie tome, World War Z, a politically-savvy multi-voiced take on a zombie apocalypse, and had hoped this book would be something comparable. It’s not, really. It’s a series of tips on, well, surviving a zombie incursion, played completely straight. If you’re fascinated by zombie stories, you’ll probably quite enjoy it. Personally, I liked the last section quite a bit, which imagines zombie outbreaks throughout history, in a range of different cultures. Which is to say, that was the bit most like World War Z. Overall, though, I’d have to say this is a well-done book for zombie fans, and not terribly interesting for those of us who aren't.

Readings — Of Mice and Men

2010-04-26T11:15:00.001-04:00

Of Mice and Men

by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck wrote this book, apparently, in a deliberate attempt to cross the novel form with the play form, creating a prose story which could be acted on stage. In practice, it feels like a fix-up afterthought; like a poorly-adapted play. The language is improbable and stagey, and a number of ostensibly major characters come off as mere devices (including the only female character). You can imagine good actors making something of this material. But it’s too much to expect a reader to cobble the hints here together into credible characters. Sure, novels can work by indirection and implication, but the gaps in this book are in the wrong places, and the work is unsubtle in language, theme, and character. The melodrama, and the overly-signposted symbolism of the speeches, drown out everything else.

Now, I’m not a tremendous fan of American literature in general (more precisely: not a fan of what I’ve read of the American-written literature that Americans chose to canonise in the twentieth century), still less of early-twentieth-century American naturalism. And the fact that the book’s been so widely parodied and has such a broad influence doesn’t help; it’s impossible not to hear some of the lines of dialogue spoken by Mel Blanc, and difficult not to think of Old Yeller at the overwrought tearjerker finale, as well. Still, the book seems to me to be dated in ways that Dickens and George Eliot never are, particularly in its slang.

I’d go so far as to say that the book was so bad that it called into question the idea of the pared-down narrative voice. That is, most of the book consists of dialogue between the characters, with only an occasional brief interjection by an omniscient narrator. Instead of feeling like a successful attempt at economy of diction, though, it felt like a half-assed attempt to turn a play into a novel. Which makes you wonder about other novels that try for a similar spareness. Is that stylistic direction really fruitful? Or is it something inherently un-novelistic? Is it a coincidence that this stylistic ideal became prominent at about the same times that films did?

No art form exists in a vaccuum, and different media forms will influence each other. But not every influence is necessarily positive.

Readings — The Romance of the Forest

2010-04-23T19:08:00.003-04:00

The Romance of the Forest

by Ann Radcliffe

I don’t know why I never read any Ann Radcliffe before. I’ve enjoyed a number of early Gothic novels, but had yet to get to hers. I think hearing about Radcliffe’s notorious tendency to cop out on the supernatural aspect of her stories, presenting Scooby-Doo endings where all the apparent magical or ghostly happenings were actually improbable machinations by the earthly characters, caused me to shy away. In fact, I was somewhat surprised to see that the supernatural played almost no part in this book; it’s essentially a historical melodrama set in seventeenth-century France.

I was more surprised by the fact that it read less like an adventure story and more as an attempt to speak up on contemporary debates on the philosophy of the sublime. Radcliffe has a tendency, as many people have observed, to feature extended passages of landscape description; certainly, if you think Tolkien tended to excess in that respect, you don’t want to come anywhere near Radcliffe, but then as with Tolkien those passages aren’t just providing colour but actually providing shape to the theme of the book. So Radcliffe’s gothic is actually a part of an extended dialogue on the sublime and human reactions to nature. You can see the link to contemporary Romantic poetry clearly.

On the other hand, the descriptions of nature don’t do a lot to speed up the story. Coincidences abound; the structure is halting, episodic. Jane Austen, notoriously, rubbished Radcliffe’s character-writing, but she’d have been better advised to focus on Radcliffe’s plotting skills.

Since I’m on the subject, though, let’s look at that Austen quote. I’m referring to this passage in Northanger Abbey (here from Project Gutenberg):

Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist. Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. There, such as were not as spotless as an angel might have the dispositions of a fiend. But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad.

Okay, so, taking the last point first: I was surprised to find that, contrary to Austen, The Romance of the Forest actually did have a number of “mixed characters” in it. Pierre La Motte, who carries the story for the first part of the book, is decidedly mixed; well-intentioned, but weak. The same for his wife. Nor am I entirely convinced that Adeline’s meant to be entirely without flaw. Certainly, you can argue that these characters are not convincingly drawn. But Austen’s main point is that “human nature” is not faithfully represented in Radcliffe because her characters are “spotless as angels” or else “have the dispositions of a fiend”. This is simply not true. (It also ignores the fact that faithful representation of human nature is not necessarily the aim of a novelist; but that’s a whole other argument.)

Still, what always struck me as ridiculous about this passage — I can think of no other word for the incredulity with which I first read it — is the central part: “But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist.”

All right, then. Anybody who ever read Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge will recall that the book opens with a poor man selling off his wife, thinking that would count as a divorce. According to one reference book I have to hand (Daniel Pool’s What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew), “Between 1750 and 1850, in fact, there were some 380 of these do-it-yourself divorces effected in rural England. The general procedure was even crasser than Hardy suggests, for you typically put a halter around your wife’s head and shoulders and led her to the auction place like a cow, the only checks on the practice being occasional ostracism and not very stringent legal penalties.”

That’s assuming we’re talking about divorce, which in its legal forms was prohibitively expensive and difficult to obtain. Pool again: “Once married, a wife could not sue or make a contract on her own nor make a will without her husband’s consent. If he wished to confine her against his will, as Mr. Rochester does his wife at Thornfield Hall, until 1891 he was well within his rights in doing so. He could ‘correct’ her if he wished, too, a right which was supposed to mean only verbal chastisement but in practice often meant physical punishment.” So, yeah. I suppose you could make an argument that the Brontës’ brand of Gothic, unlike Radcliffe’s tales set in England, went some distance toward both disproving Austen’s take on a wife’s situation (Austen, of course, was never married herself) and perhaps validated the experiences of their readers.

While I’m at it, I might mention that when Austen declares “servants were not slaves” she neglects to mention that slavery was actually legal (she completed Northanger Abbey in 1799, the slave trade was outlawed in the British Empire in 1807, the book was published in 1817, Britain abolished slavery in 1833). And it has to be said that to someone in the contemporary First World, a servant’s life still seems pretty harsh. Pool tells us that a servant’s day might begin at 6 AM and end at 11 PM, with only half a day off on Sunday and two full weeks of vacation in a year, plus one evening a week and one day per month. Pay could be as little as 11 pounds a year. “The servants slept in tiny, overheated or freezing-cold attic rooms and worked in dark, dank basement areas that were too hot or too cold ... They were ordered around, sometimes insulted, and frequently treated with minimal respect for the long, hard back-breaking hours of work they put in.” And, of course, a female servant who got pregnant could expect to be fired.

(And just to finish everything off, Austen claims “neither poison nor sleeping potions [were] to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist”, which is a statement so manifestly false I have no idea why she made it. Laudanum, opium dissolved in alcohol, was widely available in patent medicines as a pain reliever and to bring on sleep. The best possible interpretation, I suppose, is that Austen was seeing around her only what she wanted to see and ignoring what didn’t fit.)

The point I’m getting to is that not only do I think Austen was wrong in her specific criticism of Ann Radcliffe, I have to wonder whether Radcliffe wasn’t a more accurate observer of the world around her. Was the Gothic form that Radcliffe partly created (the Brontës certainly seem to me to owe more to Radcliffe’s ‘realistic’ Gothic than to the overt supernaturalism of Walpole, Beckford, Maturin, or Lewis) a way to say things that could not be said more directly? There has been much written in recent years about Gothic as a female form of writing, about Gothic as a means of social criticism — does the form allow one to think more freely about the world around oneself?

(Edited to add: the thoughts on Radcliffe and the sublime follow from reading the 1986 World's Classics edition with notes and introduction by Chloe Chard. Some strong scholarship there, I felt.)

Briefly Noted

2010-04-17T16:09:00.001-04:00

My review of Guy Gavriel Kay's new book, Under Heaven, is in today's Montreal Gazette, and up at the Gazette's web site.

Take That, Ecclesiastes

2010-04-17T16:03:00.003-04:00

Overheard by Grace on Monkland Avenue:

Teenage girl #1: "You know what they say — there's nothing new under the sun."

Teenage girl #2: "Yeah. Well ... [flips hair] iPads."

Readings — Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author

2010-04-17T16:00:00.002-04:00

Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author

by Edward John Trelawney

A somewhat notorious book, this claims to be a faithful recollection of Trelawney’s experience with the two poets, and as well a discussion of his own military adventures. It is frankly beyond me to disentangle fact and fiction, and indeed has been a primary preoccupation of Shelley and Byron biographers for the past hundred and fifty years. What I can say is that it’s swiftly written and engaging in its own right.

Trelawney’s recounting of his escapades after the death of the poets (justifying the “and the Author” portion of the title) is particularly engaging; you get the sense that the subject which most interested Trelawney, at a basic level, was Trelawney. Shelley and Byron are useful insofar as it allows Trelawney to recount his experience of the two men. It’s impossible not to be sceptical, therefore, of that recounting. Certainly I had the sense of biography like a sun setting behind clouds: glints of something bright and real, shining behind a screen which was made fascinating by the light it obscured. Which is to say that the book’s intensely readable, but you take it for truth at your own risk.

Readings — Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey

2010-04-15T15:47:00.003-04:00

Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey

by Thomas Love Peacock

Peacock, a friend of Shelley, is mostly known for books like these: light comedies structured around dialogues between characters standing in for people like Shelley, or Coleridge, or Byron. Or so I’d always heard. I was happy to find these books had more to them than just a roman à clef. Peacock’s got an understated sense of structure that makes his work feel taut, and a feel for humour writing — by which I mean that you don’t just get laughs out of the books, but you’re pulled on by sheer amusement to find out what happens next.

That said, these books do feel a bit thin. Partly that’s because the characters are (deliberately) very broad — so much so that a complex figure like Shelley can be playfully satirised by two differerent characters in Headlong Hall, each representing different aspects of his personality and thought. But the thinness also comes from the style in which Peacock writes, where action is described very simply and pictorial description hardly appears at all. In other words, stylistically similar to old metrical romances.

That said, though broadly similar, these two novels (the edition I have put them in a single volume) are very dissimilar. If you step back and look at the overall plot structure of Headlong Hall, it’s actually a pleasing romantic comedy in an almost classic sense. A group of unlikely characters gather in an isolated spot; a young man pursues a young woman’s favour; she takes against him, and may end up married to a pedantic older man (a satirical take on Coleridge); various zanies and guests add to the chaos; at the end the slightly-buffoonish-yet-patriarchal lord sets things to right, almost by accident. Plot-wise, you could easily imagine this adapted to stage or film. As a novel, though, it proceeds almost entirely through those dialogues, which don’t always move the story along. In fact, the story can come to seem an appendix to the dialogue, which is a shame, as the matter of the story is nicely-turned in its own right.

Nightmare Abbey’s a different creature in a lot of ways. Written by Peacock for Shelley as a comment on Shelley's romantic affairs, the lead’s a charmingly emo-goth take on Shelley (“He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species ... He slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves. He passed whole mornings in his study, immersed in gloomy reverie, stalking about the room in his nightcap, which he pulled over his eyes like a cowl, and folding his striped calico dressing-gown about him like the mantle of a conspirator”). He ends up having to choose between versions of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook, and an amusingly humourless Mary Godwin (Peacock thought Shelley should stick with Westbrook). It’s far more cynical than Headlong Hall, and arguably less predictable. I think it’s less perfectly structured, but the characters are more engaging, and since the dialogues are really the main features of these books, that means it feels more lively than Headlong Hall. Both books, incidentally, feature a romantic triangle between a young woman, a Shelley-analogue, and a Coleridge-analogue; the different ways the triangles resolve say something about the different spirits animating the two tales.

On the whole, both books are enjoyable. The style’s brisk, and humour still sharp and direct, and there’s an amiability to them that’s still pleasing after two centuries.

Readings — Biographia Literaria

2010-04-13T23:37:00.002-04:00

Biographia Literaria

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I’d read parts of the Biographia in a class on English Romanticism, so I was used to thinking about it as a text of literary criticism. Which it is, but in a roundabout way. The heart of the book seems to lie with philosophy, specifically Coleridge’s take on contemporary German philosophy. The question of plagiarism has swirled about this part of his writing for almost two centuries; I don’t have an opinion on that one way or the other, not knowing enough about the originals, but it does seem to me that the style and approach of the work shift substantially when Coleridge enters into a relatively technical exposition of these ideas.

That said, in general the book is a strange mishmash of things — philosophy, criticism, biography, anecdote, republished letters from years before — so a shift in style here or there is not uncharacteristic. In fact, there’s at least one part of the book which Coleridge claimed he chose not to publish, but which may in fact never have been written. It’s all very peculiar, but not, I found, peculiar enough to be consistently interesting.

I’d say further that when reading the Biographia, there’s a curiously orthodox sense to much of it, especially the philosophy, which seems to rest uneasily with the Christian belief Coleridge felt was important. I don’t mean that Coleridge was Blake’s Milton, in chains when writing of heaven; but to me there’s an almost domestic, traditional tone in his writing when he discuss his religious views, something that’s notably absent not only in the most vivid parts of this book, but in all of his greatest poetry. Coleridge at his best was one of the pre-eminent poets of the strange, and at its best this book touches that strangeness. Just not very often.

As I understand it, the book was patched together for the sake of having something to publish, and reads like it. That doesn’t mean it’s terrible, nor does it make it not worth reading; Coleridge is certainly enough of a writer, and enough of a thinker, that it at least repays the reader’s time and then some. But it does have, to me, the feel of a missed opportunity, of something less than it could have been. Which, I suppose, is something that many people feel about Coleridge in general — that his genius never quite found its fullest expression.

Readings — English Romanticism: The Human Context

2010-04-13T15:24:00.001-04:00

English Romanticism: The Human Context

by Marilyn Gaull

This is a very impressive introduction to English Romanticism and its era. Gaull gives a real sense not only of the intellectual currents of the time, but of the way people thought and felt. It’s a wide-ranging survey not only of literature, but of politics, painting, philosophy, science, and other forces that shaped those turbulent, fruitful years. Gaull’s style is brisk and authoritative, and she moves quickly and easily from one subject to another. Mostly, she works through descriptions of the lives of prominent historical figures, creating a series of characters who collectively define the time.

It’s not a perfect book. The edition I had suffered from probably the worst proofreading of any book I’ve ever read (including a bewildering insistence on referring to Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer as Melmouth). And inevitably there are a few judgements that I’d disagree with. But on the whole, it’s an incredibly valuable resource, and makes you feel the excitement of a time when great spirits on Earth were sojourning.

In the News

2010-04-13T12:32:00.005-04:00

And now, a few thoughts on a subject I know nothing about. Comments letting me know where I'm wrong are strongly encouraged.

A friend just tipped me off to a proposal to have the Pope arrested when he visits the UK in September, that he might potentially be put on trial there or in the International Criminal Court. This strikes me as ironic, in that the only international judicial organisation I can think of in the Western world before the existence of the ICC was, in fact, the Papacy.

Now, I don't know if the proposal will come to anything; similar suggestions were made to arrest George W. Bush for war crimes during a state visit to Canada, and that of course went nowhere. There seems to be a higher degree of direction here, but I don't know whether the pedophilia in the Church will be seen to amount to a crime against humanity, and doubt whether the British courts have jurisdiction over the Pope. On the other hand, as the articles note, the British did arrest Pinochet, and did issue a warrant against former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

Still, I doubt that prosecutions of heads of government will become common in the near future. I tend to think political pressure will lead to the quiet disappearance of such charges. Governments have too much incentive to do business with other governments that may or may not have committed legally questionable acts. But what happens as the near future shades into the more distant future, and a greater amount of legal precedent is set for the definition of war crimes and crimes against humanity? What happens when these things become even harder to sweep under the rug?

As human connective technology grows, as media outlets begin covering everything more intently, as organisation increases among those seeking to bring to justice states and politicians who may have committed crimes — will these sorts of prosecutions begin to succeed? Can the possibility put forward in the first article I linked to, that the powerful should be put on trial just as any citizen, come to pass?

It would be nice to think so. But what happens to international politics as a result? Note that the warrant against Livni, practically, led to the cancellation of a planned visit by her to the UK. Will there be a chilling effect on international diplomacy?

Possibly; but perhaps that would be no bad thing, if properly applied. If states that sponsor war crimes and crimes against humanity are held to account for it, perhaps it results in a lessening of their influence. Perhaps it even means states think twice about sponsoring crimes in the first place. The question really is, will statutes against those crimes not be weakened by governments and individuals seeking to give themselves as much leeway as possible?

It seems to me that if the precedents are there, then the ability to wish them away becomes reduced. If so, then the slow growth of the ability of legal institutions to effectively prosecute these crimes is appropriate -- as the effectiveness of the law increases, so (hopefully) will the ability of the courts to resist political interference. Either way, the establishment of a process by which the powerful are held to legal account can only be positive. My point is just that the institution of this process may not be quick -- but sometimes, evolution is preferable, so long as it gets there in the end.

Readings — Eric and Enid [Four Arthurian Romances]

2010-04-11T19:41:00.001-04:00

Eric and Enid

by Chrétien de Troyes

translated by William Wister Comfort

A prose adaptation of Chrétien’s four completed Arthurian romances, this book is highly readable, capturing the romance — in all senses of that word — of Chrétien’s work. Now, Comfort seems, to judge from his introduction, to have been most interested in, or saw Chrétien as most interested in, just that; the pleasing narrative, the excitement and adventure. In the past century, though (for these translations are now a century old), I have the sense that scholarship has re-examined these works, with more of an eye for social aspects and thematic coherency. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, some scholars are now calling Chrétien the inventor of the modern novel.

That last seems a bit of a stretch to me, but I do find that this book hints at psychological acuity in the stories that doesn’t always entirely come across in Comfort’s words. I don't know if that’s a function of the translation or not. I do know that the stories all broke down very nicely into a tripartite structure. And that the theme of love seems to bind the stories internally, as well as each to each (some of them, notably Yvain and Lancelot, link up on a plot level as well).

The stories themselves are excellent, as you might expect. They twist and turn, and develop in intriguing ways. There’s a wealth of imagination here, as well, and coming near the beginning of the Arthurian tradition, some things happen that you don’t expect. More to the point, there’s a feel to these stories, in Comfort’s translation, that’s quite evocative. The details of dress and heraldry are described precisely; it seems logical to presume that they contain a wealth of meaning or references that are missed by modern audiences. Or, at least, by me.

When you read works from centuries past, especially eight centuries past, you have to be aware that writers and storytellers had different conventions, and different ideas of what they were doing and how they were doing it. Certainly some aspects of narrative are consistent across human experience. But perhaps fewer than you’d think. So Comfort translated Chrétien with his own expectations in place; reading these works now, trying to be more open to different conventions, it’s tempting to try to guess at what the translator missed. But that’s ultimately pointless. The texts are the texts. Take them for what they are, and draw from them what you will. Chrétien’s tales have lasted this long; they’ll last some while further, and be reinterpreted in each age to come.

Readings — Under the Net

2010-04-11T00:34:00.001-04:00

Under the Net

by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch’s first novel, this is a polished and extraordinarily funny book. When I started it I knew Murdoch’s work only by reputation, and so was surprised, at least at first, to find a novel that seemed to owe as much to Wodehouse as Wittgenstein. But the book subtly shifts as it goes on, mirroring the growth of its protagonist — for this is a kind of bildungsroman, following a young London writer as he develops into maturity and responsibility — and reaching a depth, poignancy, and lyricism that you wouldn't necessarily expect from the early pages of dry comedy.

A.S. Byatt has suggested that Murdoch’s work is concerned with issues of representation, with the question of how much of real life can be contained in language and in a novel. Hence the title of the book, a Wittgenstein reference which nods to the difficulty of representation — Wittgenstein’s image is a bit complex, but can be thought of as referring to the resolution of a representation: The finer a net, the more points of contact with what it contains, the closer an approximation to the reality it holds. Certainly the book is concerned with representation and reality, in its main character’s writing, in the books that he translates, in film (one of the characters is an actor, another a movie producer), in politics (another character is a political agitator) ... the idea is certainly present, but in no way obtrusive. The theme and the story work together nicely, mixing in subtle ways.

