Readings 2K9: Watching the Watchmen

Watching the Watchmen

by Dave Gibbons

This is a coffee-table book with some process art from Watchmen, the mini-series/graphic novel Gibbons drew from a script by Alan Moore. It’s not uninteresting, but neither is it particularly revelatory. There are no great secrets about the making of Watchmen which come out here. Instead, the core of the book is a series of initial breakdown sketches Gibbons made for the pages of the graphic novel; but since Moore’s script is so intensely detailed, and Gibbons himself is meticulous in his craft, there really isn’t much of a variance between the breakdowns and the designs of the finished pages. Even the original character sketches don’t change that much.

There isn’t much text in the book, either. Most notable are a few chatty descriptions of what the experience of drawing Watchmen was like, a piece by the colourist about the process of coming up with colours for the comic, and some discussion of the book’s reception in the 80s. But Gibbons decided not to include any material about the estrangement between Alan Moore and DC Comics which followed the publication of the book. I can understand his reasons for doing this, but there is definitely the feel of a man skirting the elephant which dominates the room.

Consider the following quotes. Here’s Gibbons (p 237):

Looking back, it seems almost inevitable that Watchmen became one of the first graphic novels, although the fact that it has remained in print and sold consistently well over more than twenty years would surely have been beyond the wildest dreams of any DC marketing executive of the time.

It was certainly beyond the imaginings Alan and I had as its creators. We expected that three years after the original series had gone out of print the rights would revert to us, as stated in our contract. Instead, it has been in print ever since. We’ve received a constant stream of royalties and it has become a perennial presence in mainstream bookstores. Indeed, Watchmen has become ‘required reading’ for any novice comics reader and is widely recommended as the ideal entry point to the medium.

Now Moore, from an interview before the V For Vendetta film came out:

When you're talking about [movies being made from] things like V for Vendetta or Watchmen, I don't have a choice. Those were works which DC Comics kind of tricked me out of, so they own all that stuff and it's up to them whether the film gets made or not.

Gibbons is of course entitled to his perspective, and if he’s happy with his situation vis-a-vis Watchmen and DC, that’s great. But there seems a bit of an odd disconnect here.

Again, consider this quote from Gibbons (p 261):

Far more upsetting to Alan and I [than another DC artist producing a poster to advertise Watchmen merchandise] was a suggestion that we produce spin-off series from Watchmen or, failing that, that DC would produce them without us. Proposed titles were Rorschach’s Journal and The Comedian’s Vietnam War Diary. DC wisely shelved the proposals and, to their credit, have managed to resist the temptation ever since.

— Though one should note that there is a video game featuring the characters coming out in conjunction with the forthcoming movie. At any rate, here’s Moore on the above events speaking to Gary Groth in issue 139 of The Comics Journal, back in 1990:

I suppose if there was a final, tiny straw that broke the camel’s back [and led to Moore breaking from DC], it was when people at DC at one point very subtly made the suggestion that ... We were talking about the future of the Watchmen characters. We had been assured that we would be the only people writing them, that they wouldn’t be handed to other creators just to make a fast buck out of a spin-off series. There was a point where a highly placed person at DC did make a not terribly subtle — I think it was intended to be subtle but it wasn’t — insinuation that they would not give our characters to other writers to exploit as long as we had a working relationship with DC. It’s perhaps just me, Gary, but that was a threat and I really, really, really don’t respond well to being threatened. I couldn’t tolerate anyone threatening me on the street; I couldn’t tolerate anyone threatening me in any other situation in my life. I can’t tolerate anyone threatening me about my art and my career and stuff that’s as important to me as that. That was the emotional breaking point. At that point there was no longer any possibility of me working for DC in any way, shape, or form.

Different people have different takes on events, but these are fairly widely divergent perceptions. In one case, the company is briefly misguided, perhaps afflicted with an over-eager middle-manager, but on their own sees the error of their ways. In the other case, their attempt to bully creators badly backfires. There’s not really enough information to reconcile these versions; they are what they are.

So Watching the Watchmen does have this going for it: it gives Dave Gibbons a chance to get his thoughts on Watchmen out in permanent form. That’s nice, and interesting reading. But there’s not an awful lot of content of that sort in the book, and what there is to it doesn’t seem terribly significant. It’s likely that in years to come, scholars will appreciate the resource. At the moment, though, the average reader can do without it fairly easily.

Readings 2K9: Tesseracts Twelve

Tesseracts Twelve

edited by Claude Lalumière

Best to get the potential conflicts of interest out of the way first; I know Claude, and submitted a story to this anthology. It didn’t get in, but my girlfriend also submitted a piece which was accepted (Claude didn’t know she was my girlfriend at the time). Such, I suspect, is the claustrophobic world of Canadian publishing.

