Readings 2K9: The Monsters of Templeton

The Monsters of Templeton

by Lauren Groff

In many ways, this book ought to be a hard sell for me. Set in, and dominated by, a small New England town named Templeton, which is strongly based on Cooperstown, New York, home of novelist James Fenimore Cooper and the Baseball Hall of Fame, it follows a young woman named Willie Upton, returning to her old home town to be confronted with a mystery about her past. I’ve never read any of Cooper’s work, and ever since the Expos moved Major League Basebal has been Dead To Me. But Willie’s story, and the stories she finds about her ancestors, are engaging; Groff’s a talented writer, and the structure of the book, with interpenetrating narratives and shifting voices, held my interest.

The book is nominally fantasy, filled with ghosts, pyrokinetics, a possibly-immortal apothecary, and the titular monsters (though it’s a safe bet the title’s also meant to refer to some of the human characters as well). You could call it magic realism — it’s a novel set in the recognisably real world, into which there are intrusions of the uncanny which nevertheless don’t alter the real setting are not necessarily the main point of the action of the story. In the end, it’s a strong blend of both the everyday and the unreal.

The writing is very strong, with smooth prose. The characters are engaging, if occasionally a trifle flat. On the other hand, this is a busy book, moving swiftly through scenes and incidents; you don’t notice that some of the characters have, let’s say, an archetypal quality to them. 

The town is well-detailed, well-imagined, but I felt could have used a bit more life to it; and by that I mean it would have been nice to see some of the secondary characters react strongly to some of the events which happen in the town. I would have liked to have seen the town, as a community, deal with a dead monster washing up on shore (as happens at the beginning of the book) in a more extensive fashion than we get. I don’t mean that the book should have focussed on that in a plot sense; only that none of the characters seem particularly interested or touched by the event or its aftermath.

More disappointing to me is the fact that Willie’s voice is less distinctive than that of many of her ancestors. Groff has a good touch with voice; the collective speech of a running club, almost incantatory, matching the rhythm of their jogging steps, or the rough dialect of an eighteenth-century frontiersman, or the excited yet stilted tones of nineteenth-century ladies in private letters — all these tones and vocabularies come across, all these speakers are vivid. Willie, by contrast, has her moments, but suffers by comparison.

This may be an extension of the tonal shifts between the present-day stories and the past tales Wille uncovers. Events in the present are sweetly comic, with relatively little tension to them; things in the past are bloody and often tragic. It’s something I find common in novels called ‘literary’ as opposed to those considered ‘genre’: in the literary novels, events in the past define the present, the main story takes place in extended flashbacks, and the climax often mixes both by revealing in the present some previously-unknown truth to which the flashbacks have been building (or presenting a capstone flashback tying past and present together). The genre books tend to be more focussed on the present; the key events unfold right now, obviously shaped by history, but nevertheless making the current moment the main field of action. I don’t mean for this to be an absolute statement, only an observation of a trend. My point is that it describes The Monsters of Templeton nicely, and in this case is exacerbated by the differences in the types of story being told in past and present.

At any rate, in the end, it’s a strong book, a fine read. I picked it up from the library looking for books from 2008 I could reasonably nominate for a Hugo Award; this might end up fitting the bill.

Readings 2K9: Who Can Save Us Now?

Who Can Save Us Now?

edited by Owen King and John McNally

One the great merits of this book is that it’s not straightforward. It’s an anthology of twenty-two prose short stories about super-heroes; but the genres and tones cover such a broad range that this statement means less than it seems. Some of the pieces here use the super-hero as an image or symbol to inform a highly literary fiction; others aim at direct parody; some are effectively unusual science-fiction stories; very occasionally a story plays it straight, but even then, usually in a way you don’t expect — Tom Bissell’s “My Interview With the Avenger,” for example, has a reporter interviewing a real-life super-hero, but there’s nothing science-fictional or fantastic in the story as such. Many of the stories cross genres, presenting literary fiction with a satiric tone, like Elizabeth Crane’s “Nate Pinckney-Alderson, Superhero”, or starting as an unconventional parody that becomes a sweetly mythic parable, as Will Clarke’s “The Pentecostal Home for Flying Children”. Impressively, it seems that every story in the anthology works, on at least some level.

It’s difficult to pick a story that stands out as the best of the bunch; none really merits being tabbed as the worst. If I had to pick a few top stories, I’d go with Cary Holladay’s “The Horses Are Loose”, a splendidly-written tale about a girl who believes that she has the power to change her life — once; Scott Snyder’s “The Thirteenth Egg”, a taut story about war and what it does to men; Michael Czyzniejewski’s “When the Heroes Came to Town”, a disturbing and evocative short-short story without a misplaced word; and “The Somewhat Super,” by David Yoo, a story of gentle mockery with an ending both downbeat and entirely right.

Are there any common themes in the book? It seems like a number of them have to do with the limitations of power. A lot of them are concerned with loss — loss of a loved one, loss of youth and innocence, loss of ideals and illusions. Many of them have to do with infidelity or suspected infidelity, with thwarted love. Now, powerlessness, loss, and infidelity are good super-hero comics themes, going back to the dawn of the genre — think of Bruce Wayne losing his parents, or the almighty Superman unable to do anything to save his exploded home planet. With infidelity we might have to go as late as early Marvel comics to find examples, but they’re certainly around. (Reed, Sue, Namor? Matt, Karen, Foggy? Peter, Betty, Ned?)

What isn’t in these stories? Generally, they don’t pound their points home. They leave you thinking; putting the pieces together, or meditating on a resonant image. There are surprisingly few fight scenes — some, but not the required regular diet of fisticuffs of even the more sophisticated hero comics. There’s an avoidance of pat moralism, of simplicity; there are moral viewpoints expressed, of course, but with an awareness of complexity. Some stories, like Bissell’s piece, have more thought about right and wrong than an entire year’s worth of certain super-hero comics I could mention.

Personally, I find it interesting that in a number of stories — Snyder’s, Czyzniejewski’s, Jim Shepard’s “In Cretaceous Seas” — the hero tales turn into something resembling horror. It’s always seemed to me that the super-hero story is the daylight form of the gothic; the same focus on out-sized personality, on forces beyond the ken of man, on good and evil made manifest — but slightly different costumes, slightly different narrative strategies. Consider Victor Frankenstein and Victor Von Doom; different in many ways, yes, but with a certain genetic similarity, I think. I suppose it’s one of the marks of success of Who Can Save Us Now? that it seems to capture the nature of super-hero stories while at the same time so many of its tales push the boundaries of the form. 

Readings 2K9: Tailchaser's Song

Tailchaser’s Song

by Tad Williams

This book was a pleasant surprise. I’ve read a couple of other books by Williams, and didn’t particularly connect with them. For whatever reason, though, this one worked for me, at least a little. It’s an animal story; when the lady-love of a young cat named Tailchaser vanishes, Tailchaser begins a great quest to find her and save her from a mysterious evil which is threatening cats everywhere.

Williams’ writing is acceptable YA stuff. What makes it stand out here is a sense of the world of cats which is at least occasionally genuinely mythic, not in a grand epic style, but in a gentler, almost Dunsanian way — folktale rather than legend. It’s not really sustained through the novel, but the touches where it does work are enough to keep you going through the book.

Oddly, I found it unfortunate that the great evil of the story derives from that mythic realm. The book seems to me to be at its best when we’re getting the real world, the human world, from a cat’s-eye view. Like a number of fantasy writers, Williams seems to follow Tolkien a bit too much. It’s a pity. But this book is still the best thing I’ve seen by Williams, and it’s got me interested in finding out whether there’s more to his stuff than I’d previously realised.

Readings 2K9: Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!

Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers

edited by Sean Howe

This anthology of essays about comics is the definition of ‘mixed bag’. That said, it’s interesting to engage with, if only to see some of the preconceptions comics still have to deal with; to see how widespread a lack of understanding of the medium is, even among those with experience reading it. Most of the writers in this book have no experience writing comics, or writing about comics — though Jonathan Lethem has since gone on to write for Marvel, and Brad Meltzer famously for DC — and it shows; in terms of valuable criticism, the average issue of The Comics Journal beats the book all hollow. What I find interesting is the reason why.

Probably the best essays in the book are Greil Marcus’ piece on Uncle Sam and Luc Sante’s on Tintin. Aimee Bender (writing about Yummy Fur) and Myla Goldberg (on Chris Ware and Renée French) have interesting essays dealing with issues of storytelling — I take issue with a couple of points they make (I profoundly disagree, for example, with Goldberg’s assertion that reading is “a quest for communion”, reinforcing experiences and emotions the reader already knows; it seems to me rather a kind of exploration, giving the reader some new way to understand the world) — but overall appreciate their writing and their approach to their subjects. I never much cared for Ware’s work, and I don’t know that Goldberg’s work shows me anything new in his stuff, but her enthusiasm is catching; I at least know what she likes about Ware.