There is, in fact, a tautness and density to the book that’s quite impressive, and matches the precision of its structure. But those virtues do not come at the expense of vitality. There’s a madcap energy in the book; it is farcical in the best sense. This, again, seems to me to be thematically appropriate; the use of the very formal tropes of farce points up the issue of representation, and the fidelity of prose to life. But then, to me, the book subtly undermines those formal elements, growing beyond them, becoming something greater. As a novel, I think it’s a great success; as a debut, it’s stunning.

March 2010 Reading Summary

2010-04-05T17:58:00.002-04:00

So, as noted, I didn't read as many books in March as I wanted. I read a total of nine books, two of them from a library. I added one book to the apartment. So six books down, and I'll be trying for better in April.

Readings — Deep Future

2010-03-25T16:31:00.001-04:00

Deep Future

by Stephen Baxter

This is a slim book of what might be called ‘popular cosmology’. Baxter takes a look at where the universe-at-large is going, according to the best that was known at the time of writing, and what science tells us about what’s coming up in the future. He spends some time considering possible futures of human technology, but so much is unknowable about how that’s likely to develop that he soon widely leaves this field to talk about the slow aging of the universe, and strategies for us to cope with same.

I gather Carl Sagan wrote books something like this, popular science outlining the grand scale of the universe we live in. Baxter’s used to that scale from his sf writing, and he plays with big ideas and vast reaches of time and space just as in a big-screen sf story. The writing’s not terribly sophisticated, but it is clear and non-technical while still being detailed. Overall, well-written and mind-expanding.

Readings — Nifft the Lean

2010-03-24T12:10:00.000-04:00

Nifft the Lean

by Michael Shea

A collection of fantasy short stories in the Vancian mode, characterised by elaborate diction and a decadent mood. Like Vance, the diction isn’t quite supported by a style as smooth as that of, say, Clark Ashton Smith (whose work this sort of thing otherwise recalls). On the other hand, Shea’s work is probably more intensively plotted than Smith’s, and the volume’s tied together by ‘introductions’ that help situate the stories in their subject’s overall career. There’s an abundance of imagination on display, and the sort of cheerful refusal to take itself wholly seriously that can result in characters with names like Vulvula, the Vampire Queen.

But as you might imagine, it is a bit rich. I found the whimsy of the book, along with its richness of diction, made it best absorbed in small-to-mid-size doses. Which was a bit of a problem, in that one of the stories is a long novella in which Nifft and an associate wander through Hell. It’s not a particularly clever Hell, in the sense of presenting new spiritual tortures; but it’s quite spectacular, in the sense of presenting new physical tortures and gothic imagery. Still, it does start to become repetitive, and I at least needed some time away from the story by the mid-point in order to return later with refreshed eyes.

This is actually a bit odd, in that much of what makes Shea’s style (and Vance’s style, and Smith’s style) work is its novelty. That is, what really makes them stand out is not the ostentatiousness of the words they use, but the whimsy. The unexpected word that’s not only right, but arch, and throws a new light or an ironic tint across the whole scene or story. Shea does that, but while with Smith I’ll joyfully immerse myself in his wordplay for hours at a time, Shea’s prose tends to push me out. I think this speaks to a slight difference in the type of irony he uses; a little bit less profound, or else a little bit more prone to contrast itself with reality, I think (though, oddly, his world’s more fully-developed in terms of history and geography than anything I know of by Smith). Well worth reading, then, but the ultimate effect will likely be determined by your personal reaction to Shea’s tonal choices.

Readings — The Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer

2010-03-22T15:46:00.001-04:00

The Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer

text by T.D. Barlow

This is a small book (about 12 by 18 cm) from 1948 reproducing many of Dürer’s designs, along with a helpful introduction by Barlow situating the images in the context of the times and Dürer’s development as an artist. Curiously, the selection omits Melencolia I, Knight, Death, and the Devil, and St. Jerome In His Study (though another cut of Saint Jerome is included), nor are they mentioned in the introductory text. Still, what is here is well-reproduced and clearly-printed, to my eye. It’s just a pity the book couldn’t have been a bit more thorough.

Breaking Radio Silence

2010-03-22T13:07:00.004-04:00

So of course the reason why you don’t make public resolutions is that, as my brother once pointed out to me, the universe runs on irony; and as soon as you say what your goal is, forces will conspire to make it impossible to realise. Or at least a major uphill struggle. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve been pretty ill lately, making my aim of reading thirty-one books by the end of March virtually impossible.

Still, I am feeling better now, which is good. And I suspect I’ve finally kicked some sort of infection that’s been troubling me since January. Or else the advent of spring has given me some new energy. Either way, I’m actually feeling better than I have in months. So, if not thirty-one in March, perhaps thirty in April. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, we may be living in the neighbourhood of a thieving cannibal planet.

Readings — Behold the Man

2010-03-08T18:22:00.001-05:00

Behold the Man

by Michael Moorcock

One of the stranger books I’ve read of late, the high concept of this book is simple: a London student in the 1970s takes part in a time travel experiment, and goes back to the days of Jesus — where he finds himself taking over the role of Christ. To Moorcock’s credit, he doesn’t rely on the concept alone to carry the book. It’s structured nicely, and spends much of its time taking apart the character of Karl Glogauer, its lead.

The result is one of Moorcock’s better books, I think. It’s short, focussed, and gets at a lot of material in a short space. It’s both experimental and highly disciplined. And it has to be said that Moorcock’s quite adept at using the Christ scenario to tap a kind of iconic energy. He does it with a light touch, setting up a properly inevitable climax. It’s a subversive take on the Christ story, of course, but Moorcock handles it well enough that, to me (and I’m not a Christian), it doesn’t feel exploitative. In fact, because it’s not exploitative, it is that much more powerful — compare, by contrast, something as witless as Garth Ennis’ Preacher graphic novels, and you’ll see what I mean. Overall, then, quite a success.

Readings — Lightning

2010-03-08T17:21:00.000-05:00

Lightning

by Dean Koontz

I don’t have a lot to say about this book. It has a nice hook: a man appears at crucial moments to save of the life of a girl; she grows older, he stays the same age, eventually it becomes clear that he’s a time traveller. But is he from the future, or the past? In fact, it’s the latter, and the novel’s playing with the old idea of Nazis trying to get their hands on future technology.

Still, I didn’t care for it. I found the prose flat and unengaging. The attempt to make the story fit with history seemed a bit sloppy. And there’s a passage in the book where the main character equates genocide and pacifism, which is a little strange, especially as it seems to be meant literally. So, no, on the whole, not my cup of tea.

Readings — Star of Gypsies

2010-03-08T13:50:00.002-05:00

Star of Gypsies

by Robert Silverberg

Stunningly well-written, this is a book about a King of the Gypsies in the far future, where humankind has spread among the stars and the Romani are the only people who can navigate the ships that travel from sun to sun. Yakoub, the King, abdicated some years ago; now his brutal son has taken the throne, and Yakoub must face the responsibilities he abandoned. Sentence for sentence, this is easily the finest book by Silverberg that I’ve read, and one of the finest sf books I know. There’s a wealth of invention here that recalls Lord Valentine’s Planet, but the scope is even larger, and Silverberg creates societies and planets and larger-than-life personalities in glorious profusion.

That being said, I did often feel myself a bit detached from the story. That’s due to two reasons, I think. The first is that among all the extravagant characters in the book, Yakoub never finds (or admits to) a peer. He stands head and shoulders above all the other characters in the book, if only in his account; but then, while he certainly has a self-aggrandizing streak in him, I don’t think that estimation is wrong. In the long run, this tends to make the main story of the book less than gripping — his estranged son never really seems to have a chance. Basically, Yakoub comes up with a plan to remove him, executes the plan, and the plan pretty much goes just as he figured it would. Yakoub has no real rivals, and nobody to balance him or challenge him.

The other reason I felt a bit removed from the book was Silverberg’s decision to tell much of it in flashback, unreeling Yakoub’s early life in detail. He comes up with very elegant ways to introduce the flashbacks, and they’re as well-written as the rest of the book — in fact, they probably make up the majority of the book’s text. Silverberg gives Yakoub the ability to blur past and present; he can ‘ghost’ into the past, to be present at any point in history (this strikes me as a bit under-thought, though; it’d be a great way to spy on your enemies, but neither Yakoub nor anyone else ever uses it as such). He spends much of his time, then, observing or recalling his past. Effectively, the present-day story is like the surface tension on a lake, while the main part of the book, those past years, is the depths below. The problem is that the exploration of the depths makes the surface feel a bit thin. Oddly, I wonder if the present was less developed if I might have had an easier time with the book. But then again, as I say, perhaps it’s the mix of past and present (both of them looking toward the future) that’s the real point here.

So I’m hesitant to say that the problems I had with the book are real problems. They may well be cases of assumptions I made as a reader that were wrong-headed. Certainly the writing’s gorgeous, and Yakoub’s a vivid character — warm and clever, but so arrogant he’s difficult to warm up to; accomplished and yet flawed (I don’t feel I know anywhere near enough to speak knowledgeably about how he fits into traditions of romanticised depiction of the Romani; all I can say is that on its own terms, it seems to work). The depiction of the Romani as effectively an alien race is odd (it seems to relate to events in another of Silverberg's novels, Letters From Atlantis, which I have not read), but the depiction of their history is heartfelt, if not particularly novel. Mainly, the great strength of the book is its wildness, its invention, its unpredictability, and the elegance of its writing. As such, it’s well worth reading.

Readings — An Evil Guest

2010-03-05T15:55:00.001-05:00

An Evil Guest

by Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe’s latest novel strikes me as a mixed bag, both in terms of contents and in overall effect. By ‘contents’, I mean that it includes time travel, stage musicals, musings on celebrity charisma, dread Cthulhu, and a host of other things up to and including time-travel and aliens. By ‘effect’, I mean that I’m not sure Wolfe builds an involving novel out of the whole.

The tone, for example, is engaging, but noncommittal. What seems like it should be in one spot a screwball romp out of The Sound of Music, and then in another a suspenseful edge-of-your-set noir thriller, becomes flattened into an oddly grey, rambling story which contains these things but seems to lack their flavour. The setting is ostensibly the future, practically seems more like the big city of a 1930s Hollywood film, and feels really like nothing in particular. Sure, Wolfe’s linguistic dexterity is on display, his tricks with showing only what characters see (including what they see wrongly) are there as well, and it’s a book which will reward the engaged reader more than the casual page-turner — but I don’t know whether the reward’s really that great.

The WolfeWiki suggests an alternative reading of the work which is logical, internally consistent, and yet weirdly unaffecting. Which I think is my ultimate problem with the book. It’s too detached. Much of the effect of Wolfe’s writing, one way or another, comes from keeping the reader at a certain distance. I think for this book to work, the lighter sequences would need to be more affecting, and that’d probably mean allowing the reader a bit closer in. Lacking that, I found myself uninvolved with the characters and the world.

Now, it doesn’t help that the central character is not, to my mind, terribly well-written. Cassie Casey really hearkens back to the women in those ’30s films I mentioned above, and not in a good way. It’s not that she’s flat or unintelligent, though she’s both, it’s that she’s not credible. She sounds like a movie character, which means what a bunch of men in a smoke-filled room think a spunky woman sounds like — or what they think she ought to sound like. Adam Roberts, in his thoughtful review of the book, seems to me to have it exactly right: “Casey is not a strong woman. She is a conservative’s notion of a strong woman: an "Of Queen's Gardens" woman, permitted to explore to the very edge of her pedestal but not to step down from it.”

A concern with old movies is hardly new in Wolfe’s fiction; consider There Are Doors. But while that novel was, to me, genuinely eerie and unpredictable, An Evil Guest seems to struggle more with the pulp formulas it plays with. Certain Wolfeisms seem oddly out of place. For example, his fondness for what I think of as “Thursday” figures, after G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Without giving anything away about that remarkable book, its central figure is a mysterious man, fat, cunning, and wise, who has a disturbing amount of both power and charisma, and who is perceived at the beginning of the book in a sinister light but who ends it being revealed to be something different and greater than was previously suspected. Wolfe frequently uses similar figures in his writing, some of them sinister and some of them not, some of them variations on the archetype; consider Benjamin Free in Free Live Free, or Rex von Madadh in Castleview. The point I’m getting around to is that you'd expect a figure like that — and there are two of them in this book, though they might actually be one and the same, depending on how you read it — to fit naturally with noir themes. But they don’t, really. They seem, to me, out of place; as though Wolfe hadn’t quite worked out how to make some of his recurrent imagery harmonise with the other images he was working with.

In the end, An Evil Guest seems to me more an interesting book than a good one. It’s intriguing, and worth thinking about, and moves at a relentless clip. Its language is spare and pared-down, but the dialogue is often jarringly improbable. What I suppose you can say is that for good or ill — for good and ill — it seems weirdly characteristic of Wolfe. It’s far from his best book, but it is still recognisably his.

Media Linkage

2010-03-03T20:57:00.003-05:00

Wandering around the internets, I found the Muppet Wicker Man. Which is quite brilliant. Technically, I suppose that's actually a mash-up that could have occurred back in the 70s — but it took today's modern technology (in the form of Photoshop) to make it happen. Good job, modern technology.

And the other day HBO officially announced that they're ordering nine episodes of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones. In more peculiar media announcements, there's this.

February 2010 Reading Summary

2010-03-02T18:36:00.002-05:00

Not a great February on a number of levels (but then is there such a thing?). A plumbing incident in my apartment disrupted the first half of the month, and I think the repairs brought on a nasty allergic reaction from all the plaster dust floating around. At any rate, I was groggy and generally headachy throughout much of the month, which was only partially alleviated by arguably the greatest hockey tournament in history. The upshot is that I only completed two books this month. Plus, blog posting slowed down.

Bearing that in mind, I’m going to say this: I aim to read thirty-one books in March, and update this thing every day of the month from this point forward. I'd like to start talking about other topics here as well, but we'll see how that goes.

Readings — Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn

2010-02-23T19:14:00.001-05:00

Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn

edited by Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey

This is the second of the Thieves’ World anthologies, the books that essentially created the shared-world writing form, in which different writers set their stories in the same fictional universe. There had been predecessors of a sort, in the form of things like the King Arthur stories or H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos — and of course Marvel and DC Comics had been doing this sort of thing for ages — but these are the books that really created shared-world writing, as we have come to know it, in print. I read the first six or eight or so when I was very young; let’s say, oh, ten or twelve. A couple of years ago I happened to pick up a used copy of the first one; rereading it, I was surprised, and impressed, to see how much it was of a piece with traditional swords-and-sorcery pulp adventure. My recollection, shaped by the later books, was of something more inbred and elaborate, with more graphic sexuality and gender-based themes — and an annoying tendency to soap opera and excessively powerful characters.

You can see that sort of thing beginning to develop in this second book. The stories aren’t bad, as such, but the apparently-immortal character of Tempus seems strangely out of place in the low-magic setting. Which may be why series editor Robert Asprin tried (unsuccessfully, as I recall) to write him out in the book’s last story. At any rate, you can see a tendency to angst in the stories revolving around Tempus, while the earlier stories in the book seem to me much more in the vein of Frtiz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories. Which, given the choice, I prefer.

Overall, these are competent pulp adventure stories, probably better as individual pieces rather than as a sequence. The shared-world aspect is useful, but not dominant; you certainly get the sense that anything could happen at any point — wars starting, Gods descending, you name it. Which is really the problem. If you try to look at the book as a unit, it starts and stops in peculiar ways and shifts from character to character in an inelegant manner. What you gain in unpredictability is offset in shapelessness. And one of the virtues of good pulp is cleverness in form (not brilliance, necessarily, but a clever play with plot structure). I think, all in all, that this and the first anthology were interesting experiments, but more notable in conception than execution.

Apparently, I'm In A Book

2010-02-22T22:46:00.003-05:00

So I wanted to check if an article I wrote for a web site ten years ago was still online. The piece was a profile of Vancouver rock band 54-40, for The Rough Guide to Rock. Which was a sort of early crowd-sourced site, as I recall; fans were encouraged to write in about their favourite bands, with the possibility that accepted articles might see print if the site ever published a book version (there might have been a ten dollar payment or some such involved; at this point, I can't remember). The site doesn't seem to be around, but I guess the book did get published. And I do seem to be on the list of contributors, though Google Books won't let me preview the 54-40 entry.

On another note, I find I've also been cited as a source in Wikipedia for an article I wrote previewing the last Worldcon. Which is surreal in a way I can't quite define.

Readings — Zastrozzi

2010-02-22T18:03:00.003-05:00

Zastrozzi

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Shelley’s gothic novel written at age eighteen suffers in comparison to his future wife’s gothic novel written when she was eighteen. The latter, after all, is one of the classics of the form, and arguably one of the great modern myths (depending on how one defines myth). So there’s a sense in which Zastrozzi is most useful as a way to throw the greatness of Frankenstein into stark relief. Comparatively, Zastrozzi is flat, and its prose more mannered. It never really touches on the primal fears that Frankenstein does, and seems much more of its era. Largely a violent soap opera, filled with lies and stabbings, its plot moves in fits and starts, and its conception of character is broad and simple.

But it’s not unentertaining, if you like the gothic. Specifically, if you like early gothic — Ann Radcliffe-style gothic, which was light on supernatural events but heavy on crumbling castles, sublime scenery, and villainous Byronic figures in the south of Europe conducting elaborate vendettas. It has been said that the gothic novel, in its original form, was in part defined by its anti-Catholic bias, its exoticising of Catholic societies, and you can see that in Zastrozzi’s wild Italian killers. That said, anti-Catholicism doesn’t seem to be a focus of the book, the way it seems a conscious interest of Maturin in Melmoth the Wanderer. In fact, other than the introduction of the evil Inquisition, there’s surprisingly little anti-Catholic sentiment here from such a noted atheist as Shelley.

You could probably read the book as an interesting contrast to Shelley’s own Cenci as well as a contrast to Frankenstein, or to Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest. Like The Cenci, it’s about thwarted love and heightened emotion, with aristocratic Italian characters. On a technical level, you could probably argue that it’s better than Radcliffe's Romance in its dramatic technique, and particularly in its concision — the book presents itself as a fragment, a favourite technique of the Romantic era as it is now, and so begins in the middle of things with background filled in along the way. It’s almost terse, in structure if not in style, and gains a real power from the extreme compression with which the material is treated. At its best, it’s almost hallucinatory in its intensity. Which is a good and fitting thing in a true gothic novel.

Readings — First Folio

2010-02-22T14:33:00.002-05:00

First Folio: A Little Book of Folio Forewards

No editor is listed for this volume, which is a collection of forewards written by various authors for books reprinted by the Folio Society. Catherine Taylor introduces the book, which seems an engagingly post-modern exercise, being an introduction to a series of introductions. The whole project recalls Alasdair Gray’s The Book of Prefaces, though it doesn’t have the high ambitions.

The value for me lies in the quality of the writers whose prefaces are being reprinted. Those include Iain Sinclair (examining the geography of The War of the Worlds), PeterAckroyd (reconstructing the life of Dickens to shed light on Oliver Twist), and A.S. Byatt (considering the nature of fairy tales in reflecting on Andrew Lang’s Pink Fairy Book). Many others of these brief essays are intriguing, such as Fergal Keane’s appreciation of David Thomson’s Woodbrook, or delightfully unexpected, such as Philip Pullman’s celebration of The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Really, only John Sutherland’s piece on Slaughterhouse-Five is actively poor — Sutherland’s an example of the sort of Vonnegut critic one hears of, who feels the need to absolve Vonnegut of the sin of having committed science fiction, himself knowing nothing about the genre. Particularly egregious, and frankly unjust, is Sutherland’s describing Vonnegut’s character of SF writer Kilgore Trout as “that archetypal SF writer who, like others of his craft, has great ideas but can’t write worth a damn”; leave aside the description of SF as a craft and not an art, leave aside the fact that (for better or worse) many SF writers were focussing on ideas and not prose style, and consider that Sutherland follows this statement with a note in which he says: “It is assumed that Kilgore Trout ... was based on the actual writer Theodore Sturgeon.” Now, I’m not the world’s biggest Sturgeon fan, but to say, even by implication, that Sturgeon “can’t write worth a damn” is simply wrong on the face of it. Granted that Vonnegut’s acknowledged the connection; but the point is that here Sutherland is calling Sturgeon, a conscious literary artist, a hack. It’s the sort of whopping error that doesn’t just leave the critic looking foolish, but calls into question his reliability as a whole.

(For the curious, Vonnegut himself sums up science fiction, and his relationship thereto, in this only mildly outdated essay.)