This volume of the long-running series of Tesseracts anthologies, which feature Canadian science-fiction stories, has a special focus on the novella. Each of the stories is at least ten thousand words long. That’s a rarity, and nice to see right off the bat.

Even better, to my mind, all of the stories seem to hit what they’re aiming at. They do different things, and which you like best will probably depend upon which project you’re most sympathetic to; but what they do, they do well. For me, leaving Grace’s story “Intersections” out of the equation (which I really do think is a lovely work), the stand-outs were E.L. Chen’s Arabian Nights update “The Story of the Woman and Her Dog” and David Nickle’s bitter media satire “Wylde’s Kingdom”. Chen’s is probably the most structurally inventive story in the anthology, while Nickle’s is to my mind the best at sustaining a specific voice and tone.

Are there any consistent themes through the book? Are there any specifically Canadian approaches? Actually, in some ways, I’d argue that the book is most notable for its avoidance of typical Canadian themes. The father-and-son generational conflicts which seem to me to dominate much of Canadian literature are nowhere to be found; equally, the traditional man-versus-unbreakable-nature theme isn’t really present, especially in its usual form of settlers breaking a hostile land. Northrop Frye’s ‘garrison mentality’ (colonists alone against a harsh wilderness) is notable by its absence, with the arguable exception of “Wylde’s Kingdom”, which really inverts the whole concept by presenting a nature thoroughly disrupted and exploited by human agency.

At the same time, nature is strongly present in the anthology in the form of animals; but these are animals which in one way or another blend into the human. “Intersections” is probably the only story without an animal presence. Humans and mammoths share mentalities in Derryl Murphy’s “Ancients of the Earth”, Michael Skeet and Jill Snyder Lum give us fox spirits and a surprisingly talkative tanuki in “Beneath the Skin”, Chen has men and women changing into dogs and goldfish, Randy McCharles’ story “Ringing the Changes in Okotoks, Alberta” has witchcraft linking a man and a goat, Gord Sellar’s super-hero tale “Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang” includes a Japanese cat-woman, and “Wylde’s Kingdom” is the story of a man hunting and being hunted by a giant squid — with, inevitably, a hint of empathy between hunter and hunted towards the end. So perhaps this anthology represents a new Canadian mentality; no more of the garrison, no more of the conflict between man and wilderness, now our stories are those of man and nature merging. 

Further: based on this book, Margaret Atwood’s thesis in Survival, that Canadian fiction is dominated by victims whose stories are simply about living through tragedy, can be discarded. Only “Wylde’s Kingdom” seems to fit her template, and even that’s debatable. The characters in these stories typically learn how to take control of their lives; how to grow out of being the victim. Atwood aside, there is a stereotype of bleakness in Canadian fiction, of pessimism and darkness — but, by and large, that sterotype finds no reflection in this anthology.

So instead of dreary stories about European immigrants breaking the land, we have a wildly multicultural selection of stories. Sure, “Ancients of the Earth” takes place in a northern frontier town in the nineteenth century, but it has a conclusion different from any trope of Canadian literature I know. Other stories are set in feudal Japan, in Korea, in a small Albertan town influenced by Celtic witchcraft, or in a Toronto inflected by a wealth of different cultures — and Chen's Toronto, as I said above, is most defined by The Arabian Nights, itself a polyglot collection of tales from different lands, reflecting the multicultural environment of Toronto. 

So Tesseracts Twelve may signal, ultimately, a change in Canadian literature to mirror the changes in the country itself. Where the country has seen its demography shift, has managed with surprisingly little strain to incorporate a wealth of voices and cultures within itself, has changed its traditional narrative of its own founding and development, the book suggests new themes for Canadian writing, new models for its story. Hints of the old are still there, certainly, as they should be, but not given the stress they might have carried in the past — for a Francophone (however bilingual) to edit a major English-language anthology, for example, likely would have been noteworthy ten years ago, and I think certainly would have attracted comment twenty years ago or more. I haven’t noticed that so far. One hopes this is a good sign. One hopes that the promise of Tesseracts Twelve is borne out in the stories yet to be written in this country. At the very least, this is a good start on the literature of Canada’s future.

Readings 2K9: The Enchantress of Florence

The Enchantress of Florence

by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s latest novel is a generous, extravagant dollop of story and metaphysical speculation, leaping wildly from India to Italy and back again in the heady days of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. It’s a novel of magic and tale-telling, of imagery and reflections, of love and of desire. A traveller comes to the court of an Emperor with a strange story. Telling it will change many things, reveal much that was hidden — if the tale is true. It will change its hearers, and it will change its teller. The Enchantress of Florence is the story, and the story of the story, and the story of its telling.