Tom Piazza’s piece is a clever narrative conceit, and it’s amusing to read Brad Meltzer’s fannish love letter to the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans. John Wray’s piece on Jim Woodring is a good try at capturing the uncapturable essence of Woodring’s work. Geoffrey O’Brien’s piece on Streanko’s Nick Fury has some solid analysis of narrative strategies, and some understanding of basic comics grammar — how panel transitions work, how significant they are to the medium. Geoff Dyer has an enjoyable essay about the importance of Silver Age Marvel comics to his youth. But although on its own terms it’s a fine piece, this is also a symptom of the greatest problem with many of the other essays in the book.

Too many pieces here fall into an uninteresting narcissism — the literary equivalent of a particularly uninteresting 1990s indie autobio comic. Jonathan Lethem, Christopher Sorrentino, Andrew Hultkrans, and to a lesser extent Glen David Gold turn in essays essentially about themselves, not about comics. Gold’s piece almost works, as it’s a piece about collecting artwork, and one of Gold’s own experiences in that area; I can’t agree with him when he writes, in his first sentence, “All stories about collecting are about self-loathing, self-love, and self-deception confused with the piquant cologne of loathing, love, and deception that drenches the object so desired.” Not only is it an inelegant sentence (the repetition of ‘deception’, the trailing-off at the end), it’s a sentiment I don’t recognise in either my own experience collecting or the stories of other collectors I’ve heard or read. Still, the rest of the essay at least explains why Gold comes to think the way he does, and in that way justifies his opening.

Most of the essays in the book refer back, in one way or another, to the writer’s childhood experience with comics. It’s a theme so recurrent you wonder whether it was part of the editorial brief the authors were given. If so, it was probably a mistake. Some of the essays are able to move beyond childishness; Lethem, Sorrentino, and Hultkrans don’t. Each of their pieces is concerned with their own personal experiences as a child, and the importance of comics, primarily Marvel comics, within those experiences. Those experiences are not inherently interesting, though, and their writing isn’t good enough or insightful enough to make up for it. Lethem’s essay is particularly fatiguing, with a kind of facile cleverness — he arranges his text into unusual shapes! Heavens, the ingenuity! This sort of thing is “facile” because it’s not connected to anything profound, anything truly moving. It’s a writer attempting to justify an exercise in self-indulgence.

The worst aspect of this fixation on childhood is the fact that it seems to get in the way of actual critical thought. In some cases one might question the critical perception or understanding of the medium of the authors involved. Perhaps the worst essays in the book, Steve Erickson’s piece on American Flagg! and Gary Giddins’ on Classics Illustrated, demonstrate an incredible lack of any grasp of comics’ form or history. Erickson, unbelievably, says Flagg! “kickstarted the independent comics movement,” — ignoring Cerebus and Elfquest, to name only two books which preceded Flagg! by several years — “and also provided the door through which the medium rushed to the likes of such eighties landmarks as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, the Hernandez Brothers’ Love and Rockets, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.” While it’s true Flagg! was an influential and significant comic, Erickson’s list mixes up great work with the merely flashy (yeah, I’m talking about Dark Knight), and throws in one book — Love and Rockets — which preceded Flagg! by a year or two, and actually grew less like Flagg! as it went on. 

Giddins, meanwhile, makes such odd comments as “A computerized list, for example, of the popular songs published during the first half of the twentieth century reveals an infinite treasury of found poems: Flip to any page, put your finger on any title, and track the first ten songs upward or down, and voilà, instant lit.” This is the sort of thing that gives postmodernism a bad name. Still, had Giddins focussed on issues of canon formation and the like, he might have produced something halfway interesting. He doesn’t, instead giving a rambling overview of the art of the Classics Illustrated line, littered with asides — for example, criticising the company for transliterating Dostoevsky’s name as ‘Dostoyevsky’, a perfectly acceptable spelling.

Giddins concludes his essay by writing that the comics he’s been talking about “are, after all, childhood pulp, and one wouldn’t go home again even if one could.” If so, why bother to write the essay? This attitude, that comics don’t matter, bedevils many of the other essays. Lethem can’t put together three sentences describing the work of various comics creators without saying “Enough: I fear I’m losing you.” In the context of his essay, it’s an example of the self-loathing (to use Gold’s word) which comics seem to inspire in him. Conversely, Sorrentino is never able to rise above the Marvel-versus-DC paradigm of his youth to talk about what really matters in comics and why. Hultkrans, meanwhile, not only indicts his old comics as charged with “squirmy prepubescent freight”, but even appears to slight the book he’s writing for: “The intervening years have seen the justifiable and largely successful efforts of creators and fans to make comics worthy of adults (Exhibit #8,166: this book)” — this actually makes less sense than it appears, since the book isn’t a comic; I can only assume Hultkrans means that creators and fans are trying to justify comics to adults, an effort I think the rest of the essay implicitly condemns as futile without actually coming out and saying so.

Too many of these essays shy away from grappling directly with whatever real power there might be in the comics they’re talking about. Far too many are far too obsessed with social status and hipness. On the one hand, the writers are trying to reassure their audience that they, the authors, are above being truly interested in mere comics. On the other hand, they’re also concerned with the peer pressure and alienation experienced as children. This has potential as a subject, but nothing is actually said; nothing of worth is put across. In the end, the reader is left to wonder why they bothered; many of the writers seem to have the same question.

Editor Sean Howe, in his introduction, quotes Salman Rushdie as saying “ unlikeness, the thing that makes it impossible for a writer to stand in any regimented line, is a quality novelists share with the Caped Crusaders of the comics.” This is at once more insightful, more mature, and arguably more articulate than most of the essays which follow. Howe’s own introduction includes many of the problems I find with the rest of the book — a concern with undigested autobiographic incident, obsession with acceptance by others, a lack of thought or understanding of what comics are. “The fragility of the stapled pamphlet,” he writes, “hardly designed to withstand travel, is testament to the medium’s resignation that there will be no exposure to the outside world.” But this is the same form children devoured during family trips, in the back seats of cars; the same form that sold, at its peak, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of copies of a given issue per month. Howe’s lack of comprehension of the form, and the creations begot by it, has created an interesting book — but a book mainly to react against.

Readings 2K9: January summation

So, the aim of trying to reduce unread material around the house progresses.

In January, I read twelve books (three write-ups are now pending), one of those being a library book. I also acquired three new books. Meaning that overall, I cut down the number of unread books in the house by eight.

It's a start. Things may get a bit difficult in February, as Grace and I will be reading a whole bunch of books to try to find some novels worth nominating for Hugo awards. Some of those will be from the public library, so ... we'll see how many of my own books get read. If I end up with another net total of eight, I'll be happy.

Readings 2K9: Past Master

Past Master

by R.A. Lafferty

This is easily the strangest book I’ve read so far this year, and I expect it to remain so. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The basic gist of it is: in the future, men from a colony of Earth bring Thomas More forward in time to be their ruler. The joke is that their world is a communistic utopia, effectively (though unintentionally) built along the lines of, well, Thomas More’s Utopia.

But there’s so much more to the book than that one-line premise. There’s a manic inventiveness that keeps the book moving, in ways that have nothing to do with traditional plot structures. Lafferty was noted for bringing the feel of oral storytelling into his prose, a hellaciously difficult thing to do, and that’s clearly shaped Past Master on a number of levels. Not only linguistically, but also structurally; the book careens from image to image, from event to event, in a completely unpredictable and extravagant way.

Character suffers for it, in a sense; that is, characters become flattened, archetypal. The book works because Lafferty knows that’s what’s happening, and runs with it. More in this book bears little resemblance to the Thomas More I’ve read about elsewhere, but he’s close enough that he collapses into the historical image of Thomas More easily.

The book, Lafferty’s first, was published in 1968, and acclaimed as a classic of the New Wave of SF. Oddly, though, what leaped out at me as I began it was its similarity to classical Campbellian Golden Age stories — the situation of the colony world, travel in time and space, evil robotic intelligences, action scenes, and so on. Then, of course, it became something completely different; but the superstructure of the older stories is still there. The point I’m trying to get to is that, looking back now, I wonder if the New Wave is best considered as an intermediary step; writers like Ray Bradbury and Alfred Bester going a degree beyond Campbell in the late 40s and 50s, then the New Wave making another leap in the late 60s and 70s. Leading to, I suppose, writers like Jeff Vandermeer and A.A. Attanasio — arguably more literary, but also perhaps even more inventive writers. Like most teleological views of historical process, I expect this could be demonstrated to be false pretty easily; still, I find the notion intriguing.

Cool things

A couple interesting things found on the Coolopolis blog:

First, it turns out I'm getting a new library -- or a new old library -- moving in right next door to me.

Second, found in the comments section, a dream of what could have been -- plans for Montréal's métro system in the early '80s.

Readings 2K9: King Arthur

King Arthur

by John and Caitlín Matthews

This book, published by the Folio Society, is an examination of King Arthur and of the stories of the Round Table and the Holy Grail. It’s got some interesting material in it; the first chapter is an analysis of a historical figure in 2nd-century England who might have been the original Arthur, which is a relatively new (or newly-revived) theory. There’s a lot of speculation involved, but it’s a creative take on the perennial problem of Arthur’s historicity.