Thankfully, this sort of thing is not otherwise present in the book. And there is a lot that’s intriguing, such as Roy Foster’s dicussion of Yeats’ collected poems, or Richard Holmes brooding on his own life and Robert Louis Stevenson’s travel writing. So while there may be no outright revelatory re-imaginings of the experience of a classic text, there is a lot of illumination of lives and times, and much careful thought. Which is what makes a useful foreword.

Readings — Seven Ages of Paris; Paris: A Secret History

2010-02-16T14:50:00.000-05:00

Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

Paris: A Secret History

by Andrew Hussey

Superficially, these two books appear quite different. But read a little ways into both of them, and you soon see that the core of them is much the same. There’s a slight difference of perspective, yes, and they do in the end do slightly different things; but they’re recognisably telling the same story.

That, of course, is the story of Paris. Horne’s book appears to aim, if not at greater authoritativeness, at least at presenting a more traditional view of the city. Hussey’s more conscientious about digging out opposing voices and counter-currents in the flow of history. Surprisingly, though, the difference seems to me to be not much. I think that’s because the books have to cover history on such a grand scale — well over a thousand years — that differences tend to fade next to the shared substance.

That being said, the books do have differences. Horne chooses to make his Paris a key agent in the story of France, and so provides a pocket history of the country as a whole alongside the story of the city. Hussey, on the other hand, sees his Paris in somewhat the same way Peter Ackroyd sees his London: a metropolis suspicious of its rulers, less a microcosm of the country beyond its gates than a counterweight. Hussey’s also far more sedulous about linking past to present, discussing themes of the city’s past in light of its present, describing present-day Paris as a continuation or contrast to its past, and speaking to relevant contemporary Parisians.

Both books are well-written, Horne’s style more magisterial and Hussey’s more immediate. Both have a tendency to focus on recent history in more detail than more distant times, which in sweeping histories is understandable and usual and, to me, always disappointing. I’d say that Hussey’s book is much better on postwar Paris than Horne’s, which probably gives it a slight edge if I had to pick one or another. Rather than do that, though, I’d say both are fine books, both worth reading, and just different enough to make reading both volumes worth doing.

Readings — The Books of the South, the Return of the Black Company, and the Many Deaths of the Black Company

2010-02-15T14:53:00.003-05:00

The Books of the South

The Return of the Black Company

The Many Deaths of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

The second through fourth collection of Cook’s Black Company novels features the titular hard-bitten mercenary company heading into the south of their world in a search for their origins — which we find are darker than even they might have suspected. Cook broadens his storytelling techniques here, playing with new perspectives and voices; he also introduces a host of new cultures into his world. These things help keep the momentum of the series going, preventing the sag that often afflicts long fantasy epics, until quite near the end of the fourth collection.

And it’s questionable even then whether that sag isn’t deliberate. Cook catches a kind of entropic feel in the story — it grinds on, through battle after battle, death after death, until almost without realising it the Company (or what’s left of it) has run out of enemies. But they still have promises to keep, and, indeed, miles to go before they sleep. It does feel like it captures something of the weariness of the surviving company members after a long and brutal campaign. Still, the relative laxness of the plot, with groups of characters making unusually bad tactical choices, makes it seem like the series is ending at just the right point — on the brink of a potential decline.

(Incidentally, the last book in the second collection, The Silver Spike, is a one-off that shows what happens in the north after the Company heads south. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t pretty. The story's a good exercise in balancing story threads and multiple tones, though. The odd thing is that despite the extravagant and often sudden plot developments, the most difficult bit to swallow is that one of the characters, notable for being particularly adept at violence even among the Company, twice gets his ass handed to him by a character with no particular military or martial training.)

All that said, in general Cook seems to expand his aims and techniques throughout the series. For example, for first two or three omnibuses, the world of the Black Company is a world of louts. That’s what gives it its charm, though it also comes to seem a limitation. You can say that there’s a kind of blue-collar ethos to most of the characters, sure, but the books never present a credible picture of somebody who lives for the intellect — not even when a wizard’s the POV character. The closest you get to something like that are scheming politicians. After a while, you do start to notice the absence; granted that the Company is pretty much the exact opposite of anything civilised or intellectual, you begin to wonder whether there’s something missing here, some alternative unexplored. Something that might cast the Company into starker relief. So when some scholars are introduced as minor characters in the first book of the last omnibus, it’s refreshing. Of course the Company doesn’t know what to make of them, and manipulates and uses them as they do everything else around them — but they’re there, and credible, and help broaden the world.

But the most notable way Cook plays about with his world is through point-of-view. Different books in the series are narrated, or compiled, by different annalists in the company; the story works itself out in ways such that we come to understand how the annalists can gather the information that makes it into the books. Now, the annalists don’t have voices that are tremendously different one from another — a few minor differences in vocabulary, most notably. But that works, because it reinforces the idea of the brotherhood of the Company, of a group mentality that shapes the individual perspective and personality. The annalists also compare notes with each other, and critique each other’s work, which helps bring out the individual differences while also bringing a charming self-awareness.

At any rate, Cook’s writing is terse, and moves like a shot. The overall darkness of the work is leavened by an appropriate black humour. This is the kind of writing that’s good enough that you think it understates things somehow to say it’s a great adventure story. But that’s what this is: some of the best adventure writing I’ve read.

Readings — The Golden

2010-02-11T14:29:00.001-05:00

The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

At a convocation of aristocratic vampires in a vast castle in Europe, a girl bred for generations to serve as a blood sacrifice is found dead, torn apart. A newly-converted vampire, a former inspector in the Paris police, must find her murderer.

This sounds simple enough; the merit of the book is that Shepard consistently pushes every element of the story into more elaborate, more gothic, more sensual, more sublime detail than you might imagine. Start with vampire lore; his vampires don’t just burn up in sunlight, they have illuminations, and die ranting out prophecy. In becoming a vampire, you don’t just die; you pass through Blood Judgement, into Mystery, and then (perhaps) return. Or consider his setting: Castle Banat is a Gormenghast-like edifice, apparently the size of a mountain, containing massive shadowy gulfs, sprawling libraries, and mazes of secret passages. All of it based on Piranesi’s Carceri drawings, and partaking of that hallucinatory quality.

Which last drawings seem to me to suggest the book’s themes; as the Carceri drawings illuminate a fantastical prison, so the book’s main characters come to an end by leaving the castle behind. It’s a kind of vampiric bildungsroman, as we follow Shepard’s undead inspector through a series of encounters which grow progressively more outré and which lead him into increasingly metaphysical terrain. These things change him, but not always in a way which is immediately obvious in terms of character. Overall, though, you can see the progression: he loses his connection to the human world, he becomes increasingly heedless of others, he generally becomes more wicked. But if this is intended, the climax betrays this progression; not that he has any turn of heart, but simply that this tendency toward the psychopathic is given no clear way to manifest.

Discussion of the book often centres about its elaborate style, and I’ve seen the name Clark Ashton Smith invoked a couple of times. To me, it doesn’t read quite as smoothly or as extravagantly as that; I’d go more for Jack Vance, who anyway is not a million miles away from Smith stylistically. And it is quite taut, moving swiftly despite its extravagance of vocabulary and sentence structure. My concern is that I don’t really see the link between style and theme. Style and setting, style and plot, yes, certainly. It’s a gothic style for a gothic tale. But what’s the tale about? On the one hand, by the end, the European vampiric aristocracy, the castle/prison, and the Patriarch who rules both these things, are all abandoned. On the other, it appears a new vampiric colonialism is about to be born. So the political angle seems mixed. Perhaps that’s the point; that power and evil are necessary companions, that power always corrupts. Certainly even the best of the vampires are needlessly brutal and cruel.

A detective story can be about truth, and the search for same; it also can be a way to bring an investigator into contact with a world, giving a character a reason to go from point A to B to C to meet a series of interesting individuals. The Golden certainly follows the latter course. Its mystery is cursory, and committed by the person you suspect early on; and there isn’t really a series of clues suggesting a logical deduction of a chain of events, so much as a lucky stumbling-upon of large arrows pointing in a single direction. The plot, then, is not the point. But the investigator’s motive for solving the crime seems unclear, if not absent; he risks his life (or unlife) repeatedly, but there’s not much of a sense of desperation. There’s the sense that he’s on one of those tours fantasy characters take, shuttling around the world, occasionally getting involved in some episode of violence or another, reaching ultimately some sort of conclusion you can see looming off in the distance from quite a ways away. Still, that being said, The Golden is at least an enjoyable tour. I’m not sure whether it’s ultimately enlightening, but it is definitely engrossing.

Readings — The Golden Helix

2010-02-11T13:11:00.002-05:00

The Golden Helix

by Theodore Sturgeon

I want to start off by saying that this is a good book. That said, this collection of Sturgeon’s favourites among his short stories draws heavily on tales from the 1950s, and to me largely reads that way. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though it left me personally cold. I find there’s a specific style and sensibility to American writing in the 1950s, especially commercial writing; there’s an odd balance between a desire for directness of address on the one hand and a tendency to conventionalisation on the other. So, for example, you find attempts to write out of a street argot, but the language lacks obscenities and sounds — to my ears — stilted.

More significantly, there’s an attempt, particularly I think in SF of the era, to depict a humanistic world, in which people overcome their differences through communication and learn how practically to live together. It’s liberalism in a very genial, non-political, form; indeed, it’s a liberalism that tends to undermine politics and political viewpoints — if people end up in agreement the more they communicate, then clearly the differences in ideology were never that significant. I find this liberalism difficult to accept, even when it’s well-written (and Sturgeon does write well); I don’t think people are all fundamentally alike, I don’t think disputes can all be solved by communication, and I do think there are problems in the human psyche with the drive for power.

(To give a concrete example of what I mean: One of the stories, “The Skills of Xanadau”, has to do with a paradisiac society on an alien world. Except, to me, it’s an unconvincing paradise. People are unconcerned with privacy, and go around almost naked; so how does that work with the human sex drive? I dunno. The story’s curiously sexless. Or take “And Now the News”, which ends up being driven by a man’s exasperation with the news presenting a constant parade of “damn foolishness,” which includes “people all the time pushing people around” and “Everybody hungry for a fast buck”. To me, calling these things — examples of the will-to-power, if you like — foolish is simply evading them, dismissing them without understanding them. Without understanding why humans act this way, and considering whether they’re a major part of the human condition. It’s the limit of that liberal viewpoint I’m trying to identify.)

I’m painting here with a broad brush, and I don’t want to say that that’s the only thing going on in these stories. As I say, Sturgeon’s technically a good writer. He writes in a range of different styles; probably the best story in the book, “The Man Who Lost the Sea”, plays with point-of-view and creates a memorable, hard voice. His prose is always readable, and set with memorable images. Notably, Sturgeon most often seems a tale-teller in these stories; there aren’t any obvious oral story-telling tricks, but the sense of a narrator’s personality is very strong even in the third-person stories. They’re good pieces. They happen not to touch me. Your mileage may vary.

Readings — Elantris

2010-02-10T14:05:00.000-05:00

Elantris

by Brandon Sanderson

According to the cover of this book, Orson Scott Card has called it “the finest novel of fantasy to be written in many years.” I really don’t understand why. It’s not a terrible book. It does what it does, tell a fantasy adventure story, and does it reasonably well. But its prose is gravely ordinary, the political world it creates is perplexing, subplots are left hanging (no future books seem to be planned), and characters are flat and unsurprising. It’s an efficient book, and people who like this sort of thing will like it, but I’d have no problem thinking of any number of finer fantasy novels in recent years.

The basic story has to do with the eponymous city of Elantris, once the centre of a powerful kingdom, struck down ten years ago by some kind of curse or blight. Its glory is dead and decayed, a parody of what it was, and its citizens, once elf-like beings of great magical power, are now zombies who cannot be killed and feel pain eternally until their hurts cause them to sink into catatonia. These Elantrians are not necessarily those born in the city; in fact, humans who live in the surrounding lands are unpredictably ‘elevated’ to become Elantrians. That was great when being an Elantrian meant becoming a powerful wizard; not great when it means becoming a cursed zombie. So the new Elantrians are forced into exile in the ruined city, where they’re left to rot with no food or fresh water. Oh, and meanwhile, an evil theocratic empire is planning to add the kingdom formerly ruled by Elantris to its domains.

The story unfolds through the points-of-view of three characters. Raoden is a prince of Arelon, the land Elantris once ruled; as the book begins, he’s just become an Elantrian, and so is exiled to the zombie city, where he sets to work building a community and trying to find a way to reverse the damage done to Elantris. Hrathen is a priest of the theocratic empire, trying to convert Arelon before his masters sweep in to invade; the idea seems to be that he starts off as a villain, but circumstances conspire so that he’s working with the good guys by the end of the book. Sarene is Raoden’s fiancé, a princess of a neighbouring country who comes to Arelon to marry Raoden only to find him gone (his father’s hidden his true fate, so everybody believes him dead.).

I found Raoden a bit bland on the page for someone as charismatic as he’s supposed to be; and he builds his new society with surprising ease. Moreover, he has a habit of not telling certain other characters, notably Sarene, certain vital bits of information — such as his true identity — until it’s particularly dramatic. Hrathen’s a bit of a muddle; the early chapters which establish him don’t really set him up as an effective character, as he stumbles around in a not-particularly-intimidating fashion and is generally a fanatical priest out of central casting. Then he undergoes an ordeal, and is retroactively revealed to have an interesting backstory. Sarene, meanwhile, suffers from a galloping case of spunkyprincessitis. Symptoms include being an intelligent liberated (but not sexually liberated) princess in a patriarchal and patrilineal society who is unmarried due to her independent spirit; nevertheless having other characters, including the priest of the male-dominated religion, fall immediately in love with her or otherwise treat her with constant affection and deference; having a romantic interest (Raoden) who is the nicest and most intelligent male character in the book but who she nevertheless (in a case of mistaken identity) at one point physically fights and defeats; being faced with a stupid king/father figure who at first is intimidating but who she immediately and comprehensively gets the better of when a confrontation occurs; and, most crucially, meeting no real opposition and living in a world which generally unfolds in such a way that things go easy on her. For example, easily besting a high-ranking priest of a religion not her own in a public theological dispute over doctrine — because he wasn’t expecting her questions, you see.

So it may be fairly said that I had some problems with the book. On the flip side, the best thing about the book, its readability, is not something that I can easily illustrate. I can’t even really use a quotation to show it; the quality I’m talking about is not something that you can see in a short passage, it’s something that becomes apparent as you read the book, and turn pages, and turn pages, and it’s easier to keep reading than to look away, and the pages flip by and you realise the thing’s moving you along faster and faster. This is nothing to be sneezed at, this quality. It’s an aspect to prose that I rarely see mentioned, and never quantified. It’s got something to do with rhythm and diction, though the drawback may be excessive simplicity. At its extreme, it makes the Harry Potter books bestsellers. Elantris isn’t quite at that level, but this is the sort of thing we’re talking about: a smoothly-written pop fantasy. It does what it does, and there you go.

I just think there’ve been better books written in recent years.

Readings — Reluctant Voyagers

2010-02-10T12:13:00.000-05:00

Reluctant Voyagers

by Élisabeth Vonarburg

translated by Jane Brierley

This is the story of a woman in an alternate-universe Montréal who begins to have strange visions, and embarks on what turns out to be a quest into the north of Québec to uncover the truth behind her world. It’s a book dense with images and speculation, but at the same time presents a fast-paced narrative.

You can look at the book from a number of different angles. As being about identity, for example. Or about the mediation of differing realities. Or about views of deity. Or about gender. Or how these things interrelate. Published in 1995, it’s tempting to view it as a creative response to the political tensions of Québec at the time. You have Separatists (in the English translation; I don’t know what term was used in the original French) who have nothing to do with Québec sovereignty as we know it; you have suspicion of a Canadian government nothing like our Canada’s; you have a tense language situation nothing like our own. The ending of the book has largely to do with the peaceful resolution of a longstanding quarrel between a couple who have certain differences but nevertheless have more in common with each other than with anyone or anything else. So ... there are certain resonances, one might say.

I thought the book was exceptional and rewarding. Vonarburg’s writing is tight, direct, and yet also resonant. If science-fiction can be understood as visionary literature for the modern world, then Reluctant Voyagers is one of the more successful visions I’ve read.

Readings — In Conquest Born

2010-02-09T13:13:00.002-05:00

In Conquest Born

by C.S. Friedman

A melodrama, this, a soaring, galactic melodrama that resembles nothing so much as a distillation of the 80s oeuvre of Chris Claremont transposed into a space-opera setting. You’ve got your angry super-competent female lead; your brutal yet not unsympathetic male counterpart; a seemingly-destined love that goes nowhere you’d expect; forced-sounding dialogue; complex pseudo-espionage sub-plots ... even issues with dominance and control. Above all, it’s written in prose that, while effective, recalls the emotionally-overwrought tone of Claremont in his prime; so imagine Claremont writing a Star Trek novel, and you’re halfway there.

It’s not unfun, if you like that sort of thing, but it is a bit wearying. It moves like a shot, and there’s a decent level of invention in it. But it gets a bit wrapped up in the details of its own universe and there I go talking about Claremont again. Well ... for better or worse, it’s unlike X-Men in that the book doesn’t focus on a group, but stays pretty tightly on its two main opposing characters. And having two super-competent characters in opposition to each other, alternately doing each other down, makes for an intriguing twist on standard adventure fare where it’s one hero and perhaps an almost-as-competent villain. So it keeps the attention. What more is there to say? People who like this sort of thing will like it a lot.

Readings — Footfall

2010-02-08T09:05:00.003-05:00

Footfall

by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

This is not by any honest reckoning a good book. But that’s almost okay; I’ve never read anything more cheerfully disinterested in being a good book. This is a book that wants to tell a story about humanoid elephants invading the Earth, and by God that’s what you’re going to get, complete with heroic Americans, rugged survivalists, group-thinking commies, and at least one plucky military heroine struggling with her own sexuality. So, you know, it is what it is, and it burbles along with unflagging narrative drive, and it ends when the bad guys are defeated, and not one moment past that.

The characters are bland and undistinguishable. There’s an attempt at providing a cross-section of (American) society reacting to the invasion; now that we’re in the twenty-first century, and all, it’s striking how thoroughly white (and Northern-European white) that cross-section is. The prose isn’t engaging enough to really keep your interest on its own, but Niven and Pournelle are experienced and professional enough that it never really becomes bad enough to drive you away. The plot is sharp, but there’s something of a lack of real science-fictional sense of wonder. Overall, though, the book does what it does. If you’re looking for a pleasant, undemanding tale of alien invasion, and don’t care if you’re reading a good book or not, this is the one for you.

Readings — Avengers of the New World

2010-02-08T08:33:00.003-05:00

Avengers of the New World

by Laurent Dubois

I read this book several months ago for an article I wrote about Toussaint L’Ouverture. It’s a highly-readable narrative account of Haitian independence, from the first uprisings in 1791 through to the country's formal winning of freedom from France over a dozen years later. Dubois has a strong feel for character and incident, and he makes a highly-complex story surprisingly clear, illuminating the way in which factions refuse to be reduced to easy labels.

He also situates Haiti’s story within the overall narrative of Western history, showing its links to the progress of Enlightenment ideals and democracy. I think it’s this aspect that makes the book stick in the mind, especially in light of recent events in Haiti. Without being a propaganda piece, it makes a clear and precise statement for the importance of the country, establishing what its history gives the world.

Haiti’s story is a story of people of three continents, really — the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Dubois makes that clear, and shows how these different groups and different individuals with different perspectives bounced off each other and came to form some kind of whole. That’s a valuable accomplishment, and not an easy one.

Are there difficulties with the book? Sure, since it’s a difficult subject. Dubois has to abandon chronological order at several points to explain one theme or another; that’s obviously not uncommon in historical writing, but I don’t know if it’s always for the best here. It has a tendency to feel, if not exactly vague, at least abstract. Generally, I would have liked to see more a bit more concrete narrative, precise outlines of L’Ouverture’s military campaigns, for example, rather than quick mentions of his brilliance. That said, it would have made for a much longer book, and might have distracted from the points Dubois was making.

Of course it’s impossible right at this moment to think of this book and not think of Haiti’s current situation (reading about a terrible battle around Jacmel, and then seeing that the city is being used by Canadian forces as their headquarters, is oddly sobering). But I don’t know that there’s a direct connection. The story Dubois presents is a human story, men (and very few women) dealing with other men. There’s not much to do with threats of the natural world. The book also gives us a story of, essentially, empowered people; it is in a sense the story of a people coming to power. The nature of the earthquake seems to have been an overthrowing of human agency (certainly the narrative I've seen in North American news reports has focussed on relief efforts from other countries). I suppose the only point I can think to make is that no such disaster can overthrow or obliterate history. Dubois establishes (for those who did not already know) that Haiti’s history is not merely colourful and dramatic, but important.

