Readings — Of Mice and Men

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

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.)

Readings — Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey

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 — Eric and Enid [Four Arthurian Romances]

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

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.

Readings — Zastrozzi

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 — The Golden

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 — Reluctant Voyagers

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 — Castleview

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

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.

Readings — The Magicians

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

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

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 — City of Saints and Madmen

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 2K9: The Disinheritance Party/Appleseed

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: Orsinian Tales

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

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: First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

by Eric McCormack

It’s a pity that this book isn’t as interesting as its title. It’s not terrible; it’s the story of a boy born in Scotland, orphaned at a young age, who ends up travelling a fair part of the world and seeing some strange things before his story is wrapped up in Canada in his middle age. It’s an odd structure. The first two thirds or so are extravagant, set in exotic locales, featuring almost Gilliamesque oddities; the last portion is stripped of wonder and charm, livened only by an odd dream and a perhaps-supernatural vision of blackness. It’s clever, but makes the whole feel false. The two parts don’t coexist comfortably within one tale.

The problem may simply be the blandness of the narrative voice. McCormack chose to make his main character tell his tale in a very prosaic voice; there’s a reason for that, as we discover when we find out who he’s telling the story to, and why. But it doesn’t do the actual story any favours. There’s an absence of atmosphere that the story perhaps needed; lacking that atmosphere, the extravagances of the early parts never come to life, never catch fire, and end up even less substantial than they were presumably meant to. It’s a book that balances wonder against the quotidian, and tips the scales in favour of the quotidian.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a Canadian novel. It’s a decent example of the sort of tropes one thinks of when one thinks of CanLit — an erudite wander through a colonial culture’s history and literature; a tendency to flee the fantastic in favour of a bleaker realism (superficially bleaker, at least; one suspects that CanLit is more comfortable with the narrower bounds of realism). It’s a short and not terrible book; but, like much CanLit, not in the end terribly interesting.

Grace Notes

I've been far too slow in posting this, but: Issue 12 of the Beneath Ceaseless Skies literary fantasy webzine is up. I recommend the magazine highly, especially this issue, which features a story by Grace Seybold. It's really good. You can also find more of Grace's work in the new issue of Neo-Opsis. Excellent work, I feel.

Readings 2K9: Pretty Monsters

Pretty Monsters

by Kelly Link

This is a recent collection of Link’s stories aimed at the Young Adult market. One piece, the title story, is new; the rest have appeared elsewhere, some of them in previous collections by Link. I know some people are annoyed by this, and I can see their point. On the other hand, this was my first exposure to Link’s writing, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

Would I have enjoyed it if I’d been a younger reader? I don’t know. I might not have liked the storytelling perspective of Link’s work; all but one of the stories are told in the third person, with a narrator who comments on the action in asides directly to the reader. I can remember not caring for that point-of-view when I was younger. Then again, the one first-person story seemed to me to be one of the weakest in the book, so who can say? Most of the stories here focus on children or teens, which presumably gives the book its promotional focus, but I have no idea whether it’ll actually appeal to its presumed audience.

In some ways, that’s a good thing; the best books usually don’t have built-in audiences. Link’s stories are a good example: they confound expectations. They’re not structured the way stories normally are — a plot description might sound like a series of random elements, but Link crafts these often-surreal events into something that feels like a narrative. In part that comes through a strong grasp of language, of pattern and rhythm; also of imagery, but not in any usual way. Typically one watches an image develop over the course of a story, and extracts meaning based on the way the image is used in different places. It’s difficult to do that with Link’s work, because the images she uses are so strange, and recur in such unexpected ways; also because connections are so plentiful. If a typical pattern of images in a work of fiction is additive (this occurrence, then this one, then this one, illustrating this thematic development), Link’s use of imagery is somehow multiplicative, or even exponential: a new appearance of an image can cast a theme, a major plot element, or even the story itself in a completely new light.

This probably makes the stories sound more complicated than they are. In fact, they’re very intuitive; that’s how they work. Link’s authorial voice is calm, precise, and infinitely suggestive. There’s a clarity to the pieces, even when Link is juggling multiple layers of narrative and fictionality. Yet at the same time there’s a dreamlike feel to much of this material, something emphasised by the relative lack of conventional characterisation. Or, at least, lack of individuated characters. Link generally provides hints about things, letting the reader fill in details of scene-setting, plot, or other aspects of the story. That doesn’t necessarily work the same way with character — lacking detail, Link’s characters tend toward the archetypal. Not flat, necessarily, but not clearly defined, one against another. This may be for the best; Link is not necessarily at her best with character — in the first-person story, “The Surfer”, we’re told that one character isn’t terribly smart while another is a genius, but that doesn’t come through in the behaviour of the characters (or in their perceptions, as far as I could see). 

Abigail Nussbaum gave a favourable review to Link’s story “Magic for Beginners” — also included in Pretty Monsters — while noting that her fiction often lacked an easy emotional connection (for Nussbaum, the element of television fandom made this story more accessible; I don’t have that experience of fandom, but this story, and the collection in general, worked for me just fine). Nussbaum notes, I think correctly, that Link is more surrealist than fantasist, and further suggests that the surrealism could be what’s alienating her from a direct connection with the work while she still nevertheless enjoys it. It sounds likely to me, and it would seem to me that most people who appreciate Link’s writing at whatever level would be dedicated readers of one stripe or another. People who like to think about what they read, and why it works, and how it all fits together. 

On the other hand, this review at Locus notes that Link made a conscious effort to develop more traditional approaches to plot and character in her work. I think that’s there in the work, especially in the stories the reviewer cites. But I don’t know if it represents an improvement, in that I’d have a hard time arguing that those stories are better than “Magic for Beginners” or the other more surreal work in the collection. They do seem to me to be probably more accessible, though, and who knows where it will lead? Who knows what new kinds of fictions might come out it?

If I'm struggling with these questions — surrealism versus standard narrative, audience expectations and marketing versus what's there on the page — it's because Link's stories most often feel like distinct creations of a distinct sensibility. They're not written for a marketing category. So to me there's a level where Pretty Monsters feels like a bit of a misstep purely for that reason — a category error. On its own terms as a fiction anthology, it's excellent. In terms of its packaging, and specifically its positioning as a Young Adult anthology rather than a general story collection, I wonder whether it's the best possible presentation.