Subsequent chapters move in stages through the evolution of Arthurian myth — examining the historical age of Arthur and its first historians, Welsh narratives in which Arthur appears, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s contribution to the figure of Arthur and the use to which that figure was put by Normans seeking to justify their rule of England, then on to medieval narrative epics, Malory and Le Morte d’Arthur, and finally the modern age and the contemporary explosion of Arthuriana. It’s at this point that the book begins to weaken, enough so that it makes one question the scholarship of earlier chapters.

Structurally, the last chapter doesn’t make any kind coherent argument about the use of Arthurian story, which is a pity, as the book’s analyses of what Arthur meant in earlier ages was quite involving. Instead, after the Pre-Raphaelites, the chapter becomes a series of quick mentions of different Arthurian stories. The selection of works referred to is mostly strong, though the inclusion of the original Star Trek is puzzling — the stated justification is that Kirk is an Arthur-figure with Spock as his Merlin, but surely many other stories have the same character dynamics, and the comparison is never made in the show itself. The greater problem is that there’s not much context given for the different works, and the balance of space given to some seem out of balance. I like Charles Williams, and I enjoy his Arthurian poetry, but there’s a page about his poems while Wagner’s Parsifal is described in one sentence. Moreover, by following specific forms (novels, poems, operas), chronology is lost — there’s no sense of how one work influenced another, how the story changed over time.

There are also some factual errors in this chapter, and those are particularly worrying in a scholarly work. Spenser’s Faerie Queene is said to have “been planned as a work in twelve parts”; actually, it was planned to have twenty-four books. Una is described as a “female knight”, which more properly describes the character of Britomart. Later, the creator of the TV show Babylon 5 is named Michael J. Straczynski, instead of J. Michael Straczynski. Both in the text and in a picture caption, the comic book Camelot 3000 is described as created by Mike Barr, with no reference to artist Brian Bolland — which is to say that the man who drew one of the images in the book wasn’t credited for it. Minor details like this make one wonder how thorough the research was in previous chapters as well.

(I’m not entirely sure what to make about the book’s praise for the 2004 movie King Arthur, which gets a whole paragraph: “a convincing picture of the Arthur of the Dark Ages ... unflinching in its depiction of the savagery of the times. Cive Owen makes a strong and thoughtful Arthur ... after decades of films portraying Arthur as a hero of medieval splendour, this is a welcome move towards an alternative, more consciously authentic characterisation.” I’ve not seen the movie, so I have no opinion on whether this is accurate or not. But it’s troubling to find out — from online sources, and not from the book — that John Matthews was a historical consultant on the movie. Surely that would be worth noting in the interest of clarity?)

With these things in mind, one begins to wonder about earlier choices in the book. This is a relatively slim volume, and can’t go into either all the contemporary manifestations of the Arthur myth or the wide range of medieval texts. So choices had to be made, which is understandable, but I wonder now whether some of the complexity of the Arthurian corpus is given short shrift. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival is given a cursory mention, for example, but no more. The story the book tells, of how the Arthurian story develops, requires that certain manifestations of that story be passed over in silence. That’s fair enough, as every history must make its choices about what to include and what to leave out; but it means that the historian must maintain the confidence of the reader in their selections. In this case, I have my doubts.

Readings 2K9: The Egyptians

The Egyptians

by Alan Gardiner

This is a reprinting by the Folio Society of Gardiner’s 1961 book Egypt of the Pharaohs: An Introduction. It’s apparently a classic in its field, and still used in places as a textbook, despite its age. There’s no doubt it’s an informative, scholarly work. It’s a chronological examination of the history of the Pharaohs of Egypt, as nearly reign by reign as feasible. Of course, that’s not really possible; there’s too little known. The book is effectively an attempt at establishing a chronology of Egypt up to the time of Alexander the Great.

There’s nothing, or very little, about the experience of the people of the country. There’s some discussion of Egypt’s wars, but little about the way they went to war — either in terms of attitudes to war and soldiering, or in terms of weapons and technology used. There’s effectively nothing about religion, except insofar as it connects up with the political history of Egypt. Nor about art. Nor about culture or literature. Nor even about mummies. 

Much of this is by design.“We frankly admit our aim to have been propaganda,” Gardiner says in his Epilogue, “and our ambition will not have been satisfied unless we succeed in winning at least one fresh recruit to our fascinating field of research.” He writes this explaining why he’s left out the things he has, and why he’s spent much of the book discussing archaeology, and deliberating between different theories or analyses of archaeological research. He’s frankly hoping to draw people in to the field. I find his choices have the opposite effect: rather than presenting Egypt as a subject in its own right, with its own mysteries and fascination, it becomes merely a field of rubble for scholars to pick over. Something dead. Something mummified.

Up to a point, this is actually valuable; there’s no romanticism about the mysteries of the Pharaohs here. But the style can’t help but be dry. There’s too little known for sure about the Pharaohs, and specifically too little known about their individual personalities, for the subject to connect on a human level the way more recent history can. Gardiner’s choice to present pre-dynastic Egypt out of chronological sequence at the end of the book doesn’t help matters.

Gardiner’s writing doesn’t always help; it’s not that he’s a bad stylist on the sentence level, but he doesn’t seem to have understood how to construct a paragraph. Again and again paragraphs sprawl shapelessly for a page or more. One wishes a bit more craft had gone into the shaping of the text.

I can understand why this was a valuable book in its time; I’m not sure how much of it has been superseded in the past near-half-century, but as I say, I have read that it was being used as a textbook in an Egyptian history class. There’s a lot of information in the book; but lacking human context, it’s difficult to keep that information in memory, difficult to make it connect with anything, difficult to give it a human face. On one level, it has to be admitted that Gardiner accomplished just what he set out to do — he wrote a book containing exactly the information he wanted, and leaving out what was not relevant to his theme. But on another level, I can’t help but think that according to his stated aim, he failed. This is not the sort of book that I can see easily sparking the imagination.

Readings 2K9: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

by M.R. James

The Penguin edition I read contained both Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, first published 1904, and More Ghost Stories, published 1911. It’s surprising to think of these stories being written so late (realising that some, at least, were written at least as far back as the 1890s); there’s an apolitical conservatism, a Victorian stillness to them. The ghosts and horrors are never explicit, never broached directly, but approached elliptically. A review quote on the back cover speaks of the “academic reticence” of the style, which is as neat a way of putting it as any. And it gets at something else key to these stories; there’s a definitely academic tone to them, a concern with texts and provenance. With history, as well, and with thought; James expects his readers to think as they read, to assemble clues for themselves.

It’s quite possible that James forsakes a certain amount of horror in his intellectual style; H.P. Lovecraft’s brief capsule description of the plot of “Count Magnus” (in his essay “Supernatural Terror in Literature”) is probably more frightening than James’ actual tale. But on the other hand, it allows James to lure the reader in, to almost let them forget that they’re reading a ghost story. James conveys the character of everyday life very well, an unobtrusive characteristic of his stories which helps to emphasise the fantastic when it does occur.

Readings 2K9: Briefly Noted

This is an update post, to say that I've read Graceling by Kristin Cashore; a full review should be forthcoming from me elsewhere (more on that later, when it happens). I acquired the book in 2009, so it doesn't count in terms of cutting into the unread books around the house. That means out of a total of five books read so far this month, three have actually counted to my overall goal.

Luckily, I'm the sort of reader who always has a bunch of books on the go at once. So those numbers should be changing soon. 

Readings 2K9: The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

by Peter Ackroyd

I’ve been following Peter Ackroyd’s writing for some time now, both his fiction and non-fiction. He’s one of the most English of English writers, deeply involved with his country’s history and literature. His non-fiction includes biographies of great English heroes of the imagination (Dickens, Blake, Thomas More), and biographies as well of places (London, the Thames River). His novels are often elaborate pastiches, though one, The Plato Papers, is an extravagant science fiction. His new novel, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, re-imagines Mary Shelley’s most famous novel as a London farce, a kind of cockney black comedy.

It’s a strange creature.

The novel’s world seems a bit off kilter; we meet a young cockney poet studying medicine named Jack Keat, not John Keats. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s first wife is not a suicide but the subject of an unsolved murder. Oh, and electricity restores the dead to life. But there’s a reason for all this, as we find out on the last page; for the novel ends not with one twist ending, but two, and it has to be said that the final twist is one perfectly in character for the genre Ackroyd’s playing with, calling to mind as it does thoughts of German Expressionist film.

“Playing with” is the operative phrase. In Albion, his study of the English imagination, Ackroyd identified the gothic as a characteristic English form. His last novel, The Siege of Troy, was a full-blown gothic in which an archaeological dig site replaced the traditional gloomy mansion. Now The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein pushes the form yet further, resurrecting the broad comic relief which was an element of the eighteenth-century gothic and allying it with figures out of proto-Dickensian London. The book becomes not only an evocation of the gothic and of the English past and English imagination, but of Ackroyd’s own career, a re-mix of his own tropes; so that as his last book was a study of the Thames, for example, thus the river features prominently here, as does the element of water in general.