Readings — The Realm of Prester John

2010-02-04T23:39:00.002-05:00

The Realm of Prester John

by Robert Silverberg

Silverberg, probably best known as a science-fiction and fantasy writer, also has a long list of historical non-fiction books to his credit. This one’s about the Christian King in the Middle East, whom medieval Europeans believed would give them victory over the Muslims who had taken the Holy Land. Guess what? He didn’t exist. How the idea of Prester John took hold, and what fragments of reality underlay the myth that developed, is what this remarkable book charts.

Silverberg covers a lot of ground here — almost five hundred years of history, and a sort of widening gyre that ultimately takes in large parts of three continents. You can’t pack that much into a book without strong writing and structuring skills, as well as a strong command of your sources. His research seems strong, and his ability to evoke the different eras and societies he writes about is superb.

Perhaps most suprising, at least to me, is the extended section toward the end of the book which follows the Portugese involvement in Ethiopia in the sixteenth century, a function of the last belated belief in Prester John. It’s a detailed, intriguing presentation of a part of history that’s not discussed all that much. But it’s only one of the cultures, one of the points of contact between cultures, that Silverberg charts; indeed, one might say that the Prester John myth was born out of a kind of interference pattern where different cultures met and failed to communicate. Medieval Catholics and post-Genghis Mongols, most notably, but also, say, early Christians and Indian kings, or romancers and quasi-historians from across centuries whose imaginings were, bit by bit, integrated into the story of the kingdom ruled by the wise Prester John.

There’s probably an inelegant comparison to be made between the realm of Prester John — said to be filled with wonders and gems and gold — and the riches of The Realm of Prester John — which is inarguably filled with narrative gold and colour. But stories and character aside, this seems to me (though I am not an expert in this field) a well-researched book. The version I have is lacking in footnotes, an omission which grieves me deeply; but Silverberg does not stint on quoting from primary sources, and so the book moves along with the rhythms of medieval prose, and thus also of medieval thought. Which helps the reader, almost subliminally, enter the mindset in which kings who command miracles may be imagined, and indeed may be believed to exist.

Readings — The Complete Book of Swords

2010-02-03T23:55:00.001-05:00

The Complete Book of Swords

by Fred Saberhagen

On the one hand, this is a collection of a solid three-book fantasy adventure series. On the other hand, it’s an infernally frustrating piece of writing that never quite rises up to its potential.

You can’t really fault it. The ambition, or lack of same, of the series is plain enough from the beginning. It’s readable, exciting, and that’s it and that’s enough. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. The setting’s vivid in its little details, annoyingly vague or peculiar in its large scale. Names are generic, even everyday; Gods are (mostly) named for Greco-Roman myth, and it’s not clear why that is. But the plots are engaging, and vary in nature from book to book, and the scale does open out a bit as the series goes on.

But, damn, what a concept Saberhagen came up with. Those Gods created a dozen magical swords, somehow more powerful than the Gods themselves. Each sword has its own distinctive power, which tends to operate according to specific rules. And each sword has a name. So Coinspinner brings good luck — but tends to vanish when its needed most. Inevitably, the series becomes in part about the discovery of the secrets of the swords. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. There is, really, quite a lot that’s right.

In fact, the constant presence and mystery of the swords gives the series a real touch of mythic power, of wonder; and makes you wish the three books were better equipped to take advantage. You can’t help but think that the machinations of Gods and the mystery of deep magic and the resonant imagery of the swords should have added up to something truly memorable. Instead, there’s just ... a solid fantasy adventure series. Nothing wrong with that at all.

You just wish it had been a bit more right.

Readings — Castleview

2010-02-02T23:25:00.002-05:00

Castleview

by Gene Wolfe

I’ve noted before that Wolfe is a master of playing about with perceptions, those of his characters, and those of his readers. This novel sees those gifts in full effect, in telling a tale that’s largely about perception, and about the parts of a story we don't see. In essence, this is a narrative about a seasonal war of faerie taking place in the near vicinity of a midwestern town; but exactly what’s happening, and exactly what the stakes are, are left deliberately vague, lost in the interstices between the overlapping awarenesses of the point-of-view characters.

The novel follows the shape of a familiar myth, then, a seasonal conflict, an archetypal battle between kings, between the day and night, the summer and the winter ... though it’s not quite clear who’s playing what role. The small-town setting is almost too real, the characters too purely human, to be reduced to bit parts in a romance. Or, put another way, they're too large; from one point of view they're one character, from another another. Still, the structure of the myth takes over, and guides the story along; the characters are caught up in it, each seeing only a part of what’s actually happening. The story works because the characters are fundamentally believable — simple, many of them, but each with their passions and interests and emotions and moments of transcendence.

The mythic apparatus is well-handled, as are the full-on incursions of fantasy. Wolfe modulates, as it were, the fully human and fully fantastic by including certain of his own archetypal characters — notably, a Merlin-like wise man figure (or is he Mephisto-like?), seeming now malevolent and now benign. It all comes together elegantly at the end, and leaves you with much to think on; much to try to understand.

Readings — Objects of Worship

2010-02-01T22:22:00.003-05:00

Objects of Worship

by Claude Lalumière

Claude’s a colleague and friend, so of course this review isn’t going to be impartial by any rational standard. I mean, I do think this is an overall excellent collection of stories. I tend to prefer the super-hero stories to the zombie stories, but then that’s my attitude toward stories in general. So make of that what you will.

That being said, there are a couple of observations that occurred to me. One is that the title of the collection is very well-chosen; the stories tend to revolve around beliefs and Gods. If not Gods, then Heroes, super or otherwise. Literally, objects of worship. The point I want to make about that is this: usually, in writing about these subjects, writers tend to delve into myth. Obviously, there’s some of that here — but the stories here are at least as much about ritual. Rituals of worship, of eating, of hunting and loving and death. The myth that provides the text for the ritual act may or may not be present, characters may or may not take on mythic roles (the son succeeding the father, the child who renovates — makes new — the world), but the rite itself seems to me to provide the focus for most of these stories. Which in turn means a concentration on the physical, the visceral, the body, in a way that much myth-centred fiction, especially fantasy fiction, seems to me to avoid.

The second thing, linked to the above, is that most of these stories derive power from a deliberate incompleteness in their form. Of course a story is defined as much by what it leaves out, or leaves for the imagination of the readers, as what it gives explicitly; but I find a recurring structural principle here to be the sense of partial understanding of a text. The stories give us a glimpse of meaning, a hint of a world, a suggestion of background. We have the rite, but maybe not the myth; or we can deduce the myth from the rite, instead (as is more usual in fantasy, I think) of the reverse. This limited-information technique lends itself to horror — the lack of total understanding, the suspension of normative physical laws, the sense of being caught in something, indeed the inchoate sense of something greater than the quotidian which has overwritten reality, a something which defies expression in words and therefore is not put into words. But, crucially, all those things also may apply to the experience of the divine.

So that is what we have here, I think; stories aiming at unmediated connection with the source of myth. ‘Unmediated’ not only because the myth itself is not present, being for us to construct (so the stories force us or elevate us into the position of mythographers, being therefore mythopoeic in the purest sense), but also because of the absence of any personified sense of deity. There’s no actual God or Gods at the core of the fiction; only what you might call the sense of the divine, but what you could also call (if you are of a materialist bent) a perception of the scope of the universe. One could view this as a transcendence of the human; or one could view it as the culmination of the human. Either way, to return to my first point: that sense is the opposite of what is traditionally considered mystical, because it is of the body. It is, literally, sensuous. Overall, then, there’s a sensibility here unlike any others I can think of.

January Reading Summary

2010-02-01T22:20:00.002-05:00

For January, 2010, I completed six books; and added four to the apartment. Not a great start, but all things considered, not so bad. Even if I am only up by two when all's said and done.

Readings — The Magicians

2010-01-31T23:08:00.000-05:00

The Magicians

by Lev Grossman

At first glance it seems almost precious: a novel about a young man who’s inducted into a secret university for wizards, and the schooling he gets there, and then also about the series of children’s books that inspired said young man with a love for magic and what he finds out about them. But this isn’t a sterile exercise in post-modernism. Grossman’s characters live, his prose catches real magic — something that’s a necessity for a book about magic, and a book about books of magic — and there’s a fertility of imagination and invention that convinces. The imagery of clocks and fountains, suitably redolent of Narnia, is worked nicely into the overall structure of the book.

Where the book seems to have a problem, in fact, is in the excessive debt to C.S. Lewis. While the structure of it seems like a parody of Harry Potter, with sexually and pharmaceutically aware college-age students in place of oddly asexual high-schoolers, in fact the heart of it tries to enter into a dialogue with Lewis and the Christian beliefs that are at the heart of the Narnia books. The difficulty is, Grossman’s characters don’t really carry the philosophical or experiential heft that they need to really struggle in a meaningful way with Lewis. They don’t have the intellectual equipment or life experiences necessary to engage with him. That could be intentional; this would then be the ultimate parody of children’s fantasy, a story in which the protagonists are too small to really matter, and, only half-aware of their lack, throw trivial complaints against the architect of their destiny. But it seems unlikely.

The magcians who we follow in the book seem meant to represent people of talent, if not of genius. But none of them seem to think deeply; none of them seem aware of, or moved by, art or philosophy or religion or anything else on a profound level. In that sense, the central conceit of Grossman’s book works against itself: These characters are all linked by their love of a fictional series of children’s books, but none of them seem to have the mental or spritual equipment to move beyond that. I don’t mean leaving children’s books behind for some more “adult” literature; I mean reading in an adult way, whether what is read is nominally for adults or not. It’s that evolution in the reader that really, I think, reveals the quality in a good children’s book — the fact that you can come back to the book as a different, older, person, and still find the book worth reading.

Of course, the experiences the titular magicians undergo in the book are presumably meant to depict the process by which they come to maturity. It’s just that I wasn’t entirely convinced. Certainly the characters, by the end of the book, are older; it’s difficult to tell if they’re wiser. In a sense, the facility of Grossman’s writing is a drawback here; it sometimes seems glib, 'facile’ in the usual, negative, sense. That said, it’s far more often perceptive, gentle, thoughtful, and unexpected. So in the end, the journey here is worth following. It takes you places you wouldn’t imagine, and keeps you involved and engages as it does. I just wonder whether more profound travelling companions would make the experience richer.

Readings — The Silent City

2010-01-30T22:38:00.001-05:00

The Silent City

by Élisabeth Vonarburg

translated by Jane Brierley

A complex and resonant story, the most notable thing, perhaps, about this novel is way it shifts and reinvents itself, becoming a different kind of tale every few chapters. It’s set in a vaguely post-apocalyptic setting, with most of the world regressed to savagery and a few mechanised cities still holding secrets of high technology. The story follows a girl (later woman), Elisa, who may hold the secret for the rejuvenation or re-creation of the human race. Gender and reality dissolve and reconstitute themselves as we follow Elisa over the course of decades.

It’s thought-provoking, and almost too rich to hold in the mind. The translation seems solid to me, though I haven’t seen the French original; at any rate, there weren’t too many Francicisms that I noticed (am I wrong to think that Gallicism would be an inaccurate word when speaking of a Québecois text?). It’s thoughtful, unpredictable, and satisfying. Intriguingly, to me it has the feel of a European sf novel — which I suppose I would identify as a kind of allegorical sense, a story that is conscious of itself as a vehicle for ideas more than as a tale driven by genre or indeed narrative conventions. Which is to say that it’s not plot-driven, even though it contains a complex plot, a rich world, and elements of adventure and exploration. It’s almost too full of matter; and that is always worth reading.

Readings — The Folk of the Air

2010-01-29T22:23:00.001-05:00

The Folk of the Air

by Peter S. Beagle

When Grace loaned me this book, she mentioned that she didn’t know why it wasn’t in print. Casting about online, I found out that Beagle is in fact in the process of rewriting it. Which disappointed Grace, as the book is a favourite of hers, and she likes it as it is. I can her point, but I can also see Beagle’s. The novel’s a fine tale about a wandering musician who gets involved with a group not wholly unlike the Society for Creative Anachronism, and then also with magic and old Gods and time-lost souls. But it’s slightly loose, the plot maybe not so perfectly constructed. Yet there’s no doubt that overall, it’s a very strong book.

What anchors the novel is its sense of emotional reality. On the one hand, it’s about fantasy and the fantastic impinging on and shaping reality; so it’s about a sense of transcendence, about being touched by extraordinary powers. But it’s also about real life, about mundanity, if you will, in the various senses of the word, about love and lost love and moving on from lost loves. It’s genuinely realistic, in that sense. And it has a heft, a credibility, that many attempts to mix fantasy into reality don’t attain.

But, yes, I can see why Beagle would want to rewrite it, if only to reshape its plot; the novel sometimes doesn’t seem to build in any obvious way. There are payoffs at the end, but the book seems to wander into them, with incidents not quite building on each other in the ways they perhaps ought to. The atmosphere of the book is strong, but becomes somewhat diffuse as a result.

Still, this is a fine book. The character work is fine, the prose exceptional. A lesser writer could be quite happy with having produced this novel; I have to think it says something about Beagle that he’s determined to do better.

Readings — 26th Annual World's Best SF

2010-01-28T18:52:00.001-05:00

26th Annual World’s Best SF

edited by Gardner Dozois

This is a thick book, and a good one. It almost goes without saying that enough science fiction is published each year that any year’s-best collection ought to be at least a solid read, Sturgeon’s Law be damned; Dozois has assembled a book that’s a lot better than solid. He’s also, as per his usual practice, included an extremely comprehensive and useful introdfuction, looking back on the sf/f field as a whole for the year previous, investigating trends and presenting all kinds of solid data — number of magazines, number of books published, you name it.

So, what is there that we can gather trend-wise from this collection of over 30 stories? Where’s the cutting edge of science fiction? In general, the prose is very strong, contrary to general prejudices, and covers a lot of different styles. Characters are front and centre. In terms of content, there seems to be a strong tendency toward multiculturalism, towards sf explorations of different cultures. Or, putting new cultures in new contexts. Space opera of one sort or another is surprisingly common, but not space opera per se — large-scale events, but viewed from other, more marginal perspectives. It’s a strong collection, and one of the best sf anthologies I’ve seen.

Readings — Prince of Stories

2010-01-28T18:49:00.002-05:00

Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman

by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden, and Stephen R. Bissette

A kind of bibliographical commentary on Gaiman and his work to date (actually, to the date of the book’s publication), this volume is not what you’d call seriously critical. What it is, though, is comprehensive. Gaiman’s written a lot of fiction over the years, in a lot of different places. I’m genuinely impressed by how much of it the book’s authors were able to dig up.

The book also scores points for clarity. Its discussion of the incredibly convoluted copyright situation surrounding the Marvelman character is excellent. And the interviews that conclude the book, with Gaiman and with Gaiman’s assistant, are fine.

It’s just a bit cloying, at times, and a bit reluctant to really look critically at Gaiman's work. I would have liked to see more clarity about Gaiman’s connection to the authors; he’s a friend and former collaborator with at least one of them. And, friend or no, when you see a statement like “It is our contention that Neil Gaiman is one of the premier fantasists writing today,” you’re already starting to list off other writers in your head to figure out if that’s true; to follow with “perhaps even the premier fantasist” is almost asking for trouble. I mean, I like Gaiman’s work a lot, at least the best of it, but the next sentence after that is ranking him with Tolkien and Borges, and the odd-couple pairing alone makes you wonder what kind of criteria the authors are using.

Still, issues of critical practice aside, the comprehensiveness of the book makes it a valuable resource for anybody interested in Gaiman; and, as noted, the Marvelman section is useful for comics scholars trying to work out that thorny history (which has already moved on since the book’s publication). Overall, valuable, within its limits.

We apologise for the slight delay

2010-01-28T18:32:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, plumbing happens.

Readings — Icarus Descending

2010-01-26T23:43:00.000-05:00

Icarus Descending

by Elizabeth Hand

This book is the third in a trilogy, following Winterlong and Aestival Tide. This fact was not mentioned at all in the back cover copy of the edition I bought. As it happened, I’d read Winterlong, but not Aestival Tide; so it’s maybe not surprising as I read it that it seemed to me that I was missing something.

That said, the book struck me as a fair example of Hand’s work, with characteristic virtues and defects. The prose is very strong, and the character work is effective, though the science-fictional aspects of the tale tends to put them so far beyond the real that they become somewhat difficult to identify with. The plot is not terribly well-machined, but moves with a relentless momentum nevertheless. There’s a bleakness and a decadence, lush imagery and a web of references.

It’s a strong book, but does seem to me to depend upon its predecessors. There’s a lot of plot, and the book takes a bit of a while to get its legs under it and the backstory is presented. Not having read the second book — and, frankly, with a fair amount of time having passed since I read the first one — it’s difficult for me to judge how this book caps off the story. I think it’s very strong, but does have the feel of ending a larger tale than is actually bound between its own two covers.

Readings — Quarantine

2010-01-25T18:13:00.002-05:00

Quarantine

by Greg Egan

I remember, when I was very young, reading an anthology of Isaac Asimov’s science fictional mysteries; that is, mysteries with a science fictional component. He noted in the introduction that editors used to tell him that it was impossible to write mysteries that were also SF. I found it difficult to believe at the time, but after reading Greg Egan’s Quarantine I have to wonder a bit.

It’s not that Quarantine is a bad book. Far from it. It’s well-written, imaginative, challenging thematically and intellectually — Egan works some solid science and math into the story, and keeps things moving along briskly enough that it never bogs down or comes to feel like a digression. His first-person narrator has enough life to carry the story, and enough cleverness and competence to make an acceptable genre hero.

So: This is a good book, and I recommend it. But. At the start of the novel, a private eye, our main character, is hired for a new and seemingly-mundane case. That’s all right. Only the setting is the late twenty-first century, when forces unknown have isolated human beings from the rest of the universe; a kind of bubble appeared around the solar system some years before. Now ... reading the book, I found myself waiting to see how that bubble would play into the unfolding mystery. As indeed it did; because it had to. Because it was part of the world. Because it was part of the SF given. Because why was it there, if not to be in the story? So the apparent triviality of the mystery was obviously a red herring. You knew, all genre conventions aside, that the private eye was going to stumble on something bigger than he could have imagined; because the story had to be structured in that way, just to accommodate its own setting.

It’s not a critical problem, by any means. But it does point up the difficulties that long-ago editor expressed to Asimov. It's not that your suspension of disbelief is challenged, but your suspension of awareness of conventions; your suspension of foreknowledge, if you like. When two sets of conventions mix, sometimes they do get in each others' way.

Readings — City of Saints and Madmen

2010-01-24T22:17:00.001-05:00

City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff VanderMeer

One of the best evocations of a fantasy city I’ve ever seen, this book reads like Loveraft revised by Nabokov. It has Nabokov’s sense of structural play and precision of diction; it also has Lovecraft’s sense of brooding horror, the frisson of man meeting the inhuman. Perhaps Clark Ashton Smith would be a better point of comparison, as there’s a sense of decadence, and indeed of irony, that fits perhaps more closely with Smith than Lovecraft.

Lovecraft was at heart a classicist, and if he extracted a new kind of horror from godless 20th-century science, it was I think ultimately in the tradition of 18th-century deism. City of Saints And Madmen is much more thoroughly post-modernist; in form, it’s a series of texts having to do with the fungi-beset city of Ambergris. Although appearing at first to be separate things, the various pieces of the book cohere to make up a whole. It’s subtle, unsettling, and very well-done; it’s also an intersting way to get at what cannot be known, allowing elements of history and myth to as it were fall in-between the texts. This is less man in an unknowable universe than a universe in which knowledge is futile and untrustworthy.

It’s not as if the stories here aren’t fine tales in their own right, either. VanderMeer’s a strong writer, and builds up an understated atmosphere in his Ambergris, fusing horror and irony in different combinations to create a city of obsessions and degenerate artists and obscure crimes. It’s a truly original creation.

Readings — Cities

2010-01-23T23:14:00.002-05:00

Cities

edited by Peter Crowther

This is something of an odd collection. The idea seems sound; four fantasy and SF novellas, by four well-known writers (Paul Di Filippo, China Miéville, Michael Moorcock, and Geoff Ryman), on the theme of cities. And certainly the results are never less than interesting. It’s just that the stories don’t really stick to the promised theme.

The first piece, Paul Di Filippo’s “A Year in the Linear City”, is certainly metropolitan enough. It follows a group of bohemians and drug addicts in a vast, perhaps endless, city. Filippo’s satirical, pulpy voice fits well with a story that is, well, pulpy and satiric.