I haven’t said much about the plot up to this point; this is in general not a plot-heavy or plot-centred book. It does follow the overall pattern of Shelley’s novel, but takes its time introducing the monster, to that for the first hundred pages or so the book is lacking in tension. Ackroyd’s style is smooth enough that this doesn’t seem to matter. That said, the voice he adopts for Frankenstein is less distinctive than I might have expected, given Ackroyd’s talent for pastiche and evocation of period. But then, he seems to be trying an unusual trick with the character, setting him up as a straight man who never gets the joke, the foreigner in London out of his depth, the butt of every gag. 

And Ackroyd is a man who knows London humour; its development over time, its sources and roots. Just as he knows the history of the city and its mentalities across centuries. At the same time as working with this comedic and urban material, Ackroyd mixes in traditional Romantic imagery — inspiration, lightning as the fire of creation, above all the idea of the double or shadow-self. The two strands don’t really seem to mix; that’s a pity, because one sense that if they had, new depths might have been found to both. It may be that I don’t see this happening because I don’t know London well enough; that is, that I’m missing out on the jokes or the resonances to be found in Frankenstein’s description of a given street or neighbourhood, which the ideal reader might be meant to contrast against the state of said places in the present day.

Ackroyd’s use of historical characters like the Shelleys and Byron is also somewhat disappointing. They’re a bit lackluster. Shelley certainly does some unusual things, and occasionally displays some surprising erudition, but to me there seems to be a quality of thought in the historical Shelley in particular which is missing in Ackroyd’s character. It’s notable that in Ackroyd’s corpus so far, the Romantics are largely notable by their absence. Still, Shelley comes off as interesting enough to be a credible subject for Victor Frankenstein’s unspoken homoerotic crush.

Ackroyd, himself gay, often makes homosexuality a theme in his writing. The story of Frankenstein resonates with this, and especially with the repression of homosexuality, the denial of one’s true self — it plays with notions of fertility and sterility, of doubleness and otherness, of the shadow, of the hidden part of the soul. So in Ackroyd’s novel, Victor Frankenstein’s monster represents the part of himself that he will not allow himself to look at. Mary Shelley’s monster makes a blood-curdling declamation to his creator that “I shall be with you on your wedding night!” — here, the creature asks hypothetically “What if I were to appear on your wedding night?” only to be told that his own existence makes it impossible for Victor to marry. Without going into details, the twist ending works to make this point; it establishes the centrality of this theme to the overall novel.

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is an intriguing book, but one which feels somehow less than vital; it’s an interesting rewrite of its original text, but not somehow necessary in the way Shelley’s novel feels necessary. It’s well worth reading, but it feels like a mix of interesting ingredients which don’t ultimately quite cohere to become more than the sum of its parts. 

Readings 2K9: Blenheim

Blenheim: Battle For Europe

by Charles Spencer

This is a solid work of narrative history, arguing for the importance of the 1704 Battle of Blenheim in the overall history of Europe. For Spencer, the battle marked the beginning of the decline of French military power on the continent. A skeptic might argue that the advent of Napoleon less than a hundred years later mitigates the point somewhat, but Spencer certainly makes an efficient case for the battle being a turning point in the War of the Spanish Succession, which itself went some way toward defining the political map of Europe — establishing Spain and France as separate countries, for example.

The story of the Battle of Blenheim is dramatic: a general in late middle age, the Duke of Marlborough, marches his men 250 miles in a move hidden even from his allies, in a desperate attempt to bring his enemies to battle before they can launch an attack against the empire at the heart of a grand alliance struggling against the greatest military power of the age. That said, the details which surround the core of the story are legion. The War of the Spanish Succession itself is neither well-known nor easy to summarise; and other than Marlborough and his ally, Prince Eugène of Savoy, there are few great personalities involved. The battle was long — beginning at 8 AM, it lasted until 9 PM — and complex, with a number of reversals spread over several interlinked fronts. Spencer manages to make the details comprehensible, presenting events chronologically, but breaking away when necessary for as long as a chapter-length in order to provide context or biographical detail. It tends to blunt narrative drive, and Spencer does double back from time to time in providing information from different perspectives, but is overall effective.

The most curious decision here is to underplay some of the hard calls Marlborough made. Most notably, after arriving in Bavaria in July, he had to find a way to lure his enemies out of their defenses into an open battle; his solution was to lay waste to the countryside, burning villages and terrorising the inhabitants. This was controversial even among his allies. Spencer doesn't sell this decision short, but more discussion of what Marlborough was thinking — even if Marlborough wrote little or nothing about this tactic, that very absence should be notable — would have been nice.

On the other hand, Spencer does make effective use of memoirs, diaries, and letters from both Marlborough and the men who followed him, as well as their allies and enemies. Generally, Spencer is very effective at presenting the realities of eighteenth-century warfare, from the appalling medical conditions to the difficulties of navigating bad terrain while under artillery bombardment. This almost tactile sense of the period helps make his description of the battle of Blenheim succeed, even when the movements of different detachments of men grows complex.

Overall, this is a valuable resource both for the battle of Blenheim and for descriptions of the strategy and tactics of warfare in the period. I do wish that the publishers had included another map in it —there are good small-scale maps for individual battles (though maps showing Blenheim at different points during the day of the battle might have been useful), and a good overall map of Europe during the War of the Spanish Succession, but a map showing the route of Marlborough's march would have been very useful; Spencer casually mentions a number of towns along his way which I can't find in my atlas, and I would have liked to be able to follow the geography more closely. Still, that minor caveat aside, there's no doubt that this is a useful and engaging book.

(And a note with respect to the overall purpose of these posts — I took this book out from the my local public library, so it doesn't count as far reducing the unread matter in my apartment. The count for the year so far is thus two books down, three overall. More, I hope, to come soon.)

Readings 2K9: Chronicles of the Black Company

Chronicles of The Black Company

(Includes The Black Company, Shadows Linger, and The White Rose)

by Glen Cook

I’ve been hearing good things about Glenn Cook’s Black Company series for quite some time now. But those good things never got past the high concept of the books: In a high-fantasy world torn by a war between Good and Evil, the Black Company is a company of mercenary soldiers hired by the side of Evil. That’s a nice enough idea (and it turns out there’s a little bit more to it, notably a competing force for Evil), but high concepts alone don’t make a story work. Still, when I saw that Tor had reprinted the first three books in the series in a one-volume anthology, I decided to give it a whirl. Turns out that the good word about the series was justified. 

The high concept is developed thoughtfully; in Cook’s hands, questions of good and evil, of personal honour against larger issues of morality, come alive and are developed into major themes. Croaker, the historian and doctor of the Black Company, has — like the rest of the Company — always lived by a certain code of behaviour. Which basically boils down to: live and die for the Company, fulfill your contracts, and don’t rape kids. But the Company’s latest master makes him start to wonder whether there’s something more; the experiences that befall him and his mates lead him to question whether there might, in fact, be broader issues of good and evil. 

So Croaker begins to change; and as the books go on, other characters (not just the ones in the Company) find themselves struggling with similar issues. In fact, as the books go on, they grow more structurally complex, contrasting Croaker and his experience with the perceptions of other characters. Impressively, Cook manages to integrate these other sections into Croaker’s first-person narration. It’s understated, and quite clever. 

The cleverness of the books, the concern with thematic material, is almost always understated, and brought out without comment. This makes their overall cynicism much more convincing. The more you think about the world of the books, the darker it seems. For example, almost always, the really transformative events, the things that really start to get the characters thinking about their lives, comes from an encounter with evil, with wickedness. Not from goodness, which is often ignored. Only when characters find themselves facing with something which goes where they do not, do they then begin to think of being better than they are.

This sort of thematic depth is also brought out through the creation of a vivid character. Croaker’s voice is not a million miles away from Rex Stout’s Archie Goodwin, and that is no bad thing. The books convincingly evoke a soldier’s perspective (apparently the series has a strong following among the military). It should be noted that the books are not terribly concerned with the verisimilitude of medieval life and warfare, though. I found I didn’t mind that, which surprised me. But something rings true. It’s as though Cook has translated his story from a primary source, not only in terms of language, but in terms of attitudes as well; mentalities and outlooks are described in contemporary ways, but the sense of something timeless remains behind them (and questions of translation, of texts and of language, do have an influence on the series).

The books have an interesting tension between adhering to and subverting the fantasy genre. On the one hand, the Company is the kind of ultra-competent close-knit band which many genre stories feature; the kind of group into which the reader can easily project themselves. And Cook does cheat a bit in describing the blackness of the Black Company; he mentions that the men of the Company rape and murder, but refrains from foregrounding these kinds of incidents. More could have been done with this material.

But then on the other hand, the series is anti-romantic in many ways. There’s a close-mouthed stone-faced killer; but by the end of the series, the books conclude that this character’s emotional detachment is a flaw, not a strength. The gender politics are intriguing: There are two main female characters, one the leader of the forces of Good, the other one of the leaders of Evil. But both of them, in different ways, undercut these roles — that is, they are or become more than the roles into which history has placed them. Croaker’s romantic fantasies about the Lady, the evil queen, are relentlessly mocked, not least by Croaker himself; but one of the interesting aspects of the books is the movement from those fantasies to a deeper understanding of that character, the choices she makes, and why.