China Miéville’s “The Tain” also works with the theme of cities. More or less. It takes place in a London devastated by a magical apocalypse. But its troubled hero and small group of survivors don’t seem really to have a lot to say to actual urban life. The setting is something that once was a city, in other words, but the environment doesn’t have the cohesive social structure of a real city.

Similarly, Michael Moorcock’s “Firing the Cathedral” is — well, it’s a Jerry Cornelius story. So it works through a kind of dream-logic, with coherence of setting minimal. Nominally it takes place in (a version of) London, but practically, as with Miéville’s piece, it has no real feel for a city’s life.

Geoff Ryman’s “V.A.O.” is a charmingly hard-boiled tale set in a futuristic retirement home. It’s clever, well-written, and seems to have nothing to do with cities at all. It does create the sense of a solidly-constructed world and community, and one based around a science-fictional conceit; but it’s the community of the retirement home, not the community (or communities) of a city.

So the book succeeds in presenting solid, quality fiction; it’s just that the stories don’t have a lot to do with the nominal theme. One wonders what the point was; it feels like something of a missed opportunity. Di Filippo’s story is the only one here that really conveys an urban feel, the only tale to create a living city, with its own personalities and controversies and economies. As I said, odd. Worth reading, though.

Readings — The Adventures of Alyx

2010-01-22T22:36:00.002-05:00

The Adventures of Alyx

by Joanna Russ

There’s something understated in this collection of short stories about an adventuring swordswoman and thief. Understated; also thoughtful. Superficially, there’s not much similarity to something like Fritz Leiber’s swashbuckling Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, though Alyx apparently cameos in two of those and vaguely recalls Fafhrd in one of the stories here. The stories are nominally adventure fiction in content, but aren’t structured much like it — the high points seem to come at other points than the action scenes.

In fact, each of the five stories here has its own feel, almost as though each were in its own genre, ranging over both fantasy and science fiction. It’s actually a confutation of genre, changing approach and tone each time out, rather than riffing on a standard concept. The last story, in particular, “The Second Inquisition”, almost entirely discards adventure trappings to tell an affecting SF tale.

The world-building is haphazard, but that’s fine; that’s usually the case in picaresque adventure fantasy, I think. At least, writers like Leiber and Moorcock seem to make up their worlds from story to story, as the individual piece requires; and so it is here. But Russ has a consistent and politicised world-view, with stories shaped by issues of class and gender and power. This seems to make up for a relative lack of imaginative detail, substituting ugly human truths for invention quite effectively.

Russ is known as an early feminist sf writer, and certainly one can see that in these stories. One could argue that there’s a greater interest in these tales with what might be called women’s concerns, and specifically with women relating to other women; the first and last stories both show Alyx in a sort of mentoring role with a younger girl. On the other hand, there’s also strong irony in the handling of domesticity and relationships, which matches the dry tone of the writing overall.

In the end, it’s that laconic style that makes the stories work. Russ is capable of writing lush fantasy scene-setting when she wants, particularly in the first story, but mostly aims for a spare, tight style. It works quite well, and emphasises the untraditional aspects of the stories as a whole.

Readings — Scar Night

2010-01-21T12:03:00.001-05:00

Scar Night

by Alan Campbell

A dark fantasy novel set mostly in and around a city suspended by chains above a deep abyss filled with secrets, this book manages to be both inventive and conventional. Inventive, in the fantasy imagery and ideas, and also occasionally in its prose; conventional, in its characters and much of its plot. It’s a first novel, and what I’d have to call “promising”. On the one hand, there’s real writing talent, but on the other, there’s a slickness that threatens to smother the genuinely new and intriguing aspects of the book. A mixed bag, but it does push its story further than you might expect. On the whole, as I said, promising; but I find myself with not much to say.

Readings — The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars

2010-01-20T23:30:00.003-05:00

The Forge of God

Anvil of Stars

by Greg Bear

Individually and collectively, I found these books to be quite odd. Superficially, they seem not unusual for science fiction; the first book is about a devastating atack on the Earth by a mysterious alien force, and the second book is about humanity’s revenge. But neither of them quite does what you’d expect them to do.

The reality is, the first book is primarily about the death of the Earth. That’s not really a spoiler; it becomes fairly clear about two-thirds of the way through the novel that the Earth is effectively doomed. The rest of the way Bear follows the characters he’s introduced as they prepare for doomsday, and as a very few lucky souls are saved from planetary disaster. I first read the book as a teenager, around the time it came out twenty years ago. I remember thinking that it was interesting, but didn’t quite work; that it needed to be deeper to be really effective. Coming back to the book, I wondered if that reaction was in part influenced by disappointment that the story didn’t have the usual easy solutions of much genre work. In the end, though, I think my teen self was right on.

I fel bad saying so; there’s considerable ambition in The Forge of God, and Bear tries very hard to give life to a diverse cast of characters. I don’t think it quite comes off, though. The inner life of the characters never really reaches the reader, they don't become quite varied enough as individuals, the internal contradictions of human existence ultimately never quite makes their way free of straight-ahead genre logic. Still, even if the book’s a failed experience, it’s worth reading. There’s a nice parallel, for example, between the death of the planet and the death of a single individual. And Bear’s hard-SF imagination is quite fine. The touch of human life is all that’s lacking, and even that is present enough for most books; except that Bear’s project here seems to me to require exactly what it doesn't have.

Anvil of Stars, the nominal sequel, is intriguing because it’s a completely different book in tone and approach. Here the last children of Earth are guided by one alien species on a kind of search-and-destroy mission against the species that destroyed their old home planet. This turns into a meditation on vengeance, justice, and the passage of time. Also on evolution; travel between the stars means relativistic speeds means that vast amounts of time have passed when the humans catch up with the race that destroyed the Earth (among many other planets). And the humans themselves have been changed by their experiences, by growing up in a radically new environment. That hard-SF imagination is fully on display here, with one fantastic wonder following another.

The second book in some ways is less ambitious than the first, in the sense that Bear’s more fully in his element. One might say that it partially redeems the flaws of the first book, but then one might also say that it’s so far distant from mundane concerns that the first book is at least an attempt at a necessary corrective. Different as the two novels are, they complement each other perfectly. Not only are their subjects different, not only are their approaches different, but the flaws and successes and why those things are flaws and successes are different. They’re two books that are better together than apart, and, in the end, well worth reading.

Readings — A Song For Lya

2010-01-19T10:47:00.002-05:00

A Song For Lya

by George R.R. Martin

A collection of Martin’s early short fiction, including the Hugo-winning title novella, the ten stories here range from solid genre work to strong thought-provoking material. None of them seems to me to be at the level of his Song of Ice and Fire series, or of his fiction in the Wild Cards series, but they’re generally entertaining pieces. It’s intriguing to see Martin working in genre-standard forms — short-shorts with twist endings, humans cautiously coming to understand alien worlds, even a ghost story.

In some ways, in fact, the book reads like it could be a collection from the 1950s. That’s not a bad thing; what I mean is that it’s vaguely reminiscent tonally and to some extent structurally of work by writers like Theodore Sturgeon or Alfred Bester. You see some of the heritage of Campbell-era sf mixed with a more humanistic tone; you have square-jawed space heroes, but most often they’re undercut in some way, viewed more cynically. You see plotting that isn’t cliched, but does hew to well-worn traditions and points of view; little sign here of the New Wave of SF.

I don’t know that there really needs to be. In his book Engines of the Night, Barry Malzberg argues passionately that the 50s SF that I’m talking about is an often-overlooked treasure-trove of fiction. If Martin, at the start of his career, was writing out of that tradition, then this book goes some way to support Malzberg’s point. So perhaps it hints at an alternate history for SF, in which the genre didn’t go through the contortions of the New Wave, but evolved at a statelier pace. Consider Martin’s own career in the years since; Wild Cards wasn’t so much later than this book, about ten years or so, but there’s a huge leap in sensibility, more audacious and more radical in its dialogue with the traditional idea of the hero. These stories don’t really suggest that audacity, or the multilayered storytelling of A Song of Ice and Fire, but they’re a solid start for what has turned out to be an excellent career.

Readings — The Light Ages

2010-01-18T21:04:00.001-05:00

The Light Ages

by Ian R. MacLeod

Steampunk’s an odd genre, infinitely promising both in its science-fictional and fantastic forms; but it’s relatively rare that actual steampunk works seem significant on more than a surface level. The form’s built up an intriguing visual vocabulary, indeed even an iconography, but it still seems to me that there’s territory yet to mine. The idea of a fantastic Victorian era, shaped by both the fantastic and the industrial, seems to hearken back both to the great Victorian social realists, who wrote of the mechanism of society and its effect on the individual, and to the great Victorian fantasists, who built the genres of fantasy and of ‘scientific romance’ that became sf. The potential seems to be there in steampunk for a fusion of these two approaches. But I don’t know how often that actually happens.

Consider The Light Ages, which fairly explicitly hearkens back to the preoccupation of the Victorian realists with the world around them. In MacLeod’s world, industry is at work mining a substance called aether, which is magic; his story unfolds through the life of a poor boy named Robert Borrows, who grows into a revolutionary and brings about a great change in his world. Which is where things diverge from the realists, of course. In fact, it’s where traditional genre plot structures creep in; a couple of significant individuals bring about significant societal change by uncovering the hidden secrets which drive their world. It’s difficult to see how that applies to the world around us.

But on a more profound scale, I think the project of the realists has fallen apart in this book long beforehand. Consider the language of the novel, for example. A number of people (such as John Clute) have praised MacLeod’s writing style and use of language. I don’t particularly see the greatness in it. MacLeod’s style is certainly fine enough, but seems exceptionally modern for a world that is pre-modern in many of its sensibilities. The language doesn’t fit the story, because it doesn’t fit the characters, because it doesn’t fit the mentalities of the characters. The structure of the sentences, the construction of the paragraphs, sound like a modern novel; and, while it is ostensibly a tale told from a perspective following a great change in the world, the character doing the telling grew up in the earlier world.

So that’s a problem: the mentality and structure of MacLeod’s fictional society aren’t really reflected in the language his characters use. Generally, the politics of the novel reflect the same flaw; they’re very simple, and the way MacLeod presents his society is very reductive. There’s right, there’s wrong, and that’s really that. As opposed to either Dickensian grotesques, or to the depiction of rounded characters capable of both good-hearted and cruel actions.

If realism is ultimately not the strength of the book, neither is its use of the fantastic. I find MacLeod’s attempt at capturing a sense of wonder fall flat. On the one hand, aether’s described as a magical substance, but rarely seems to provoke any sense of the numinous or create any truly magical effects; on the other, MacLeod’s writing never catches the true magic to be found in the Victorian fantasists like George Macdonald or William Morris. It’s true that the book is about the industrial exploitation of magic, but one would hope revolutionaries opposed to such exploitation would be able to articulate the wonder that’s being so drastically thinned. But that never really happens.

So in the end, the book’s an interesting attempt, with sporadically interesting prose. I can’t say I found it particularly memorable. But I still have hope for seeing something better, both from the steampunk from, and indeed from Macleod as a writer.

Readings — Solider of the Mist, Tyre, and Sidon

2010-01-17T23:32:00.001-05:00

Soldier of the Mist

Soldier of Arete

Soldier of Sidon

by Gene Wolfe

It’s rare these days that I feel baffled by a novel. Usually, either I feel I grasp the theme of a book at a certain basic level, and understand what’s involved in its imagery; or else it escapes me completely, and flies over my head. This series of books, though, leaves me with the thorough and certain knowledge that I’ll have to re-read it to understand it.

It tells of the adventures of a soldier, a Roman or Italian who fought in the Persian army defeated by the Greeks at Plataea; this soldier, Latro, is a serial amnesiac, who each day loses his memories of the day before. This was caused either by a head wound in battle, or by the curse of a God; the story encourages readers to take it both ways. Latro’s wound, or curse, has opened him up to a range of visionary experiences, and he often sees Gods and apparitions that no-one else can.

The series is nominally about Latro’s attempt to find his way home and recover his faculties, but tends to lose itself in the picaresque adventures with which Latro becomes involved. This is not entirely surprising, perhaps, given the nature of Latro’s injury; lacking memory, he lacks a constant drive, and so lives each day in an improvisatory scramble in which he wakes up and must try to understand where he is and what’s happened to him before making progress toward any kind of goal. This means that he’s oddly passive as a protagonist; he has something that he wants, but he doesn’t always remember what it is.

Nevertheless, Wolfe keeps his story moving smoothly, keeps the prose flowing with an even feel that perfectly evokes the tone of a translated classical text, and above all, plays about with Latro’s handicap in a number of inventive ways. People lie to him, people forget that he forgets, important clues slip by him — but not by the attentive reader. This is where the book begins to become baffling, though. Far more than most stories I can think of, even the most experimental, things happen at multiple levels. What Latro understands makes for a solid adventure story. What is actually happening ... is trickier to grasp. Because he does see the signs of Gods; and those signs have patterns to their recurrence that he, lacking memory, does not see. Even more, perhaps, than with most of Wolfe’s writing, there are multiple narratives, multiple streams of meaning, and if you cannot follow them your understanding of the text will necessarily be limited. For me as a reader, I found it difficult to keep track of the various symbolisms of the different deities at work in the story. And this is why I feel I’ve missed a level of what’s going on; why I know I must reread the series at some point.

In part, the problem is that by the time you understand what’s going on in the book, its devices and symbols, you’re far enough in that much of that symbolism has already been thrown at you. Which I suppose means the book is much like life. But, like all books, it boasts this crucial advantage: you can go through it a second time, or several times, with greater understanding each go-round. That’s something I look forward to, in future.

Readings — Beauty

2010-01-16T00:45:00.002-05:00

Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

I’m of two minds about this book. Briefly, it’s the story of a fairy-tale princess who avoids the fate of Sleeping Beauty, and embarks on an adventure that takes her to the present day, the future, elfland, and realms beyond. There’s a remarkable level of invention in the book, and a lot of story, which unfolds smoothly through mostly above-average prose. So that’s all good.

The main character, though, is uninvolving. She’s not particularly intelligent (and is aware of it), and not particularly gifted in any way other than her eponymous beauty. Unfortunately, she’s also the narrator of the book. As a result, much of the elegance of the story and prose is undercut by the flatness of the main character, and her flat perception of the world around her.

The book is often engaging, but wildly uneven. When Beauty (for that is indeed her name) finds her way to a future dystopia, there are no redeeming features to it whatsoever, to the point where the credibility of the society in question is strained (particularly, the fact that society’s in that state and they use time travel for relatively trivial ends). On the other hand, structurally the book's intriguing in the way that Beauty’s tale ends up encompassing other well-known fairy tales, and in the way certain other characters get to provide commentary on Beauty’s own text.

It’s certainly an interesting book, and worth reading. That said, I admit I came away from it frustrated by Tepper’s handling of political issues; in points where I disagreed with her (when she comes out in favour of censorship, most notably) I felt her treatment of the ideas involved was shallow, and in fact this sense was notably present even in the areas where I did agree with her. There’s a sneaking suspicion at that point that Beauty’s own simplistic view of the world is actually meant to be taken at face value, and that suspicion becomes more pronounced the further into the novel we get (there’s a very good review here that makes much the same point). Ironically, Tepper’s paeans to the need to suppress imaginative work she finds personally offensive is itself one of the uglier things in the novel; the book, which aims to be about the gradual thinning of beauty in the world, can’t help but suffer as a result.

Readings — The Graveyard Book

2010-01-15T22:35:00.003-05:00

The Graveyard Book

by Neil Gaiman

The difference between a good book and a bad one can be surprisingly subtle. Between a well-structured plot and a formulaic one; between a sympathetic character and a bland nonentity. Between limpid prose and pretension. Between suspenseful writing and melodrama. Between humour that sharpens a mood and hints at depths of personality, and humour that gets in the way of the emotional core of the book and kicks the reader out of the story with excessive self-awareness.

The Graveyard Book shows Neil Gaiman coming down on the right side of all these things. One reason why is his sense for the mythic; or, more precisely, the mythopoeic. The world opens up the further into the story you go; hints and throwaway lines blossom into plots and new vistas. His main character, Bod, reacts to these things ina credible way. If not necessarily flawed in a traditional sense, he’s at least capable of being petulant or frightened.

That’s only natural, all things considered; Bod’s parents are killed in the opening pages of the story, and he’s raised by the ghosts in a local cemetery. That’s the springboard for a story that unfolds in a set of linked short stories, roughly one per year of Bod’s life (the title and structure are a deliberate nod to Kipling's Jungle Book, and in fact the novel's understated, elegant prose has the feel of a classic children's fantasy from a hundred years ago). We get to know him quite well, and to know the ghosts around him, and their different eras. Gaiman, as is his way, works in a ton of references and links to the past, without being obvious about it. One of the pleasures of the book is the way the language used by the characters from different times sounds right in their mouths.

There’s a feel about the book of ‘Harry Potter done right,’ the young boy growing over the years and gaining magic powers, living in a place both part of conventional reality and also someplace totally other. But all the things one might find lacking in the Potter books are present here: the ear for language, as noted, the sense of the mythic, an awareness of depth. Present also are the things the Potter books do well, notably intricate mysteries and a complex plot.

The book won last year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, which I mention in order to note that I saw a panel at Worldcon where a group of critics discussed the novels on the award shortlist; they felt that technically The Graveyard Book was the best-written book in the group, but expressed some reservation over the fact that the novel seemed episodic, and that it wasn’t particularly deep. I don’t think either of these criticisms is, in the long run, accurate. I think that the individual chapters are each fairly tightly bound into the fabric of the book, both in plot terms, in that they build up the true story of what’s going on with Nod and his world and the killers of his parents, and in thematic terms, in that they expand on what Nod learns in his life and how he grows and what he finds as he interacts with the world around him. Which brings me to point number two, and that is that I think in the end the book has a lot to say about identity. About time, and death, and how we construct ourselves in the shadows of the past. About learning to read, and how to read the history around us. I think a lot of Gaiman’s work plays with these themes, and to me The Graveyard Book is perhaps the most successful of his recent iterations of these tropes.

Readings — Zoe's Tale

2010-01-14T19:01:00.000-05:00

Zoe’s Tale

by John Scalzi

This book, I should note off the top, is an installment in an ongoing series. I haven’t read any of the others. Although not strictly speaking necessary, I can’t help but think familiarity with the preceding books would help a reader immensely. As it is, the book suffers from the odd sense, common in novels in the middle of a series, of excessive backstory — characters begin with too much having happened to them. Zoe, the main character, isn’t only the daughter of retired military officers become the leaders of a new human colony on a far planet; she also has a pair of aliens tagging along with her as part of her extended family, her parents having taught the aliens to be conscious. There’s not much you can do about this sort of thing, I imagine; this is where previous books have left the character, and that’s all there is to that.

Still, there are things that might have been clearer if I understood the background of the world. For some reason, humans are opposed to an alien group called the Conclave; it’s not clear why humans aren’t a part of the Conclave. More gravely, in this universe, sixteen and seventeen-year-olds apparently do not have, think about, or talk about sex. So I have to presume that the book’s aimed at a very young audience. Even so, the character work seems to me extremely shoddy.

Zoe’s too intelligent, too articulate, too self-possessed, above all too self-aware, to be interesting. Or particularly believable. At sixteen, to say “Five is a bad age to lose a mother, and to hope to remember her for who she was” is unlikely; to follow it with “I think it could be a good age to lose yourself, if you’re not careful” isn’t making things better. Sure, there’s the right dollop of melodrama, but there’s also a bit too much awareness of the aging process and how it works. It’s not the right kind of way for a teenager to enunciate melodrama.

Looking at Scalzi’s blog, there’s far too much of a similarity between Zoe’s voice and Scalzi’s own voice. Not only in tone, but in pacing — in the rhythm of sentences and paragraphs. So it’s not surprising that Zoe’s voice doesn’t sound real. I can’t help but compare her to the narrator of Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness, which was a book I didn’t care for at all — but which had exactly the opposite set of problems and virtues. It captured something believable in the voice of its main character, a teen girl from a rural community. The problem there was that no story could be found under the voice, meaning that character could not be built because there were no choices to be made, not even the choice not to make a choice. Here we have the opposite; character work fails because the language is flat and the plot overly-determined. Zoe tells us “I am a daughter and goddess and girl who sometimes just doesn’t know who she is or what she wants,” but we don’t believe her.

I’ve spoken so far about issues of voice, but the actions of both Zoe and her best friend Gretchen are just about as unnaturally self-possessed as their voices. About two-thirds of the way through the book, they set off after some unknown aliens who’ve stabbed Zoe’s mom; the scene that develops turns out to be an opportunity for Zoe to show off her enlightenment, communicating with the hostile natives of the planet. You’d think that would involve overcoming her hatred of the aliens for hurting her mother; actually, she seems to to forget all about her mom, and the several colonists the aliens have killed by that point.

Now, in fairness, I should say that it’s not as though those characters are the only two clever, sarcastic, wise, funny people in the book. In fact, so are Zoe’s parents. And her boyfriend. And her parents’ assistant. And every sympathetic character in the book. The not-sympathetic characters? Not clever, sarcastic, etcetera, etcetera. In fact, they tend to be violent and aggressive. Basically, there are two voices in the book, and each character gets one voice or another. Or is an alien lacking consciousness.

(In at least one case, Magdy, a character starts out aggressive and stupid, and then later becomes clever and sarcastic when he becomes friends with Zoe. But then the plot needs him to be stupid, and he is, and he is no longer clever or sarcastic. You remember those Saturday morning cartoons where one of the gang of plucky kids has to be an ass for no real reason other than to show the audience what not to do? That’s who Magdy is: Eric from Dungeons & Dragons. I suppose you could say Zoe’s telling of her tale naturally places her at the centre of the universe, and that she only allows other characters to be clever insofar as she likes them; but I can’t find anything in the text that supports this idea, and the writing is generally so clunky that this self-aware use of an unreliable narrator seems unlikely. I tend to think in this case that bad writing is just bad writing.)

To return to the comparison to the Miriam Toews book: I thought A Complicated Kindness was just the right sort of terrible to win literary awards; it in fact won the Governor General’s Award and the 2006 Canada Reads contest. Zoe’s Tale, by contrast, is evidently the right sort of terrible to get nominated for a major science-fiction award, last year’s Hugo. Now, Scalzi had a blog post, which appears to not be online but which was reprinted in his collection Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, about his dislike for The Catcher in the Rye and Alienated Teen Literature (his caps) in general. As a contrast, he praises the active characters of Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels. Personally, I mildly enjoyed Catcher, probably because I didn’t read it in high school, and can’t stand Heinlein’s writing. But granted Scalzi’s book is certainly more in the spirit of Heinlein, it’s still a tremendous failure. Specifically: If you’re going to write a plot-oriented novel, the plot should make sense.

The further the book goes on, the more incoherent it becomes. Zoe’s told that several attacks on her life were made on her old planet, of which she knew nothing; she reacts to this information not at all. Discovering that potentially dangerous animals lurk in the forests of Roanoke, Zoe and her friends decide not to tell anyone (even after somebody gets killed). Zoe’s alien companions tell her that she needs to know how to fight because she’s a very important girl to their whole civilization and enemies would like nothing more to kill her; but a) this was true before she went off to a new planet (you know, when those six assassination attempts were being made), and b) maybe somebody should have thought of this before allowing her to be brought along to a defenceless colony world (seriously, did the Earth diplomats really think having Zoe turn colonist was a great idea?).

Oh, and the aliens are going to teach Zoe to fight despite not actually being remotely humanoid in form. Oh, and also human spies can locate and plant bombs on hundreds of different spaceships and none of them get discovered. Oh, and at the climax of the book the hundreds-of-planets-strong alien commonwealth tries to take the human colony with a hundred soldiers led personally by the chief of a major political faction. Oh, and also at the end a super-evolved alien race decides to make a point by staging a combat of a hundred members of their race in barehanded combat with a hundred members of another alien race, as an ‘entertainment’ (because although they’re highly evolved, apparently they still have a thing for mixed martial arts). Which last sets up an extremely convenient ending to the book, in which a hundred aliens one by one tell Zoe how special she is. Which is, you know, nice for her.

(It’s at this point that the ‘unreliable narrator’ theory is almost irresistable. One imagines Zoe’s Tale as a complete fabrication, a book written by an unremarkable girl so frightened of sex she can’t even mention it, so lacking in allies she must invent a perfect best friend. She lives a life so terrible and dull she must invent a saga that takes her to faraway planets, with parents much more interesting than her own. And the aliens who line up to compliment her in this reading would be a heartbreaking touch — brutalised by abuse or neglect, Zoe compenstates by imagining herself a messiah to a species that only exists in her own imagination, who testify to her own innate greatness; she is a hero in her own mind. From this point of view, the book might actually be touching. The idea’s been done before, but at least it’d explain some of the incoherencies in the novel as it stands. Sadly, I can find no actual textual support for it. All I can say is that Scalzi’s written a book that would actually be better if it were the sort of book he doesn’t like.)

Structurally, the book’s very slow for a plot-oriented adventure. Scalzi opens the book with the colony ship in trouble, then flashes back to give us Zoe’s early life and the backstory of the colony mission. I’ve grown to dislike this sort of thing, which seems to me increasingly common in TV, movies, and (especially) mainstream comics; it seems to me like a cheat, dropping into the story in medias res just to establish some cheap suspense, before then giving the real beginning of the story which happens to be less dramatic and intriguing. Specifically, it seems like a cheat because the uininteresting bits still end up being told; the audience is just given the bait of the really cool bits. That’s a problem here, in that once the faux-beginning is out of the way, nothing particularly intriguing happens for a good long while — over a third of the book. For over a hundred pages we get nothing but Zoe and her friends being clever and sarcastic and ... well, you know. It’s stunningly dull. It could have been dropped very easily, and would not have been missed.

Conversely, the ending makes so sense at all, lurching through a series of anticlimaxes and under-reported battles in which Zoe has no personal interest and risks nothing. The day is saved because one politically important character says so (as opposed to, say, the signing of a treaty binding people to future behaviour). Zoe’s parents, threatened by the possibility of being arrested by authorities, set off for Earth to avoid them (?), to do what I don’t know.

For a story set in the far future, it’s pretty casual about its use of modern culture. It’s nice that Babar survives into the future, but I found it unlikely (... and was the name of sports team, the Slime Molds, a reference to the old computer game Rogue?). More annoying, the teens all have PDAs, which act almost exactly like iPhones. Sometimes Scalzi brings in references from earlier cultures, safely American (the colonists grow maize, of course). Zoe begins the book living on a planet named Huckleberry, later explicitly connected to the eponymous Mr. Finn, despite the fact that it’s largely populated by East Indians. The reference is almost exactly wrong; Tom Sawyer, maybe, with its adventurous kids exploring the place they live, but there’s nothing in this book to compare (in quality or any other way) with Huckleberry Finn, and its long river journey.

Or take another example (some spoilerish stuff follows): the name of the colony world is Roanoke, after the first colony in what is now the USA. The colony famously failed; as we find out, the people who named the book’s colony chose the name as a deliberate reference, since they were setting the colony up for failure. Which means that they sent Zoe, so important to that alien species, to be a part of a colony marked for death. And the authorities who came up with this plan chose a name for the project that would be a red flag for anybody who knew Earth history (do they not have Google in the future?). This is the worst kind of reference to make; it’s a smugly self-aware tip-off meant for clever readers, but which characters in the story should also pick up on. In other words, it erodes one’s suspension of disbelief.

Maybe you’re thinking: so, if these people are colonists ... and there are natives who’re at least semi-intelligent ... hell, they even named themselves after a European colony in North America ... clearly the book deals with issues of colonialism, right? Maybe that’d be why Zoe’s family, the leaders of the expeditions, are the Perrys, as some kind of reference to American exploitation of Japan? Well ... no. No, no thinking of that sort of icky political stuff. Humans plant colonies, humans are right to plant colonies, multi-racial alien commonwealths are evil insofar as they tamper with human Manifest Destiny. It’s the lack of awareness about colonialism that moves the book from “unintelligent” to “distasteful”.

Still, for all the many flaws in the book, what really sinks it is the main character. Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, also nominated for last year’s Hugo, begins with an annoying, unsympathetic teen lead; then subjects him to real hardship, which changes him and makes him into an interesting, motivated character that genuinely compels a reader’s sympathy. Zoe never suffers in any significant way, never grows, and never becomes interesting. Instead, all her tale offers is bad writing. A series of quips and the occasional homily, dialogue like “It’s a small chance. But right now it’s the only one we’ve got,” and an extended turgid eulogy of considerable triteness.

This book is quite, quite terrible.

Readings — Saturn's Children

2010-01-13T03:55:00.000-05:00

Saturn’s Children

by Charles Stross

Although not actually formulaic, this book caused me an odd sense of deja vu. Or perhaps meme-temps vu; I could see why and what was happening in each part of the book as I read it, but felt curiously untouched even when abstractly I found myself appreciating the thematic concepts or plot structure. The main character, Freya, is a female robot in a future where humans are extinct and humaniform androids run the solar system; designed for human use, the robots have built their own society in our absence. Freya was originally designed as a sex toy. So were her sisters, derivatives from the same design; some of them, though, upgraded to become secret agents. When Freya finds herself in a threatening situation at the start of the book, she makes a series of choices leading her along the same path, ultimately finding a threat to the whole solar system.

The book’s aware of the gender issues it’s playing with. One of Freya’s first missions is to carry a secret cargo from one planet to another; said cargo is an egg, and the best way for her to transport it is inside her, in a hollow where a human woman would have a womb. It’s a clever notion, but somehow unconvincing; you feel that Stross doesn’t hit the mark he’s aiming for, that his ideas about gender and ideas of life and so on don’t reach the pitch of sophistication he needed in order to make them work (and the occasional Shakespearean reference doesn’t really help).

That absence of maturity is critical: lacking profundity, the gender theme becomes not merely ineffective, but actively troubling. Freya travels by spaceship early on, for example, which buffers her against the rigours of the journey in a very invasive way. Stross is consciously trying to use a quasi-rape scene; but I found his manipulation of this material to lack a real human connection, and thus to be unconvincing — troubling, as I said, in that it took me out of the story, and said very little.

There are a lot of nifty ideas in the book, a lot of imagination, and some clever sense-of-wonder-evoking uses of science. Stross plays about with sf adventure plots easily; but, again, to make the book work on the levels he seems to want it to requires a level of sophistication that just isn’t there. I’d say, for example, that in the use of language the book falls down — the writing’s not bad, but not consistently interesting. I’d also say that there’s a sense that his robots act too much like the humans who built them; their society seems entirely too human.

That’s not to say that Stross hasn’t thought about the robot society. In fact, one of the more engaging aspects of the book is its satire of corporatism. But, as with its take on gender, that satire isn’t sharp enough to really stand out. And the little details of how a society would function on its day-to-day levels given the ability of robots to swap out consciousness, to have bodies not even remotely close to human, is ultimately lacking.

Conversely, his gendered robots are oddly unconvincing in their sexuality. The book is full of weirdly adolescent sentences like: “Jeeves has a small pot-belly, and below that . . . hmm.” This ends a paragraph, and the next goes on to talk about something else entirely; the ‘hmm’ hangs there, a coyness that falls with a clunk. If Stross wanted to bring sex in as a major theme, I can’t help but think being prepared to write about it explicitly would have been an asset. But the problems are really deeper than that. It’s impossible to really work out how the robots are reacting in terms of their sexual emotions. Consistently through the book, one has the feeling that the hardware is in place to mimic human functionality, but the software still has a few bugs in it. The problem is that it’s not clear at all that this is deliberate. It reads too much like a traditional sf flaw — the subordination of human character to big ideas.

Robots are programmed to feel sexual desire, are manipulated by sex and rape; but these things start to seem self-contradictory or under-thought: how does rape affect a being programmed to feel sexual desire? And how does one make the question relevant to human experience? And how is it that robots can be so reliably shaped in certain ways by these things, when humans tend to exhibit a range of responses?

Further, while sex is a major element in the make-up of the robots, gender seems curiously irrelevant. On the one hand, that’s logical; if you have robots built in the shape of a hotel, for example (or, if you prefer, an AI that inhabits a hotel-shaped shell), then the physical differentiation of male and female bodies is essentially insignificant. But then, when that hotel self-identifies as male, the issue of gender re-enters the picture. In theory. In practice, there’s no discussion of the meaning of robot gender — no sexism, no societal roles, no transsexuality, no investigation of what gender does to identity.

So, while Stross has big thematic ideas based on sexuality, identity, and control, the application of them in the story comes off as the application of sf tropes, starting with the sexbot protagonist and moving on up to a plan to conquer the solar system. The book tries to use its sf conceits to explore themes of sex and power, but doesn’t manage the depth it would need to really do something new. And, in the end, the android nature of its protagonist, a key part of its attempt at building a metaphor, causes the enterprise to collapse. You can imagine Saturn’s Children being a good book, if you try. Unfortunately, the reality doesn’t quite pull it off.

Readings — Bridge of Birds

2010-01-12T23:16:00.003-05:00

Bridge of Birds

by Barry Hughart

A clever fantasy set in a magic-drenched version of Tang dynasty China, Hughart’s book is an excellent and intricate romp through folklore, pseudo-myth, and history alongside two memorable characters: Number Ten Ox, who was given the number because he is a tenth-born son and the name because of his strength and wit, and Master Li, a scholar with a slight flaw in his character. Together, they find their way through an adventure filled with the supernatural, and narrow escapes, and beautiful noblewomen, and jealous husbands, and, importantly, a real sense of wonder.

The book works partly because of the intricacy of its plot, and partly because of that wonder, that ability to capture the true feel of a folk-tale. It is, precisely, folkloric rather than mythic. It has the coldness and occasional incidental brutality of a folk-jest, and makes scenes that might be difficult to take (Master Li, as noted, has that slight flaw in his character) somehow palatable by sheer tonal accuracy. And yet, intriguingly, for all that it captures that fokloric tone, it also has a highly-worked plot, a clever and complex structure which binds together the many tales Ox and Li encounter.

Oh, and it also has a sly deadpan voice. Ox presents himself as an intellectually humble man, and in comparison to the brilliant Master Li he may be; but this is exactly the Holmes/Watson relationship, where the narrator is cleverer than might at first appear. This is fine stuff, and I’ve already got one of the sequels. Kudos to Jen Eveleigh Lamond for recommending it to me.

Readings — Sailing to Byzantium/Seven American Nights

2010-01-11T23:19:00.003-05:00

Sailing to Byzantium/Seven American Nights

by Robert Silverberg and by Gene Wolfe

One of the Tor double-novels from a few years back, these two novellas at first blush seem to make sense as a package — but, upon reading, present very different experiences. Silverberg’s story is a well-written, swiftly-paced tale that moves efficiently through several science-fiction tropes: in a far future where a small group of bored immortals play with the world on a scale we can barely imagine, a man is brought forward from our time and falls in love with one of the immortals who hides a dark secret. It’s all nice enough, with some cute nods to Michael Moorcock (whose Dancers at the End of Time books trod similar ground), and some interesting thoughts on cities (the immortals create fake cities, based on real cities in a specific era, mixed with myth and fiction, in which to spend their days). The Yeats quote feels forced, a grasping after symbolism, but then again it also points to some of the ambition the story at least intermittently displays. Overall, a solid piece of genre work, competently done.

Wolfe’s story, though ... ostensibly, it’s the diary of an Iranian prince coming to America in a future where the United States has been reduced to third-world status, and the many strange things he finds, and the terrors he comes across that sends him away from the decadent future city of Washington, D.C., and into the forests of the continent’s interior. Look closely, though, as the story invites you to, and it becomes something entirely different. Only what exactly it is, is difficult to make out.

Wolfe has two recurring tricks — or ‘techniques’ might be a better word, as he usually deploys them not merely with dexterity but with a depth that probably could not be reached any other way. Firstly, he plays with his character’s perceptions. Particularly in first-person stories, he has no hesitation at all in having his characters describe something about which they are completely mistaken, or having them assume things without even realising that they’re making an assumption. They think they see something, but then it turns out they don’t. What they presume to be concrete reality is actually a dreamscape or hallucination.

Secondly, Wolfe is a master at using narrative lacunae to enhance a story. He has an awful lot of things happen in gaps — gaps of consciousness, gaps of awareness, gaps torn in the fabric of story like (in this case literally) pages torn out of a journal. In other words, often the essence of a Wolfe story resides in what is not told. It is in what is implied; or, what the reader can tease out from the hints embedded in what seems a simpler or even superficial story. The introductory page to the WolfeWiki (a valuable resource to me as I thought about this story) sums things up quite well.

So in this story there is a hallucinatory drug, which may or may not be ingested during the course of the story. There’s a story-forging machine, which may or may not have written chunks, or a chunk, of the story. The story as a whole seems to collapse in on itself; nothing is certain. I think this is deliberate, but I’m not certain. The prose is well- and tightly-written, but the narrative seems to subvert itself so thoroughly that you end up questioning whether it hangs together at all.

Which may mean the title of this novella points back to its source, as well. Wolfe nods to the fabulation of the One Thousand and One Nights while trying to go in a different direction, and create something almost beyond narrative. I don’t know if he’s wholly successful. To say the story requires a close reading suggests that a close reading would clarify it in some way; it may be, in the end, a story about the gaps in stories.

But I’m not at all sure about that. So, like much of Wolfe’s work, it is a tale that invites cogitation. It’s something you have to think about, and successful insofar as it’s something worth thinking about. I’m not sure it’s a masterpiece in any way, or if it is, I suspect it’s a flawed masterpiece. But it is a useful example of Wolfe’s sensibility and techniques, an intelligent work in prose that twists in the reader’s mind.

Readings — The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell

2010-01-10T15:43:00.000-05:00

The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell

by Aldous Huxley

I had of course heard of Huxley’s book long ago, though only vaguely. I knew nothing of what it was actually about. Which is why I was surprised to find that, above all else, it was a book of art criticism. Although there’s much in these essays about the psychedelic experience, the book’s most interesting insofar as it considers how this and other ways of seeing apply to the history of art.

To call Huxley’s writing ‘lucid’ is an ironic understatement. There’s a clarity of approach here which belies these essays’ status as underground, or at least counterculture, landmarks. Instead, there’s a sense of these writings as being in the tradition of the essayist as critic, the man of letters as scholar. They read like measured, thoughtful considerations of unusual experiences.

I’ve never taken psychedelic drugs, but the experiences Huxley describes in terms of the nature of vision and art are familiar, are things I can grasp. It’s a mistake, then, to imagine that these essays are solely of relevance to those interested in drugs. They’re about the attempt to capture a transcendent experience. Time having passed, one can now be sceptical about the nature of transcendence involved in the drug experience — surely such a mass enlightenment would have had more of an effect on the world by this time — but the way that Huxley approaches what was for him a new technology hinting at new realms of vision is intriguing.

Readings — London: City of Disappearances

2010-01-09T15:12:00.001-05:00

London: City of Disappearances

edited by Iain Sinclair

I used to believe that the best writing, or at least the best novels, tended to the polyphonic: incorporating multiple voices, building a context out of the balance between perspectives. Lately, though, I’ve begun to wonder. Is it actually possible for any one person, however gifted, to actually create multiple different voices? The trite answer is simply to say that is in this gift that genius consists, but I’m not at all sure that’s enough. I am not speaking, here, of one person going beyond their personal experiences of gender or ethnicity or class; nor am I even speaking of the ability to create a character who thinks differently than oneself. I’m wondering about the possibility of creating in one’s head, or on the page, multiple different entities who use language in individual ways, who experience the world in physically different ways (one perhaps having a greater tense of the tactile world, another being visually oriented, another being wrapped up in their own skull), who have different talents and gifts and defects and who perceive the world through those lenses. Whose heads are put together in fundamentally distinct ways.

Of course that’s the sort of thing that can be simulated to some extent; that’s what character creation is. And if these simulations resonate enough with our own experiences, we can say that they seem real. But to fundamentally create characters, to bounce them off each other — of course the art of the novel lies in the structure of their interactions, as well, and so therefore derives from the novelist’s individual sensibility, and therefore the sense of polyphony the novelist creates is a myth. But is even the appearance of polyphony credible? Or are certain aspects of the novelist inherently embedded in whatever character they create? Again, genius would tend to have fewer of these limitations; but to what extent is even the greatest genius so limited?

(I might note that inherently collaborative forms, theatre and film and comics, don’t strike me as any more effective than prose. This may be because I instinctively respond to these forms less profoundly than I respond to pure use of language. But it also might be because, although there is a dialogue between artists in the creation of the work, the dialogue a) is between artists and not between characters, and/or b) operates on different levels, so that what the actor brings to the script is wholly different than what the writer brought. To the extent that different actors interact in character, they’re still interacting in the form of the single voice that wrote the script. Or so it seems to me.)

None of these thoughts or questions are particularly profound, and indeed are rather obvious. But the sense of multiple voices living within a text or narrative still seems to be a goal for writers and readers alike. And this is interesting to consider in the context of Iain Sinclair’s anthology London: City of Disappearances.