The books are fast and clever. The plot does threaten to get a bit out of control by the end of the third book — that is, threatens to distract from the theme and from the characters, rather than serving the theme and illustrating the characters — as mysteries and betrayals proliferate. But things ultimately dovetail in a satisfying way. I find myself looking forward to reading the other seven books in the series, as well as Cook’s other stories. I find there’s more potential in these characters, in this world. I want to know where the characters go from here. I want to know what any avid reader wants to know: what happens next?

Readings 2k9: A Fair Country

A Fair Country
by John Ralston Saul

The first book I completed in 2009. It was a good way to start the year. I've been following Saul's writing since the early 90s, with his "philosophical trilogy" of Voltaire's Bastards, A Doubter's Companion, and The Unconscious Civilization. Those books dissected things wrong with Western society-at-large; disconnections between understandings and aims, between aims and achievements. His next book, On Equilibrium, tried to suggest remedies; it encouraged a move away from reason, or what passes for reason among the élites of society, and toward a more humanistic balance of other qualities, including memory, common sense, and creativity. His book Reflections of a Siamese Twin was an attempt at reconsidering Canada, its history and reality. It could be seen as applying some of the ideas in the earlier books to the case of Saul's home country. A Fair Country demands to be read in light of the previous books; another consideration of Canada, it again considers the failure of the élite class (in Canada), again imagines new ways to understand Canadian history, again suggests ways to construct society with less of a ruinous focus on reason.

A Fair Country does this by arguing that Canada is a Métis country, a country born of — or at least a country that acts in line with — Native concepts of integration of the other, of fairness, of equality. It's an interesting, and in Saul's hands exciting, argument. Saul's approach here is a re-imagining of Canada as a unique thing in the world. It suggests what we have to offer to the global community. It analyses who we are; the characteristics we can't see, or often have not seen. It's powerful, and as a Canadian, as someone who has read a fair amount of Canadian history, I find it convincing and suggestive. This is a reading of Canada and its history as a creative act.

The immediate objection, and one that the book never squarely addresses, is to wonder why and how the social ideas that Saul identifies as being characteristic of Canadian Native societies developed over such a vast geographical spread, in coastal and land-locked nations, among peoples who sometimes had no obvious connection to each other at all. This is a worrying omission. Presumably, Saul would argue that the things he's talking about are things common to North America, or the Americas in general, and that the United States was not influenced by these ideas because that country always imagined itself as an embodiment of the ideas of the European Enlightenment. He does note in what is effectively an aside that the realities of South and Central America seems to resemble what he identifies as the Canadian reality. It's viable, but tenuous; I can't help but think the book might have benefited from examining these sorts of issues a little bit more.

But to me Saul's arguments about Canadian history do have the ring of truth, particularly in his analysis of what was happening in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his view, the European colonists in the lands which would later be a part of Canada were deeply affected by the Native societies around them — indeed, not only around them, but integrated within them, or even better, into which they became integrated. Saul gives several examples of how intermarriage counted as ‘marrying up' for Europeans, and how European and Native negotiators interacted; how the more perceptive of the Europeans came away with a respect for the way the Natives conducted business. For Saul, this shaped later aspects of Canada, such as Confederation, even without explicit Native involvement. Hence, he argues, Canada is not fundamentally a Judeo-Christian country; it is not only not a traditional Western nation-state, it is not traditionally Western.

The colonial mentality which has marked much of Canadian history can thus be identified easily in both past and present: if somebody is acting according to ideals developed in New York or London or Paris simply because these ideals come from Imperial centres, they're acting like a colonist. Canada's élites, says Saul, often operate along these lines; hence, the country's decline as an economic power, its increasing reliance on the resource sector of its economy, its increasing lack of control over its own resources (directly caused by foreign ownership within the Canadian economy), and the inability of the élites to recognise these things as problematic.

Many of the arguments in the book have been broadly foreshadowed in Saul's previous books. Canada as a place that embraces complexity. The significance of the oral as opposed to the written word. The incompetence of the élites, their tendency to not act in the service of the larger community without even realising it. New concepts and symbols emerge as well: the relevance of the Native experience, the significance of the word Welfare as opposed to the word Order in early Canadian historical documents, the image of society as an ever-expanding circle constantly integrating new arrivals within itself. In that sense, the book is a step forward; Saul keeps thinking, and the book reflects the expansion of his previous thoughts, both in terms of philosophy and of history (it's interesting reading the book not long after Ronald Wright's What is America?, which looks at the United States implicitly from a Canadian perspective, and devotes much time to considering the Native experience in the lands which now make up that country).

Having said all this, there are areas of Saul's arguments which I would argue with or which seem to me to be incomplete. These have mainly to do with his thinking on place and on creativity. Saul identifies an aspect of the colonial mentality as placelessness; a sense that the colonial is only in Canada as an accident, that Canada (or other colony) is an unreal place, and that real places are elsewhere, closer to the heart of Empire. This is to some extent familiar from his other books, and so far I have no argument with it. Saul then goes on to argue that part of the ineluctable reality of Canada is the nature of its place, and that there are five fundamental aspects of place in Canada: urban places, agricultural rural places, wilderness places of forest and rock, then barren places north of that (effectively a second wilderness place), and then the subarctic North proper. Saul claims that the latter three places cannot change their use; that the wilderness cannot be made rural or urban. I'm not entirely sure about this; in particular, I don't see why, if patterns of settlement and climate continue to shift, urban areas can't spring up in some of these places. But basically this is fair enough.

My problem is where Saul then takes this argument. After having defined a particular characteristic of Canada's urban centres — "They are gradually turning into primary sites of experimentation for the mixing of races and cultures" (p. 46) — he then tries to minimise their importance, by saying, for example, that "neither the urban nor the rural have been able to turn themselves into Canada's underlying source of wealth" (p. 47) and that to embrace the urban as of primary importance "is to cut ourselves off from our particular reality — to cut ourselves off from ourselves, our real life in our real country." By pages 283-4, Saul is saying that cities are potentially "new garrisons" (following from Northrop Frye's warning of a colonial "garrison mentality" in Canada, viewing the country as a small garrison of people from elsewhere fighting to maintain Imperial culture in a place with no inherent value of its own) which one way or another distances people from the land around them. In this way, argues Saul, city life risks dividing humans from the natural places which make up most of the country.

It seems to me that Saul is wrong here. It seems to me that the cities of Canada are (or should be) the particular reality of their citizens, and that an engagement with that reality by definition means that they cannot be garrisons in the sense he means; in other words, that cities are no more or less likely to be garrisons, to breed that colonial mentality, than any other place in Canada. If you're prepared to deny what's around you, you'll do so irrespective of where you are; if you're not, you probably won't.

I think further that Saul is looking at cities through the wrong lens. The question of how much wealth is generated by a given city is of interest in certain contexts, but, as he himself implies, not when examining the core nature of these places. That is, a city like Montréal is of primary importance as "a site of experimentation for the mixing of races and cultures"; I'd argue that this adheres fairly closely to the ideal of what a city is. I think a city is not primarily about generating wealth, any more than a human being is ‘about' eating and reproduction. Instead, both are about art, about culture, about history: about creation. About making new things. Especially, about making the greater world around them new. You can argue that cities might be more efficient if they made more money, but I don't think you could argue that this would make them better places, or more "real". (In fact, it seems to me Saul's missed a bet here: are Canadian cities perhaps unique due to an integration of rural and wilderness areas into their history and ongoing development in ways which are not common in the rest of the world?)

Now, Saul's general approach, that the idea of movement from hunter-gatherers to farmers to urban life is simply one of unquestionable progress to be unreservedly hailed, is one I would agree with. My point of disagreement, ultimately, is with his analysis of culture, of creativity. I think he undervalues these things, and I see this elsewhere in the book.

A Fair Country is a book concerned with language — can you write a book about Canada and not have it be concerned with language? — and it has many wise things to say about language use, particularly in terms of law or philosophy. But I have qualms with its analysis or assumptions about the creative use of language.

Consider the following statement: "Our universities — anglophone and francophone — are largely constructed as pale imitations of European models led by language. And so ideas — to say nothing of literature and history — are separated out by language, as if that were the ultimate statement of meaning, as if an Alberian novel had more to say to a francophone or a Sri Lankan novel had more to say to an anglophone just because it was written in their language, even if the experiences and influences are completely different." These sentences are problematic because Saul's confusing two different things: ideas, and literature. He's right that it's foolish to expect philosophy and history to appeal to people because they're written in a specific language; in those cases, the ideas are what matter, and the literary form, including language, is accidental. Literature is a different kettle of fish. Novels and poems (to a lesser extent, because less purely verbal, film and plays and graphic novels) are language. A translation is really a rewriting; it's not the original text. What that text is, is something dependent upon the language in which it's written.

For me specifically, I don't see why a Sri Lankan novel might have any more or less to say to me than an English-language novel set in Montréal; it might have more to say to me due to other aspects of it's subject, of course, and then again it might be more immediately accessible because I'll have fewer assumptions to set aside — the extrapolations that I and the hypothetical other Montréal writer may have made about our common experiences will be different, which is presumably something that's less likely to occur with a Sri Lankan writer. And, of course, I think most people read (I certainly do) not to confirm their reality, but to broaden it, to find new things, to in a sense experience new feelings and the perceptions of some other person. From this perspective, a foreign author writing in one's first language is a fantastic luxury. But the truth is that in the end experiences, shared or not, are irrelevant; the use of language is all. It is language that makes a text.