This mammoth anthology is stuffed with the matter of London; which, to Sinclair, means everything that’s not there. It’s a kind of paradox: one of the great cities of the world, notable for its variety and range, is defined (to Sinclair) by absences. He builds a convincing case, creating a literary London familiar and strange, violent and seedy and unknowable as well as lyrical and beautiful.

And when I say ‘he’, I do mean that there’s a sense that Sinclair himself is working through his collaborators to build his London. The volume has a whole has the sensibility of one of Sinclair’s own works, although it’s overall less elliptical and stylised in its prose. But given that, it is, still, the creation of multiple different individual perspectives. It is a true polyphony, which resolves into a harmony — and it happens to be a harmony stylistically familiar to those of us who know Sinclair’s other work.

Sinclair does have some small pieces in the book himself, as does his wife and some past collaborators like Rachel Lichtenstein and Alan Moore (who contributes one of the longest pieces in the book). But much of the book is by other hands, and it’s Sinclair’s cunning juxtaposition of text with text that gives them a sense or voice that they might not otherwise have had. His editorial creativity shows not only in terms of who he approached for pieces, but how he assembled their work. The book becomes a collage, and the texts seem to speak to each other, forming a network as any city does of landmarks and shared experiences.

(It’s interesting to me to compare this book to Humphry Jennings’ book Pandaemonium, another collage-like anthology which assembles disparate texts from across a couple centuries to create the sense of how England dealt with the Industrial Revolution. It’s unfinished, though, and the texts there were pre-existing writings chosen deliberately to fit Jennings’ theme. Not a perfect match, then, but worth considering.)

There’s a hardness to much of the prose here, a vigour and a swiftness. At the same time, there’s a mystery to much of the subject matter; this is a book of disappearances, of the unknown. Occasionally, as in Moore’s piece, that touches on the explicitly esoteric. Other times, it has to do with espionage, with the bohemian fringe, or with crime; it is a book of under-worlds and demi-mondes.

I remember reading a piece in a London literary paper not long before the book came out, cooing at Sinclair’s dismissal of Zadie Smith’s “essentially suburban” outlook. Reading Smith, I appreciated what Sinclair meant. Reading this book is a reaffirmation of something greater. A fool sees not the same city that a wise man sees; I’ve been to London, years ago, and it looked nothing like this. I wonder now if I were to return, wiser, what I would see; and whether the metropolis might come to resemble this book.

Does the unity of the book answer the question of whether an individual can create a polyphonous work? If the anthology has a feel so like Sinclair’s own writing, does it suggest that we are each of us in some way anthologists of ourselves? Do truly distinct voices emerge from within ourselves, or in some way speak through us when we write? Certainly some writers have spoken of feeling that to be the case; is that a psychological tic, or a symptom of some other truth?

Conversely, is the editor of the anthologist, in this case, functionally similar to that of the novelist? Is the rejection of the sensibility of Zadie Smith a limitation of polyphony? But then, is even the broadest diversity not in part shaped by what it excludes?

Or does it matter? Perhaps the point I’m coming around to is this: if the anthology is so close to Sinclair’s own work and voice, then does it mean that prose is a medium capable of synthesising voices? If the evidence suggests that multiple voices sound like the voice of one man, then does it follow that one man’s voice may contain within itself multiple voices? Or, at least, that one voice may mimic the sound of multiple voices within the medium of prose in a way that is indistinguishable from the reality of different voices?

I suppose I’d like to think so.

Readings, and other things

2010-01-06T14:32:00.002-05:00

Well, that was an annoying delay.

I broke my modem a bit before Christmas, and only now am I back online. It says something odd about society, perhaps, that being able to access the internet is so very important, but (it seems) the only way to get a modem easily is through your ISP.

Anyway, the time off-line may have been useful. I completed the novel I was working on; it's a very rough draft, but is overall complete. It's 106 000 words, and I wrapped it up on Christmas Day a bit after 1 PM. Now I have to put in some heavy time revising it.

Between Christmas and Boxing Day, I added 12 books to the apartment. I read 10 through December, one of them from the library. So that's a total of 113 books read on the year, with absolutely no change in the number of unread books in the apartment overall. I still intend to write about the books I've read, so have added a general-purpose 'readings' tag. I think the exercise of keeping track of my reading was a good one, so I'll continue that for the future, and see how it goes.

Bixi Praise

2009-12-15T22:34:00.002-05:00

Found a link to Time magazine's 50 top inventions for 2008.

#19 is "Montreal's Public Bike System".

Catching Up

2009-12-15T04:56:00.002-05:00

In the end, I made my 50,000 words for November, and the novel's actually progressing nicely. I want to keep going at a high rate, finish it, then research and rewrite it. It feels good, and I'm hoping I might be on to something with this one. Working title: A Treatise on Opticks.

I did buy (or was given as an early Christmas gift) Liquid Story Binder. I'm looking forward to bringing over other things I've been working on, and trying them out in this program. Opticks has benefited from LSB's architecture, but I have an idea some of my other long-term projects might make an even better fit.

I read one book in November, which was also a book I added to the apartment. So no change overall in the reading stats.

Finally, a significant document, courtesy of the Robot 6 blog: The series bible for Batman: The Animated Series. Some interesting notes in there, including character backstory that never made it into the show (Renee Montoya was married?). For its soundtrack and design sense alone, that show was one of the greatest achievements of American TV. Check out the link, and see that sensibility as it was first laid out.

Binding stories

2009-11-18T15:15:00.005-05:00

For the last couple of years, I've taken part in National Novel Writing Month. I signed up again this year, and decided I'd try something a little different. In addition to generating 50,000 words of text over the course of November, I'd change up my habits a little, using some new writing software. Specifically, I decided to give Liquid Story Binder a try instead of trusty WordPerfect.

LSB isn't a standard-issue word processor; it's really a variety of things, allowing you to enter text in a range of formats to help you outline and organise a long multi-part work. There are text editors that you use to write "chapters" as well as "notes"; you can also create "dossiers" and "outlines", which format information in ways that might be useful as you work on the structure of your story, as well as "journals" which link info to specific days, and "mindmaps" which create a kind of virtual pin-board on which you can move brief notes around to help you get a visual sense of how ideas link up. You can use the program to set up a playlist of mp3s, or establish a gallery of images related to your story. And so on.

The program does so much, in fact, that it can be difficult to get your head around. It's possible to look at all these features and wonder what it all has to do with actual writing. Certainly I found it difficult at first re-imagining my working process to take advantage of LSB's features, but over the past couple of weeks I've come to find the program really helpful; I suspect the novel I'm working on has gained a level of complexity it might not have had otherwise. Or, more precisely, I've reached that level of complexity with a certain ease that I might not have got with a word processor.

A word processor is by its nature linear; you're basically entering text on the screen as though the screen were a sheet of paper. Liquid Story Binder takes more advantage of the properties of a computer. On one level, that means that you can change the colour scheme of the program to match the tone of your work. More profoundly, though, it makes it easy to have multiple applications -- or sub-applications, in this case -- open at once. So you can work on a chapter, have three notes open while you do, and have an outline next to the chapter which tells you where the chapter fits in to the overall framework. And you can have a visual reference in the background to help you along. The program seems designed for the current generation of rectangular monitors, taking advantage of all that horizontal space to have multiple stuff going on at once.

Crucially, having these multiple formats and multiple windows seems to make it easier for me to visualise what I'm doing. It's easier for me to make connections between parts of the book. It's easier for me to see how it builds, how the parts interrelate to the whole, and I what have in mind for each of those parts as individual pieces.

Now, up this point, I've actually just been working on the story's outline. Which is a bit of an issue in terms of NaNoWriMo, in that I now have to write 50,000 words over the next dozen days or so. We'll see how Liquid Story Binder does with that; I haven't yet tried out its actual text-entry aspect yet. That's where word processors shine, obviously, and we'll see if LSB can match the ease and flexibility of WordStar. That said, I like what it does so far, and like the way it helps me think about structuring fictions. I'm going to seriously consider buying the program when the free demo expires.

Another Book Sale

2009-11-11T14:04:00.004-05:00

Last week the Friends of the Westmount Library had their autumn "Quality Book Sale". I picked up a bunch of stuff:

Stephen Baxter / Deep Future

Michael Chabon / Gentlemen of the Road

John Clare / The Wood is Sweet

Candas Jane Dorsey / Black Wine

J.P. Eckermann, translated by Gisela c O'Brien, selected and edited by Hans Kohn / Conversations with Goethe

Lev Grossman / Codex

Kathryn Lindskoog / The C.S. Lewis Hoax

Iris Murdoch / Under the Net

Patrick Rothfuss / The Name of the Wind

Dan Simmons / Darwin's Blade

Alfred Lord Tennyson / Poetical Works

So that's 11 books for $15. Not bad, and some very exciting titles in there. The Tennyson is intended as a gift, so that's 10 new books added to the apartment. Interesting to me to note that between this sale and the spring sale put on by the same people, I end up with 22 books, 21 to be read, while the McGill book fair this year gave me 35 books, 26 to be read. So these Westmount sales are kind of catching up to the McGill sale, if only for me personally. Fewer older books to be found at the Westmount sales, though, and generally less idiosyncratic and not as varied as the McGill fair; but the prices at the McGill sale this year were actually slightly higher than in the past, so the Westmount sales actually have the edge there.

The main concern for the Friends of the Westmount Library has to be the amount of space they have to work with, though. There just isn't anywhere near enough space in their current configuration, given the number of books available. It's one thing to have boxes of books under the tables, even boxes on top of boxes, but when the books fill the boxes such that they can't be easily examined, as far as I'm concerned you risk losing a sale. Still, between the Library and Victoria Hall, there are probably answers to these problems. We'll see what happens in future.

Readings 2K9: October summation, and the McGill Book Fair

2009-11-02T15:48:00.003-05:00

So, the final tally for me from this year’s McGill Book Fair is as follows:

The Cloud of Unknowing

Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer

M.H. Abrams / Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature

John Aubrey / Brief Lives

Iain Banks / The Business

Richard Harris Barham / The Ingoldsby Legends

Max Brooks / The Zombie Survival Guide

Edward Bulwer Lord Lytton / The Coming Race

Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver / Mr. Palomar

G.K. Chesteron / The Man Who Was Thursday

Charles Dickens (with plates by Cruikshank, selected by J.B. Priestly from Sketches by Boz) / Scenes of London Life

Nalo Hopkinson / Midnight Robber

Ellic Howe / Urania’s Children: The Strange World of the Astrologers

Sam J. Lundwall / Science Fiction: An Illustrated History

The Works of John Milton

Iris Murdoch / Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues

Iris Murdoch / The Book and the Brotherhood

Iris Murdoch / Bruno’s Dream

Iris Murdoch / The Green Knight

Iris Murdoch / The Message to the Planet

Miyamoto Musashi, translated by Nihon Services Corporation / The Book of Five Rings

David Pringle / Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels

Apollonios Rhodios, translated by Peter Green / The Argonautika

The Complete Short Stories of Saki

Robert Silverberg (editor) / New Dimensions 1

Carl E. Schorske / Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture

Leon Surette and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, editors / Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition

John Timbs / Abbeys, Castles, and Ancient Halls of England & Wales: Their Legendary Lore and Popular History

Janet Todd / The Secret Life of Aphra Behn

Edward John Trelawny / Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author

J.F. Webb and D.H. Farmer, translators / The Age of Bede

H.G. Wells / Meanwhile and The King Who Was a King

Ronald Wright / A Scientific Romance

Oh yeah, and in a moment of nostalgia I also grabbed a couple of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks:

Ian Livingstone / City of Thieves

Keith Martin / Vault of the Vampire

So that’s 35 books for a total of $70.50. Not bad, really. Still, it was a slow year. The Milton I bought just as a replacement copy for another edition I own which is falling apart from years of use; the Banks was a mistake, as I already own a copy (anybody want it?); and I also already owned a copy of the Chesterton, part of a massive anthology, and bought this edition for the convenience of having the book in a stand-alone volume.

As a contrast, last year I bought 66 books (including gamebooks, graphic novels, reference works, and so on) for $141. Now, I’m not complaining about my haul this year; but the fact is I only bought half of what I did in 2008. Deduct the three books I mentioned above from the total, deduct another four books I’m planning to give as gifts, and ignoring the gamebooks — I end up with 26 books to be read added to the apartment. Which is a more manageable number than I’d been expecting.

I will say that there seemed on the whole to be less interesting older material at the fair this year— the John Timbs book is an example of the sort of thing I mean. An obscure hundred-year-old-plus book (this looks like a first printing, which would put it at 1872), with an odd subject. There’s a curiosity factor to volumes like that, and in other years I’d find several such, but not this time. Then again, I went to the fair hoping to pick up some books by Iris Murdoch — a major influence on A.S. Byatt, I grew curious about her after reading all that Byatt a few months ago — and that certainly worked out. Plus I found some books I'd been curious about for a while, notably the Bulwer-Lytton.

Fun as always, then, but not one of the great Book Fair years for me. That does mean, though, that I have a shot at ending the year having actually made a dent in my books-to-be-read pile, despite only completing one book in October. I added one book to the apartment besides the books I bought at the fair, as well (so 27 added, 1 read, 26 down for the month). Overall: 102 books read, 13 fewer unread books in the apartment on the year. Not bad.

Of course, next Saturday is another book fair at the Westmount Library ...

[This post was edited because I managed to miss the Trelawny in the first version of the list I posted.]

Readings 2K9: The Parish

2009-10-09T15:49:00.000-04:00

The Parish

by John Clare

Interest in John Clare seems to be in something of a renaissance. A character in Alan Moore’s novel Voice of the Fire some years ago, he recently figured in (and posthumously contributed the title to) Iain Sinclair’s Edge of the Orison. This may not sound like much, but Clare’s not terribly well known; I took an undergrad course in the Romantic poets, and I don’t think his name ever came up. In later years, I came to know Clare’s nature poetry well enough, but I think this was my first exposure to his more satirical side.

It’s really very good. It’s angry, bitter, mournful, and — crucially — wise. Clare’s unconventional diction recalls Blake in more than just superficial details; there’s a feel here not unlike the Songs of Experience, as though the parish Clare anatomises in the course of over 2000 lines is itself fallen as a whole from the innocence of earlier days. Clare seems to touch on every aspect of parish life, rich and poor, male and female, young and old. And everywhere there’s a fire to his portraiture of life, a sense of outrage which I think holds up well next to Blake and Shelley. Even more than Blake (and quite unlike Shelley), Clare lived on the fringe of society, and turned his anger at what he saw into verse. It’s quite a sustained performance, and it deserves to be better known than it is.

Readings 2K9: A Man For All Seasons

2009-10-08T11:52:00.002-04:00

A Man For All Seasons

by Robert Bolt

I have not seen this play, nor even the film based on it. So my reaction here is, as is necessarily the case with a reaction to a theatre script, a reaction to a blueprint. That being said, it strikes me as something peculiar.

It’s the story of Thomas More, and More is definitely the hero of the piece. Not only is he the most moral and most intelligent character in the play, none of the other characters really seem to be able, on some profound level, to even understand him. He is a great man, and nobody else in the play demonstrates a greatness kin to his. As written, the text seems to me to be trying to make clear to the audience wherein More’s greatness lies while at the same time hiding it from the other characters.

More’s downfall, if downfall it is, comes not from any weakness in himself; Bolt’s preface to the play makes it quite clear, in fact, that he sees (or has treated) More as “a hero of selfhood”. But this is not a typical tragic hero — he lacks a flaw. He is in fact much more like John Proctor in The Crucible; a moral man in a society that is afflicted by the immoral, who eventually is thrown in prison and sentenced to death for being, in essence, incorruptible in a corrupted world. The interest comes perhaps in empathising with a (morally) superior being, who is brought down, mocked, and destroyed by the world; which means, these are passion plays.

As such, this play is quite strong, or so it seems to me (and obviously this is a work that has been quite celebrated over the years). I’m interested enough to want to see the movie (or play, if I get the chance) to see what a director can do with the material. Bolt talks in his preface about trying to use Brecht’s alienation techniques; on the page, they don’t seem particularly likely to alienate, and I wonder what the effect is in production. Certain things one can imagine; other things one can’t, and that is why one must see it for oneself.

Readings 2K9: Captain of the Andes

2009-10-07T14:31:00.002-04:00

Captain of the Andes

by Margaret Harrison

This is an English-language biography from the 1940s of José de San Martín, liberator of Argentina, Chile, and Peru. It’s narrative in focus, to say the least. More precisely, it’s intensely romantic. San Martín is cast as an absolute hero; and while there’s no doubt his actions were heroic on a grand scale (raising an army and leading it across the Andes mountains to capture Chile from the Spanish, then leading them by sea up the coast to besiege Lima), you tend to wonder at the enthusiasm Harrison brings to her subject. As noted, the book was published in 1943, and it comes off as a rewrite of Bartolomé Mitre’s The Emancipation of South America — or at least of the chapters to do with San Martín. Mitre’s book is more restrained, and even then it’s been criticised for romanticising San Martín. It may be that the man’s accomplishment lends itself to such approaches. At any rate, Harrison’s book tends to be good at giving background, but occasionally difficult to follow when it comes to the exact chronology of San Martín’s actions. A bit of a mixed bag, but an easy read.

Readings 2K9: The Disinheritance Party/Appleseed

2009-10-06T16:32:00.002-04:00

The Disinheritance Party

Appleseed

by John Clute

Clute’s two novels, published twenty-four years apart, are very different books. Both attend strongly to language, pushing syntax and diction in new and strange ways. In both cases, structure shines through the language; there’s the sense of archetypes in action. Of mysteries of sex and death being played out. But the connections between language and those deeper structures are dissimilar, and the feel of the books completely different.

The Disinheritance Party is nominally more realistic; a late modernist novel in the style of Pynchon, it follows an odd family group through madness, incest, and castration to a blow-out ending. Identity shifts, and one becomes other; history is mutable. It begins with a young man named Abraham Zuken (A to Z, Biblical echoes) and more-or-less ends with him as well; in between is a parabola of dysfunction and improbability, of hallucination, and of rebellion against a Cronos-like patriarch. The more extreme the book gets, the less real it feels; it becomes a modernist farce. It becomes an open question how much of what we're reading is 'taking place' in any kind of objective world, and how much is inside the head of (at least) one character. It’s an interesting performance, but it’s a burlesque of a story.

Appleseed is nominally a space opera, with a heroic roguish starship captain, evil aliens, traitorous AIs, and vast space stations. It completely inhabits the world of its future, such that exposition is effectively nonexistent, and we must piece together on the run the nature of its extrahuman species and also of the human culture that has evolved in this future, as well as technology and other elements of the setting. It moves toward a hieros gamos, a sacred and healing marriage. On one level a simpler book than The Disinheritance Party, it is on another level more complex; more human.

Both books seem to begin with simple family dramas, and both in their different ways play that drama out on cosmic scales. The Disinheritance Party hints at a fantasy of history, making the tragedies or black farce of its story the story of the human race, an inevitable Oedipal clash of generations and genders. Appleseed moves to the future, to transcendence. It is serious and comic. Not only longer, it is the greater and more sustained work.

Both books can be seen to lack something; the texture of character which is associated with the traditional novel. The sense of a society against which individual characters can be discerned. These books tell simpler tales (yet also more complex, particularly in The Disinheritance Party, where the individual players take multiple roles), almost play-like. They’re both successes at what they do. But they are in a sense unforgiving, or unyielding; by their abstraction of character, they are two very different approaches to the inhuman.

Readings 2K9: Camp Concentration

2009-10-05T13:04:00.002-04:00

Camp Concentration

by Thomas Disch

A slim, ambitious, ecstatic book, Disch pulls off the difficult trick here of not only presenting a literary genius, but presenting the work of said genius, and making us accept the genius as a genius. Louis Sacchetti is a poet in a near-future US who is also a conscientious objector; arrested, he becomes part of a military experiment to enhance human intelligence, experiments which succeed but result inevitably in death. He’s locked up with a group of other test-subjects, and much toing and froing and playing about with minds follows. In the end the plot is worked out in accordance with symbol and image, a deft dovetailing of the novel’s concerns.

It’s a genuinely intelligent book, a concerned and human book. It draws from some surprising wells; medieval scholastic philosophy, alchemy, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Mann, Wagner, Lautréamont ... it plays freely with Western culture, but maintains a shape to its narrative. Not an intense shape; it’s not really a plot-centric text, though the story is consistent and engaging. It’s more to do with the matrix of Sacchetti’s mind, how it plays with his experiences, how he tries to ascend to revelation, how he balances heaven and earth and hell. Sacchetti’s underground prison inevitably takes on symbolic overtones; he's caught between the cruel and vulgar commander of the camp and the elliptical genius of the prisoners who have been in the experiment longer than he, with a consequent greater heightening of their intelligence.

It’s a powerful book, and Disch captures the tone of Sacchetti’s voice beautifully. He’s a poet, and so has a way with language; he is a prisoner and a martyr — but he is also aware that he is a prisoner and a martyr, and increasingly a genius, and his consciousness of these things is there in Disch’s language. This is not a book that an ungifted mind could have conceived of, or executed. Now, there are weaknesses; character is not particularly profound, for example. In some ways one could argue that it has the feel of a minor novel. But if so, it is the minor novel of potentially a major writer.

Readings 2K9: Little Brother

2009-10-04T20:50:00.002-04:00

Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

Your ability to appreciate this book — alternately frustrating and engaging — will vary depending on how much you believe Doctorow’s aware of his effects. I think he knows what he’s doing, and I quite liked the book as a result.

It’s the story of a teen hacker, Marcus, wrongfully arrested following a terrorist attack. He’s mistreated, but eventually released; a friend, arrested with him, is not released. So Marcus dedicates himself to bringing down the government in revenge, and to fighting to keep the US a free society even as increasingly draconian laws are enacted to prevent more terrorism.

Marcus is a bit of a jerk. To say the least. He tells himself he’s acting on behalf of his friend, but his actions don’t follow — he lets his friend’s dad think his son’s dead, for example. And he doesn’t really think about the inconvenience he causes to other people in the course of his civil disobedience crusade (it has been argued that he’s also irresponsible in discounting the harm he’s doing to valid anti-terrorism efforts; I can’t agree, as I think the point of the book is that no anti-terrorism initiative that interferes with a free society is legitimate).

I think Doctorow’s aware of this, because the reality is that Winston’s activities in the book as an outlaw hacker don’t really have any effect. He helps organise a rock concert that gets shut down. He forms a group of disaffected youth which is instantly infiltrated. In no way does anything he does actually initiate change — until he starts working with society, in the form of going to a newspaper and getting his story out to the world at large. This leads to him being arrested again, and tortured; and ultimately to a nicely ambiguous ending, which strikes me as entirely realistic.

In the end, the moral of the story isn’t that Winston is right. He frequently isn’t. The point of the story, what we’re left with, is the importance of paying attention to stories like his. The understanding not only that things like the suspension of habeas corpus are wrong, but that it is in part up to us to pay attention to the world around us and to act to prevent these wrongs, whether by voting or by volunteering or by financially supporting organisations we believe in. It’s a book about the importance of activism; about its frustrations, about how it can be done wrong, and also about how it can be done right.

It is also, incidentally, an sf book about a small group of outcasts fighting an evil empire, which, as I’ve previously observed, is a recurrent trope in genre literature. These things often test my suspension of disbelief because they tend to assume that the small group is smarter than the evil empire — leaving aside the number of smart people there must be within the empire. Here, though, Doctorow challenges that easy assumption. Winston thinks he’s smarter than the government and the adults around him. The book conclusively shows that he isn’t. The government does stupid things; they also do smart things. Winston does smart things; he also does stupid things, and often rationalises them to himself as being smart things. It’s that willingness to have smart characters be stupid that makes the book work, and that helps convince me Doctorow knew what he was doing all along.

Readings 2K9: The Status Civilization/Anarchaos

2009-10-03T22:59:00.002-04:00

The Status Civilization

by Robert Sheckley

Anarchaos

by Curt Clark (Donald Westlake)

I read these two back-to-back, and it makes sense to me to talk about them together. In The Status Civilization, Sheckley follows a man condemned to a prison planet from which he must escape; on this planet the inmates have formed a society based on an inversion of values, where wickedness (as defined by society circa 1960) is celebrated — you go to church to worship the spirit of Evil, for example, and taking drugs is mandated by law. Anarchaos follows a man who travels to the titular planet seeking the man who killed his brother, a colonist there; on Anarchaos, there are no laws, and life is a struggle of all against all. So a pair of books with real similarities, though they play out in different ways.

Sheckley's is a more direct satire, as I take it, of nineteen-fifties life (it was published in 1960). It’s a solid adventure story, with nice action scenes, and an unexpected ending. It tries to have a character-based conclusion, but isn’t really as profound as it needs to be to pull it off. Still, it’s a clever extrapolation from the premise. It moves fast, has some nice set-pieces, and has a few ideas in its head.

Curt Clark — actually a pseudonym for Donald Westlake — goes a completely different direction. One of the things you find out quickly about Anarchaos is that corporations are effectively in charge, exploiting the lawless brigands who populate the planet. It’s basically a realistic depiction of libertarian fantasies; without laws, the strong exploit the weak. The strong and smart triumph — but only up to a point. An individual can't stand against a group. Malone, the main character, can kill a taxi driver easily enough; but when two or three people join together, he gets taken down easily. And that small gang is nothing compared to the corporations, who operate slave labour camps because there aren’t any laws to stop them. What's interesting about the book is that instead of following Malone as he cuts a bloody swathe through the planet, he gets captured early on and sent to one of those camps. He breaks free, eventually, but he's never the same after. It's a nice swerve, making for a vastly different book than you'd anticipate.

Both of these are good books, frankly better than I expected. They take a similar premise, but explore it in different ways. You laugh at the social satire of the Sheckley at the same time as you’re led through the highs and lows of an action story. The Westlake wrong-foots you completely, and you never know what to expect after. Stylistically they’re not dissimilar — neither of them are brilliantly written, but both of them are competent enough to accomplish what they’re trying to do. Together, they’re a good example of how a similar premise (one man against a wild planet) can be twisted in ways you wouldn’t expect.

Readings 2K9: The Centauri Device

2009-10-02T23:33:00.001-04:00

The Centauri Device

by M. John Harrison

First published in 1974, this book is in some ways curiously sedate. Harrison’s strongly associated with the New Wave of science fiction in England, but there’s little of the formal play that’s so often identified with the New Wave. It’s a fairly direct story, set in a human-populated galaxy hundreds of years in the future, about an alien super-weapon and the variety of rogues, scoundrels, and thugs who try to take control of it. In a lot of ways, it’s not that distant from classic golden-age sf.

Except, and it’s a crucial exception, in terms of sensibility. There’s a greater cynicism, a greater distrust of governments and militarism. A greater willingness to play with anti-heroes. The very end of the book seems to call in question much of what came before, especially the ending, explicitly declaring itself “a dramatized account” of history (it’s an imaginary story; aren’t they all?). So it’s bleaker; but there’s still a considerable romanticism at play here, and the anti-heroes are still notably effective, still sympathetic.

In a lot of ways, the book’s reminiscent of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. There’s a similar density of imagination, a similar use of sf adventure tropes along with a subtle questioning of those tropes, a similar downbeat ending that misses being apocalyptic only due its scale. Even a similar whimsy in its starship names: Intestinal Revelation, Les Fleurs du Mal, Atalanta in Calydon. It’s shorter than the Culture novels I’ve read, though, and I think the length does it a favour. I think Banks, although consistently imaginative, tends to fall into a rhythm in his inventions and conceits. That’s something Harrison adroitly avoids. This is a solid, tautly-written story. Maybe it’s no more than that; it’s certainly no less.

Readings 2K9: September summation

2009-10-01T18:21:00.002-04:00

I read eleven books this past month, but my birthday was in there early on so I also added eight new books to the household. And three of the books I read were library books. Thus a net gain of zero; still just 39 fewer unread books in the apartment. 101 books read so far this year. And this month ... the McGill book fair.

Readings 2K9: Orsinian Tales

2009-10-01T18:19:00.001-04:00

Orsinian Tales

by Ursula Le Guin

This is an intriguing and strong collection of stories. They’re set in a fictional central or eastern European country, and range from the middle ages through to the mid-twentieth century. There’s no overt sf or fantasy element to them, though the way they’re presented has a visionary quality, a hint of something beyond the real. Yet most of the stories are what might be called bourgeois dramas; stories of young people in love, men and women trying to build lives for themselves, a man trying to find a way to escape into art. There are few stories in the collection about wars or treaties or the place of the country in the greater European context. But just by its existence, it situates itself as fantasy.

These paradoxes aside, the stories are largely excellent. Le Guin’s writing is understated and controlled. There’s a kind of impersonal perfection to many of them. Le Guin knows how to use implication, how and when to underwrite, to allow the reader to fill in the blanks. So her fictional lands come alive, her unreal cities have a life and an internal logic and culture to them. Although, that being said, there isn’t much of a sense of how the country interacts with the larger European context; of where its own traditions influence and are influenced by the ideas and arts around it.

Mind you, these stories wouldn’t work at all unless Le Guin had a strong grasp of her country, and of the times through which it lived. She’s able to evoke an era clearly, and create a convincing sense of the times in each story. In a way, this book is a good example of what I would call true post-modernism; an acceptance and revision of the past, a re-writing of what has gone before, suggesting new possibilities, new ways of looking at old accomplishments. And it is, in the final analysis, a considerable accomplishment in itself.

Readings 2K9: The Atrocity Exhibition

2009-09-30T12:56:00.002-04:00

The Atrocity Exhibition

by J.G. Ballard

Called a novel, this is actually an assemblage of short texts which collectively make up an excoriation of the barrenness of the modern world. It’s tied together not with narrative — though a kind of dream-story can be partially discerned in its early chapters — but with recurring motifs. The assassination of John F. Kennedy; automobile accidents and fatalities; the human body, dissected and anatomised; quasars and the observation of the sky. There’s a refusal to be bound by chronological time, an apparent attempt to give a kind of cubist view — but of what, is unclear. One of the characters is said to be attempting to start World War III in a “revolt against the present continuum of time and space”, which is as good a clue to the book as any.

So this is a radically experimental work. The text is cut up, glosses itself, rewrites itself. Words and phrases recur hypnotically (“the planes of her face”). Characters change names, die and then recur with no immediately evident explanation.

If it weren’t so short, it’d be unbearable. If it weren’t as tight as it is, it’d be unbearable. If Ballard’s language wasn’t as taut and controlled as it is, it’d be unbearable.

But it is all these things, and so it’s weirdly compelling. You have to re-read it, perhaps ideally re-reading it out of order. You have to be able to hold all the different parts of it in your head, I think, which is largely impossible even for a novel as short as this; in such a way you can begin to pick out the connections between the different parts of the book.

Is it ultimately meaningful? I think so. It’s intriguing in its use of language, for example. And in the way it subjugates form to theme; it’s a fine example of the modernist tendency to express (what was perceived to be) a fractured world through a fractured structure. It’s intriguing that it feels of its time. In part that’s because it consciously uses elements of the 1960s as a source for its imagery. But it’s also because that sense of a fractured world, in which human beings are alone within their skulls and cut off from those around them, seems slightly outdated in a twenty-first century defined by the internet. Our anxieties and stresses have become other than they were. That doesn’t make the book outdated; it means that it’s easier to see as a product of a specific moment. Ballard’s a good enough writer that this is still a living book. The anxieties of his time therefore speak to ours, and we can see ourselves in them. The book uses elements of its moment to speak to times beyond its own; which could be said to be the point of literature. In a different way than at its publication, the book takes us out of ourselves. Which is, to me, the point of reading.

Readings 2K9: J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

2009-09-29T16:24:00.003-04:00

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

by Tom Shippey

Tolkien’s a writer that you either love (most people) or hate (a vocal minority). I’m in the former camp, but I do think it’s by and large true that many of the people who love Tolkien’s work often don’t make a very good case for why, or have taken from it only surface or partial elements. Shippey’s book is one of the best appreciations of Tolkien I’ve seen, not least because it begins from a point roughly similar to Tolkien’s own interest, teasing out meanings in Tolkien’s texts based on Tolkien’s play with Old English.

This is hugely significant; Tolkien’s linguistic play, to me, easily outstrips Joyce in its verve and its ability to range across more than a millennium’s worth of language. Relatively few Lord of the Rings fans are competent to analyse Tolkien’s involvement with Old English and related languages. I’m certainly not. It’s good to see a book of criticism, aimed at the popular market no less, involved with the fabric of language to such an extent.

This isn’t to say its perfect. When Shippey tries to make a list of fantasy authors to compare to Tolkien, his selections often seem random. And he is at a disadvantage in responding to writers sceptical of Tolkien’s achievement simply because many of those writers never bothered to present any cogent criticism of Tolkien’s work, instead dismissing it without thought investigation. But Shippey does pay attention to Tolkien's construction of his story, recurring motifs of his plot, the development of character — and what language says about character, plot, and story. It may fairly be said of Shippey, then, that unlike many writers on Tolkien, he is worthy of his subject.

Readings 2K9: August summation

2009-09-11T17:02:00.002-04:00

Slow month, due to Worldcon and assorted dentistry. I read three books. One of them was a library book, too. Eight books added. So on the year: 39 fewer unread books in the apartment, 90 read overall. The McGill Book Fair looms.

Readings 2K9: Port Eternity

2009-08-24T23:32:00.001-04:00

Port Eternity

by C.J. Cherryh

This is a bit of an oddity. Certainly it left me with mixed feelings. The story of a group of artificial humans created to be the servants of a rich woman on her private starship, and what happens to them after an accident in hyperspace, it is on one level a straight-ahead sf adventure. But the artificial people all have names out of Arthurian legend, and it’s hard to shake the idea that some meaningful parallel is intended. I can’t really see any, though, so perhaps it’s more the contrast between these characters and their originals that’s the point. Certainly the characters act in (sometimes amusingly) non-sf-standard ways — faced with a mysterious alien spaceship that’s captured their own, they choose to barricade themselves in their ship rather than go exploring (even when that seems the only way back home).

The really strange thing about the book is the sudden shift in tone it takes in its last few pages. A shift for the better, I should say. As noted, the book reads as a straight-ahead science fiction story, crossed with a certain degree of soap opera, until those last pages — when style, diction, and point-of-view shift dramatically. It becomes more mythopoeic, striking a genuinely Arthurian note that’s been notably absent for the rest of the book. It’s much more interesting to me than everything that’s led up to it, and it sets up a kind of end-state which would also work as a status quo from which to launch another story. In point of fact, I can’t figure out why Cherryh told this story, and not that one. So, ultimately, this is a decent book that didn’t particularly grab me — but the sequel to which I’d grab in a flash, if it existed. As noted: an oddity.

Readings 2K9: Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges

2009-08-24T15:10:00.002-04:00

Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges

by Richard Burgin

A book-length transcript of a series of interviews with Borges, conducted by Burgin. They’re interesting, but seem to have relatively little focus — each ‘chapter’ skips around a fair bit. Unsurprisingly, the interviews focus mainly on literature, and Borges’ favourite authors. But there are also some insightful thoughts on politics and war; on the nature of fascism and violence, for example (if Hitler preached strength and the goodness of violence, then does it follow that to exert one’s will through strength is necessarily to partake of the nature of Nazism?).

There’s a palpable sense here that Borges is not really caught in the book, for all that he talks candidly about major events and themes in his life. It’s as if he’s too subtle to be caught so directly; there’s some quality to him which comes out really only in his writing, and of which one has only an intimation when reading the interviews. While it’s not surprising that the writer can’t be depicted in a series of conversations, the presence of that intimation — the hint that there’s something more to the man than what we’re reading — is perhaps the most Borgesian thing about the book: if the interview reduces the man to language, this hint is the sense that he has yet other books within him than this one, books that are far more important than the book that comes out of his life and speech. Which is to say, the sense that Borges is a major writer.

Slow recovery

2009-08-13T17:57:00.003-04:00

Anticipation ended ... what, three days ago now? ... and I’m beginning to feel like I’m getting back to normal. It was a blast. Most of my thoughts on it can be seen at the Narratives blog on the Gazette’s web site (specifically, at this link), but I’ll throw out a few notes here as a last look back.

First off, given what I’ve been writing about on this blog, I should note that between free stuff, review copies, and things picked up in the dealers’ room and elsewhere, I ended up adding more than half-a-dozen unread books to the apartment:

Crossing the Boundaries: French Fantasy from Bragelonne

Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2006, edited by Rich Horton

The Magicians, by Lev Grossman

Sang du pierre, by Élisabeth Vonarburg (I’m hoping to lay hands on the English version, Blood From a Stone, soon; published at the same time, and sharing a title in translation, the French and English versions have different stories)

Objects of Worship, by Claude Lalumière

Magic Mirrors, by John Bellairs

Curse of the Wise Woman, by Lord Dunsany

... and then wandering around yesterday I bought The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance, so what the hell, let’s throw that in there too. Eight, then, nine if I get the other Vonarburg title.

Second, it was a lot of fun meeting people. And interviewing people; attending as a member of the press allowed me a useful perspective, and of course led to interviews with fine people like George R.R. Martin, Lev Grossman, and Felix Gilman.

Third, and related to the above, it was a powerful sensation being at an event of that scale dedicated, at its core, to writing. Sure, there were a lot of other elements to it — media, filk, gaming, and so on — but most of the programming had written work as its focus. I learned a lot, but even more, the sheer volume of writers, and of discussion of writing, seemed for me to reach a kind of critical mass. I don’t mean that it was inspirational, or even that it was a reaffirmation of the value of imagination and storytelling, though in fact it was both these things; what I mean is that it suggested to me, or reminded me, that writing and literature and language and dreams can be made a way of life. Or more precisely, a way of being in the world. Which is to say: a way of survival.

So there’s some value in that. Grace and I are looking at going to Con-cept, a local convention, in early October. We’ll see.

Readings 2K9: July summation

2009-08-04T17:05:00.001-04:00

Got a lot of stuff to read with Worldcon almost here, but this is a quick note to say: 16 books read in July, 4 added to the apartment. Up by 12 in total. So, 44 fewer unread books in the apartment, 87 read so far this year.

Article up

2009-08-02T19:01:00.001-04:00

A quick note to say that my Gazette article about Neil Gaiman is now up.

Worldcon, Neil Gaiman, and Marvelman

2009-07-30T13:57:00.005-04:00

Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, is coming up soon — August 6 to 10 — and I, alongside Claude Lalumière, will be blogging about it for the Montreal Gazette's Narratives blog. I've been reading sf all my life, but this'll be my first convention; Claude has a lot more experience with publishing, fandom, and the like, so the two of us will be able to present both an insider's and an outsider's view of the con.

I've written a preview piece for the print version of the Gazette, which I believe will be appearing this Saturday. As part of the story, I got to interview Anticipation's Guest of Honour, Neil Gaiman. Obviously, I spent most of the interview asking him about Worldcon; but, given Marvel Comics had announced only a few days before that they'd acquired the rights to Marvelman, I also felt I should take a moment to ask him about that. And that part of the conversation is now up at the Gazette's blog.

Readings 2K9: Dying Inside

2009-07-19T22:35:00.002-04:00

Dying Inside

by Robert Silverberg

After reading this book, my girlfriend compared it to The Catcher in the Rye, which she’d had to read in high school; she hadn’t enjoyed that book, either. I found the comparison interesting, because after reading the book I compared it to Malamud and Philip Roth, writers I’d had to read in high school and whose work I hadn’t enjoyed. The point being: this isn’t really a bad book, but it has the earnestness and self-conscious literariness of English class. It aspires to be the sort of book that attains bourgeois respectability.

Another way to put it: this book is the story of a middle-aged telepath in contemporary New York City slowly losing his gift ... and that tells you everything you need to know about the novel. Tone, plot, character, there’s nothing surprising in the book at all. Each individual scene is well-written, but put together you start to notice that you see too easily where it’s all going. Each individual character sounds good when you first meet them, but never really add up to more than a collection of stereotypes: the Black nationalist, the bitchy sister, the One Woman He Truly Loved, and so on. It’s ironic, since the book wants to insist on the value of every individual experience — but presents only well-written stock characters. Even the way the theme of The Depth of Every Individual is brought out is unsurprising (the main character, in a flashback to his adolescence, goes deep into the thoughts of a taciturn farmer, a Man Of The Earth, and finds that Still Waters Run Deep).

The style is solid, the construction — weaving flashbacks into the slow progress of the present-day sequences — effective. But the book never becomes anything more than a stylistic exercise, a series of tropes hit in practised order, all the right notes in all the right order. It’s the sort of book, I think, that attracts a lot of praise when it’s first published, and which slowly loses its luster as the years pass — a pat conclusion, maybe, given the plot of the book, but it’s the only assessment I can give. If you’re looking for literary sf, you could do worse — but you could also do much better.