To be even more specific: I find, let's say, both Mordecai Richler's novel Barney's Version and the poetical works of Émile Nelligan to have some relevance to me, as a person and as a writer. I don't mean that latter in any specific sense or any precise influence, only that these creative works seems to me to harmonise with something in me (questions of relative quality, of course, are completely beside the point here). I'd say those works are more relevant to me than, say, The Great Gatsby, Vanity Fair, or Une saison en enfer. They are less relevant to me than, say, John Crowley's Ægypt quartet, the poems of Percy Shelley, or Notre-Dame de Paris. Same sequence of writers: American English, British English, French. Widely different reactions. The point: the country of origin of a writer is not significant in determining whether they speak to a reader. It is entirely a function of the use of a shared language. This recognition is lacking in A Fair Country.

Put another way: the best way to teach literature in English (for example) is in just that form — incorporating texts from around the world which were written in the English language. It is not as desirable, but probably still somewhat useful, to teach the literature of England, the literature of the United States, the literature of Canada. My experience at a primarily English-language Canadian literature tended to be a mixture of both, with the first predominating. I read English writers, American writers, and Canadian writers, all in English. But I also read some French-Canadian writers, in translation. According to Saul, this is apparently unusual, as he claims Canadian universities "soft-pedal the idea of Canadian literature" (p. 99). I can only say that I haven't seen that in any immediately obvious way.

Three last points about this subject: One, the quote from Saul above is in the context of arguing that creativity needs an interrelationship with place to flourish. I'm a bit more agnostic than that; I think creativity is wilder than that, and that while a healthy relationship with place is likely to spur creation, it's not absolutely needed. Two, Saul refers in this section to Canadian literature as "successful," which I think needs to be qualified; it seems to me that Canadian literature has not yet produced a story or character with world-wide resonance, something like Faust or Don Quixote. On the other hand, there may well be something in the Native myths which are just less well-known; and it may be that William Gibson, in effectively inventing the genre of cyberpunk, produced that kind of broad imaginative creation that I'm talking about here.

Thirdly, Saul consistently uses the word "Romantic" and its derivatives — in the general sense of Romanticism — as a term of opprobrium. Given the incredible range of meanings for that word, I would have liked to have seen some hints from Saul about what Romanticism means to him. I'm not sure his arguments about imaginative creation hold up given his perspective on Romanticism. On page 276: "If we cannot explain ourselves to ourselves, no one outside Canada will be able to imagine us. We need to be extremely clear, unromantic, comfortable with what is original or atypical about the Canadian experiment in order to create an imaginative space." Is a "clear, unromantic" perspective compatible with "creat[ing] an imaginative space"? Maybe; it's not obvious either way. Four pages later, Saul refers to "an obsession with clarity" as a Western, un-Canadian, characteristic. Which seems contradictory in a non-illuminating manner. At the very least, given Saul's interest in place, some interaction with Romanticism, and its own obsessions with place, would be intriguing.

These thoughts aside, A Fair Country is an important book. It's a search for a Canadian philosophy; a philosophy derived from place, of particular interest in these days when the apparent placelessness of the internet engages with the specificity of experience in specific places. Saul's own personal experience of the country and his status here inform the book; he can draw on his experience of what he has seen and learned first-hand about the country, and presumably he can write with some assurance that the book will become a part of the country's discourse — that what he says will be heard.

That's an encouraging thought, because Saul's voice is worth hearing. His articulation, the style of his arguments, are worth reading, worth engaging with. Above all, his passion for his country, and his engagement with its history, is worth experiencing; it has the capacity to inspire engagement in others.

Resolutions

Well, I'm back.

Funny how days can slip away from you. Or months. Or years. Well ... I've learned one thing about blogging: it's more difficult than it looks. At least, more time-consuming.

Still, it's long past time that I do something about this place. So: I've tidied it up, changed the layout, and hope to be posting more regularly in the future. By which I basically mean "posting in the future." My aim is to at least check in to list which books I've finished reading in 2009. Hopefully even write a few sentences about them. But definitely maintain a running count of how much I've read.

See, this is what I'm thinking: I have, by rough estimation, about a thousand unread books lying about the house. I want to try to make some inroads into that mass of text this year. The problem, of course, is that while I read books, I also buy them. So it's a running battle to try to stay ahead of myself. I'm hoping a written, public record will actually inspire me to read more books this year than I bring in to the house. I'll mention borrowed books, maybe even write about them, but won't factor them into my running count.

The real trick? Getting enough of a head start to overcome the amount of books I'll be buying at this year's McGill Book Fair. Last year I picked up about 130 volumes of various sorts. So by mid-October, I'll have to have read at least 100 more books than I'll have bought in order to stay in the game.

So that's the plan. Another minor wrinkle: One of my Christmas presents this year was a new and impressive-looking version of Porius, by John Cowper Powys, with the complete text presented as the author intended it. I've got a bunch of other books by Powys, some of which I've read and some of which I have not. I'd like to read and reread as many as possible (Ideally getting through his complete works, but I can't find a library near me that has a copy of Ducdame. Time for an inter-library loan, perhaps) in the order in which they were written. Can I get through to Porius by the end of the year? Seems unlikely. But it's something to keep in mind. A side quest, if you will.

Let's see where this goes.

Things that Won't Happen

So, I was listening to PJ Stock on the Team 990 this morning and he threw out mention of a trade rumour whereby the Canadiens would give up Michael Ryder, David Aebischer, Sheldon Souray, Mike Ribeiro, and a 1st round draft pick for Evgeni Malkin. Interestingly, a blogger at Hockeybuzz.com posted this same rumour later in the day, claiming that he heard it not from Stock, but from another retired player from somewhere in TMR. We can tentatively conclude two things from this: 1) It's not going to happen, since with Bob Gainey as GM the rule has been that if you hear about a potential deal involving the Canadiens then it's already dead; and 2) It probably was being talked about inside the organizations involved, given that it's turned up from two different sources (though it is possible the guy who talked to Stock and the guy who talked to the blogger are one and the same. Who knows?).

Anyway, just for the hell of it, does the deal make sense for the Canadiens? Financially, it clears away a lot of one-year contracts. Opens up some cap room for signing Markov next year, plus maybe picking up a free agent to replace the depth they lose in the deal. From that angle, yeah.

Malkin over Ribeiro is a no-brainer; Malkin's the big, talented forward the Canadiens desperately need. Losing Ryder is tough; he scored 30 goals while playing through an injury. But the Canadiens are deep in prospects on the wing, so they can likely deal with it, and if worst comes to worst, they could sign Dumont (personally, I hope the worst doesn't come to the worst, but hey). Losing Aebischer puts a lot of weight on Huet's shoulders, but if you believe in Huet you go for it -- especially since Yann Danis can't clear waivers, meaning you kinda have to carry him on the team one way or another. So: vast improvement at one position, marginal step back at one, potential headache cleared up at another.

And now we come to Souray and the 1st rounder. The Canadiens aren't that deep on defense as it stands -- they could probably use a good top-4 d-man right now. Giving up Souray hurts bad; I feel he's more of a poor-man's Jovanovski than people realise. Physical presence, offensive potential ... also, granted, tendency to misread plays, but still. Not Jovanovski's level, but along those lines, and certainly a damn useful player and a key part of the defensive core. I don't know how the Canadiens would replace him. And a first-rounder, in what's supposed to be a very deep draft year? Here's where we get into the dicey waters.

I think I could stand the loss of the first rounder if I'm sure I've got a replacement for Souray somewhere. Or if the first rounder could get knocked down to a second. It's still arguably a good deal, though not the slam-dunk great deal some people think it is -- stars are highly overrated in the NHL. This is a team sport, where depth counts. Except ... sometimes you give up depth to get the right star, a guy you can build your team around or who complements the players you already have.

So. Risky deal. Could be good, could be bad, almost necessitates at least one more transaction afterward to fill a hole. But it does give the Canadiens that star power ... and a line of Kovalev-Malkin-Samsonov would be pretty sweet.

Anyway, it won't happen.

Some thoughts towards random comics reviews

I bought comics today.

The Escapists #1

The cover doesn't actually hurt my eyes, but that's about all that's good about it. The logo looks lost, the dominant colour is a bright orange-red flourescent which somehow manages to be dull, and the attempt to use some dynamic framing techniques just looks like the picture was poorly-cropped. Plus, as a general rule, super-heroes and arm-hair don't seem to mix.

So much for Frank Miller's contribution. The rest of the book was very nice. Brian K. Vaughan tells a nicely upbeat tale of a young man pursuing his dreams, and the rights to an out-of-print comic-book character. Mind, the story's not completed, so it could all end in tears. Seems unlikely, though; the way the thing's coming together, it feels like something else. Vaughan's pace is solid, and his dialogue sharp. Even some basic improbabilities -- most notably the 'meet-cute' between two characters -- comes off smoothly. If there's a problem, it's that the story's a bit too easy to take; we're not really getting a sense of his main character overcoming obstacles and facing conflict. But then, he does have both parents die in the course of the story, so it's not like there's nothing happening. And Vaughan's dialogue and sense of storytelling is so strong that you get pulled in.

Philip Bond's artwork is incredibly strong. Vaughan calls for stylistic variety in this book -- mimicking a golden-age comic, dropping into black-and-white and back into colour -- and Bond delivers. More importantly, he gets the basics. Characters act and emote. The design sense -- of apartments, faces, cemeteries, basements -- is all just exactly right, always serving the story. It's an understated visual feast.

The high point of this book comes in a sequence aping an Escapist comic (the Escapist being the comic-book character created by the protagonists of Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay). Roth tells us how much the character meant to him as we see the Escapist fighting an evidoer named the Villainess. Roth's words about the importance of the Escapist replace the words in the speech balloons and caption boxes of the comic. It's a device that's been used before, notably by Chris Ware in a story in an issue of Raw, but whereas Ware used the device as part of his (essentially wise-ass) distancing effects, Vaughan and Bond make it work to draw the reader into Roth's story, to affirm the importance not just of the character but of the idea of the character; of the ability to escape. Roth's reaction to buying the last issue of The Escapist he needed to complete his collection is especially well-observed and well-imagined.

This story originally appeared in one of Dark Horse's earlier Escapist books, but here it's kicking off a new ongoing series. It did its job; I'll be looking forward to future issues. For an overall grade, I'd give this book a solid B+; call it an 89/100.

Detective Comics #821

It's a single-issue story, and a detective story at that, by Paul Dini. Dini (with his collaborator Bruce Timm) reinvented Batman for the early-90s animated series, and to my mind that show stands as the definitive version of the character; it was a nice mix of Batman as an infallible mystery-man and Batman as a fallible human investigator. Visually, it was often spectacular, a highly-designed gothic deco world owing something to the Fleischer Superman cartoons. So this book, by Dini and noted design-oriented artist J.H. Williams III, has some promise.

Unfortunately, it doesn't quite deliver. It's not bad, and Dini does capture something of the feel of the cartoon; you can almost hear the actors delivering the dialogue in the word balloons. But what works over the air doesn't necessarily work as text. There's not much in the way of a sub-plot here, either. The story feels small. It has Batman, Robin, Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, assorted Gotham socialites, and a new masked villain. But it feels small.

Williams' art doesn't help much. It's too designed; there's no motion to it. His depiction of fight scenes is particularly jarring; every punch or kick has its point of impact picked out with a flare of black-and-white, and these hot-spots draw the eye all sorts of odd places at inappropriate times. Plus, Williams uses a trick I found annoying on Promethea: spreading panels across the page-divide with no warning. It's a difficult technique to master, and one which I find works a lot less often than many artists seem to believe.

All this being said, the book looks stunning. The colour choices on each page are excellent. It's a nice-looking package, no doubt about it. The story is solid enough, the mystery is coherent, and the fair-play solution is well-explained when all is said and done. It's a Batman story which hits all the bases. It's not something that leads me to think of buying another issue, but it's nice enough for what it is. For a grade, I'd give it a B-; 81/100.

Moon Knight #3

This is an odd book, in a lot of ways. Writer Charlie Huston has a hard-boiled style which, in combination with David Finch's almost over-rendered pencils, results in a lot of gore. That's not necessarily bad, but in this case it's jarring. Huston's talked about wanting to get back to the spirit of the original Moon Knight stories, and you can kinda see that; but the over-the-top violence gets in the way, shattering the tone completely to pieces. Further, part of the feel of those old stories was an almost anachronistic pulp sensibility. That's nowhere to be found. Instead, we have bits and pieces of old continuity -- characters, an evil criminal organisation, a familiar statue, all the knick-knacks of the past (including an old villain, thankfully back in his classic and snazzier costume).

On its own terms, it's not a bad book, I feel. This issue parallels Marc Spector, still suffering from an injury and not ready to take up the mantle of Moon Knight, meeting with an old friend. Who comes out of the closet. It works, somehow. Then the violence kicks in. I've seen an interview where Finch has talked about his determination to get better at drawing conversations; I think some of that comes through. At any rate, the emotions come through strongly, though we do get a lot of close-ups of eyes. The plot is strong enough; you can see what happens, why, and there's a logical and at least vaguely character-based structure behind it.

But somehow, this book just doesn't come together. It feels like it's been divorced from some source of strength that made the original series work. That could be the pulp sensibility I mentioned above. Or it could be Bill Sienkiewicz's art, which was likely the most outstanding thing about the original book -- consider that his design for Moon Knight is still in use, despite the craze for costume reworkings of the past ten years or so.

If the original Moon Knight series was a notch grittier than the other books around it on the stands, then I suppose this version accomplishes much the same thing. But in the end it's moving forward awfully slowly; this story is a long version of the old chestnut about the fallen hero recovering himself, and it's taking its sweet time about it. It's not an awful book, but it's less and less compelling with each issue. There's only so far visceral artwork will take you. Grade: B-, 83/100, but that's only because I'm in a good mood.

The Atom #1

Idea by Grant Morrison, plot and script by Gail Simone, art by John Byrne: and it seems like there's a disconnect at each step along the way. It looks like Morrison came up with an interesting take on the Atom; a new physics professor joins a mysterious New England University, falls in with a group of eccentric genius fellow-profs, and discovers his predecessor's ability to size-shift. Exploration of new worlds, new perspectives, mixed with Lovecraftian mystery. Conceptually, that's solid.

Except that it's not much like what we get in this book. That is, in plot outline, this is more or less what we get. But there's not much of a sense of atmosphere. The eccentric-genius supporting cast is introduced, for example, but don't really come alive. Whether she invented them or not, Simone didn't seem to know quite what to do with these characters; as a result, neither does the reader. And John Byrne, who can be a strong super-hero artist, is out of place in a situation where atmosphere is called for. Consider his establishing shot of the college campus; it looks like something out of the Italian Renaissance, fitting neither with the New England ('Ivy Town') locale nor the dean's dialogue.

Worst, though, is the size-changing sequence that introduces the new Atom's powers. You can see echoes of the cool-factor involved in the idea of a size-shifting superhero: getting lost in your own clothes, fighting a rat the size of a dragon. But between expository captions and fairly bland art, it never comes alive. I gave a positive review once to The Essential Ant-Man because Jack Kirby showed in that book how to make a shrinking super-hero work: you make the world around him strange, something entirely new. That didn't happen here. Some of the fault belongs to Simone; her description of the Atom's awe doesn't work as sparking the imagination or as a deptiction of the thoughts of a young genius (which this character is supposed to be). And Byrne's depiction of the battle with the rat is uninspiring -- especially since the rat looks a lot like a mouse.

Overall, neat ideas, bland execution. I've got no plans to pick up another issue of this one. Grade: C-, 72/100.

Uncanny X-Men #475

Simple, but effective. Well, as simple as an X-men comic can get.

Lorna Dane, or Polaris, gets chased through an Egyptian bazaar while Charles Xavier gathers a group of X-men for a dangerous mission. Said group end up rescuing Polaris in the book's major fight scene. Now, I don't understand who it was who was chasing Polaris, or what it has to with Apocalypse, or what's going on with her powers. So the exposition could have been handled better, because I don't think all of these things were intended to be mysteries. But given the complexity of X-men history, some confusion is a given. The structure here is solid, andmost of the characters are brought in nicely enough (though one, Havok, doens't get his own page of set-up); also, the story ends on a nice line.

The point is, it's a clear introduction to a new team of X-men, with a clearly-defined mission. Writer Ed Brubaker is almost invisible, in a stylistic sense; he's not reinventing anything, he's not bringing in any particular quirks of structure or dialogue; he's just crafting a strong X-men story. Billy Tan's art is clear, but nothing especially attractive. His characters are stiff; their emotions are clear, but lacking in nuance, and their poses and proportions seem sometimes clunky. Tan also uses photoshop blur effects to emphasise action, and of all the tricks artists use to try to get across motion in a still image, that's one of least effective when used consistently.

(Somewhere, there's a comic-book limbo full of all kinds of neat comics effects which are criminally underused in mainstream books these days. Thought balloons, sound effects, and above all, speed lines. Although, saying that, I notice that there are sound effects in this books; Nightcrawler "bamf"s when he teleports, Warpath's knives "thunk" home. But big robot-suits get demolished with no sfx comment, and a bazaar gets trashed soundlessly. There's something inconsistent about that, if only at some subliminal level.)

It's a promising start to a long storyline. Grade B, 85/100.

Good news, good news

Through the Asking the Wrong Questions blog I find an interview in which I read that the last book of John Crowley's Ægypt quartet is finally going to be published next year. This is great news, as I've been waiting anxiously for this book to come out. I've been happy to pick up the books Crowley's published in the meanwhile, but puzzled why he didn't finish the Ægypt books. Turns out he's had the complete manuscript ready for three years. Three flipping years, and no publisher was interested.

There are some things about this world that I just don't understand.

But at least I'll have the Ægypt books to read while I puzzle over it.

Upsetting

In one day at the Olympics, Canada's women' s curling team lost to Japan, Canada's men's curling team lost to Italy, and Canada's men's hockey team lost to Switzerland.

Mark my words: This ... is Stephen Harper's fault.

A comics thought

An awful lot of people have spent an awful lot of time over the past several years talking about how different American mainstream comics are from the way they used to be, say, twenty or thirty or forty years ago. This is often done with a stated or implied preference for older comics (more rarely, the preference is for the new stuff). But without making a value judgment, it seems to me that one significant difference between current and past Marvel and DC comics has not been mentioned.

That is this: in the Silver Age, and through to probably the eighties, superhero comics were seen as belonging to or at least coming out of a certain kind of subculture. Specifically, the science fiction/fantasy/horror subculture. These comics were heirs to the old pulps, and they knew it. An extended run on Doctor Strange could be an homage to H.P Lovecraft, complete with some issues scripted by pulp and comics veteran Gardner Fox. Comics writers were steeped in the lore of the pulps, and of their fandom — look through any comic written by Roy Thomas to see what I mean. It was as though a lot of the writers accepted that they had a large juvenile audience, but also a strong (if secondary) audience of sf fans. They were probably right.

On the other hand, starting with the rise of Image and the artists involved, comics began to re-imagine their audience and their relation to the culture at large. Rob Liefeld appeared in a jeans commercial. Todd MacFarlane bought into a hockey team. These creators had no interest in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy fiction. They marketed their comics in Hollywood, looking to score movie deals, TV deals, animation deals. By definition, comics were no longer looking to the subculture. They were developing a more mainstream orientation.

Nowadays, Marvel and DC still hire fantasy, sf and horror writers when they can: Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Michael Moorcock. But they're not advertised as fantasy writers; they're advertised as prose writers. Real writers. Like mystery writers, or the TV writers. The sf subculture no longer seems to register. There are good reasons for that.

When DC comics tried to launch an imprint for sf comics to sit alongside their Vertigo imprint of (then) dark fantasy and (now) crime and horror comics, the line didn't last. Science fiction readers were not turning to comics. Personally, I used to shop at a sadly now nonexistent store which stocked both sf/fantasy novels and a wide range of comics. I bought both. Most other customers stuck to one or the other. There was no easy crossover of readership.

With all the discussion of the audiences comics have lost — and there's no doubt that mainstream sales are down considerably from the pre-Image era — it may be that the most significant is the sf/fantasy readership. Lacking them, superhero comics lack something of their identity. Who are you writing for when you write a superhero book? Superhero fans, yes. But there aren't that many of them. Who else? The logical answer would be: people who have a similar interest in big ideas, in adventure stories, in non-realist stories. People who like to see real characters, but in very unreal situations.

Without that audience, not only does the superhero market shrink, but it becomes more homogenous. Cosmic heroes can't attract a readership. Neither can fantasy-oriented characters, even old standbys like Doctor Strange or Thor.

On the other hand, this trend arguably began at the height of the collector-driven craze of the early 90s. Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs, in The Comics Book Heroes, note that at this time DC in particular seemed to be trying to make all of their characters fit the same basic template: lone angry white male in his early twenties. It didn't really work. But in retrospect, it might represent the first time the comics market began to turn its back squarely on one traditional part of its reader base (and thus of its creator base) and look to the wider world beyond.

For better or worse. The question remains: is there a mainstream readership for traditional, or even reinvented, superhero comics? If there is, they've been very slow at comign forward.

The irreducible experience

The same day that I started seriously reading Plato, I found myself involved in a not-so-purely-philosophical dilemma. I don't want to go into detail about that, but I do want to say this: I understand now both why the rationalistic approach of Greek philosophy was so valuable, and also why so many people find it unsatisfactory.

There may be some people for whom instinct is a sure guide to behaviour. But for everyone else, what happens when your instincts freeze up? When they're unclear? What happens if your instincts are based on some defect in your own nature? If your instincts are telling you to take the easier path, are they giving you good advice, or are you just looking for an excuse? Most importantly, and, in my experience, most commonly: what happens if two instincts are at war? What do you do when faced with the paralysis of emotion and intellect which results?

Rationality is great tool in these situations. It makes things clearer. It can guide you to what is right. Then it's just a question of doing it. Rationality is, in the end, calming.

On the other hand, consider this premise from Protagoras: "[E]verything has one opposite and not more than one[.]" Now, it's not clear that this had actually been proven during the preceding dialogue. Nevertheless, it's a dictum that Plato uses as essentially axiomatic: to everything its opposite, and only one opposite. It's a binary approach to the world. A backslash approach. On/off. Good/evil. Pain/pleasure.

Real life doesn't operate in this way. It can't be reduced to this simple a level. The axiom is false; not an absolute falsehood, but a reductio ad absurdem of lived experience.

So the positive virtue of rationality, its ability to clear away clutter and present incisive solutions to muddled problems, becomes a vice when taken too far: the tendency to reduce reality to simple and unreal abstractions. One might conclude that rationality's main characteristic, then, is its tendency to concentrate, to distill all things to their essence — even if the essence does not exist, or if the essence resides in precisely what is inessential.

That ability to reduce by means of the intellect is something tremendously useful. Also tremendously dangerous; people go to war over abstractions. But they also go to war over their instincts. Reason's ability to clarify represents a tremendous leap forward for human cognition; even, perhaps, a movement to something more purely human. That is, if what humans do better than any other known animal is think, then the means of focussing thought enhance one's ability to be characteristically human. But that's a great "if"; what about the ability to act in accord with a moral nature? Or to create art? In both cases the intellect is involved, but in both cases something else, some other faculty, appears involved as well. Reason, in other words, has its limits.

There have been times in history — many of them — where more rationality would have considerably helped the world. But it is possible that too much rationality may be as dangerous as too little.

X and Y

It's often assumed that the best stories are those which focus the most closely on their theme and/or plot. All things not central should be edited out. Every element must tend toward a single end. Even style ought to be disciplined, ought to be pruned of all nonesential verbiage.

Yet any number of writers have produced great work which defies the above guidelines. Melville, Tolkien, John Cowper Powys, Iain Sinclair — these writers produce fascinating, powerful work which refuses the centripetal urge. What I mean by that is that in Moby Dick or The Lord of the Rings there are any number of long passages, about whaling or the history of Middle-Earth, which seem to have nothing to do with what the book is ostensibly about. These are novels which resist the urge to cohere; which do not have a single centre of gravity giving unity to their text. A centre of gravity, in this context, might be a story or a conscious theme; it is some idea which is developed, and which gives obvious form to a novel.

Yet even books which resist the pressure of gravity still very clearly have a form, have some kind of coherency and structure which gives them a unity. The Lord of the Rings would not be what it is if the long passages on landscape or history were excised. Moby Dick would not be what it is without the long passages on whaling. A Glastonbury Romance would not be what it is without the shifting, multiple points-of-view which extend even to the cosmic forces of the universe. There is not necessarily a conscious attempt to pull all this material into a shape. It's just there. Part of the world the writer presents. Something the writer felt compelled to include, something which works in defiance of accepted critical strictures.

In fact, if you look at the underlying principle of said accepted critical strictures, you quickly realise that they don't make much sense. There was a Peanuts cartoon once where Linus bugged Lucy to tell him a story until she finally gave in and snapped out: "A man was born. He lived and died. The end." And that was the story. And the truth is this: If you really wanted to cut down a story as far as possible, there's really not much more to say.

So, let's consider the possibility that while it is true that what gives a story its shape is what you leave out, it is also true that what gives a story its meaning, its importance, is what you leave in.

Think of it like a graph. The horizontal axis is a measure of plot; the drive forward, the development of story or theme. The vertical axis, on the other hand, is a measure of the material the author brings to the story. The didactic material. The connections, the atmosphere, all the things which aren't logically relevant but which are artistically necessary.

Traditional critical thought, then, would suggest that a straight line across the horizontal axis is the ideal shape for a story. But I suspect that stories of that kind are at some level unsatisfying. Certainly a lot of cleverness in the construction of, say, a mainstream film story goes into disgusing necessary elements, making them seem like interesting side bits until the story reaches the point where they stand revealed as vital to the forward momentum of the plot. The result is something smooth, clever, and fundamentally empty. There's a lack of healthy eccentricity.

So if not a straight line, what? A straight line up the vertical axis would be at least as unsatisfying, in a narrative sense. Perhaps that's the line of nonfiction; of an encyclopedia. Narrative entirely forsaken, information finding its own order.

Likely the old image of a narrative arc is most apt. A story begins, slowly moves forward, accreting images and facts and background, then at a certain point begins to really rush toward its climax, with less extraneous material being thrown in. But the amount of vertical detail given earlier lends the arc a steepness, a velocity, as it races toward the finish.

Then again, perhaps some stories don't have a single line, a single equation, to them at all. Perhaps just as some cosmological theories suggest that the universe is closed, finite, and some sugest it's open and endless, so some stories are closed (horizonally-oriented) and some are open (vertically-oriented).

The point is mainly that there are a lot of different ways to think about stories and story structure; sometimes conventional wisdom is best ignored, opening oneself up to a potentially useful point of view.