So, yes, it’s one of those stories about stories. And an exuberant one, deliberately calling up echoes of The Arabian Nights and Orlando Inamorato and Furioso and Marco Polo and Machiavelli and, and, and ... and always, it seems, more. It’s a dizzying book, thick not only with narrative colour but with theme; there are many and interpenetrating analyses of love, there are characters discussing the nature of divine revelation and its possible subordination to democratic dialogue, there are stories told inside stories. It’s hard to keep track of what the novel’s about, because it seems to be trying to be about everything.

Curiously, given much of its tone, the book shuns adventure and heroism. Perhaps this is not so curious, given that it certainly can be seen as resolutely humanist — celebrating the earthiness of life, the common man rather than the hero. But then on the other hand, its characters are anything but common people; even if the book does try to indicate the commonality within their experience, the story’s own nature seems to be trying to pull it in the direction of the larger-than-life. There may be a tension in the book, then, glorifying story while being highly aware of the ideological baggage of traditional storytelling and traditional heroism.

In any event, this is a great book. Its language, its structure, its deft use of imagery, its ability to play with history and with storytelling tradition — it’s the sort of book that could be described as an intellectual puzzle-box, except that there’s something more of life to it than the phrase implies. Rushdie has a knack for creating mythopoeic tableaux; for coming up with images, characters, situations that seem resonant, that seem to carry meanings beyond any that can be easily or confidently ascribed to them. This novel is brim-ful of such things, wonder upon wonder. It’s not an easy book, necessarily, but it is involving, and, perhaps, enrapturing.

Worth Looking At

Through the montreal city weblog, I came across this article in the Guardian about A.M. Klein. As the piece notes, Klein is too-little-known; good to see this story, then, with its brief but perceptive take on The Second Scroll.

Fiction Update

My short story, "Kreisler's Automata", is in issue 10 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, a webzine dedicated to literary fantasy. I'm quite pleased, and very appreciative of the sensitive editing job I received. Check it out here.

Readings 2K9: Briefly Noted, Part Two

I've read A.S. Byatt's first novel, Shadow of the Sun; I'll have more to say about it later, either here or elsewhere. Oddly, that's actually only the second book off my own shelves that I've finished this month, the others being from my local library. It's the fifth book I've read this month, the seventeenth so far this year. And I've so far reduced the overall number of unread books in the house by ten.

Readings 2K9: Matter

Matter

Iain M. Banks

This is science-fiction with a lot on its mind. Stylistically, there’s nothing much out of the ordinary, though a certain ironic tone does provide for something close to humour; it’s not unlike The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, if Hitchhiker’s had been written as serious SF. But this is, in essence, a straight-ahead adventure story with pointed political parallels.

The book concerns itself with Sursamen, a shellworld — a world made up essentially of several planets one inside another, like a Russian doll. The human civilisations on the eighth and ninth levels of Sursamen are at war; they’re at about an eighteenth-century level of technology, but there are overseers from a more sophisticated civilisation watching them. And then another civilization watching the watchers; and then another watching them. In other words, the physical construction of the planet is mirrored by the technological, social, and political hierarchies of the people who live on and around it. Meaning threatens to become abstracted by the differences in scale in all these things; conversely, a symbolically-freighted conversation lends the book its title — insisting that these hierarchical structures are ultimately insignificant and that life, well, matters.

But all these themes remain comfortably unobtrusive; essentially, this is an oddly-paced adventure story. Oddly-paced, because very slow-paced. There are many massive infodumps all throughout the book; they’re well-written, but still slow forward momentum to a crawl. That’s a shame, because some of Banks’ unorthodox structuring tricks work very nicely — the main villains of the piece turn out to have had almost no set-up, having been mentioned by-the-way hundreds of pages before their big revelation, and yet this makes sense, this hits you with an unexpected force. Unfortunately, much else of the conclusion falls flat; because of the range of scales of technologies and powers, all the fireworks on display at the very end seem random and abrupt.

This is not a bad book, but there’s a curiously unreal sense to it. In part I think that’s a function of the character-building and world-building; in part it’s a function of a certain lack of human depth. And then also it’s a function of a plot that wanders about, and never really frees itself of exposition to move at any velocity. The result is a book that’s highly readable, but ultimately unmemorable.

Briefly Noted

My review of Kristen Cashore's Graceling is out in today's issue of The Montreal Gazette. The article doesn't seem to be online, though. At any rate, I didn't much care for the book.

Edit: And a couple of days later, I've found the review. Here it is.

Readings 2K9: The Persians

The Persians

by J.M. Cook

Originally published in 1983 as The Persian Empire, this edition was republished by The Folio Society — meaning that the book is a nice package, with some fine maps, and some truly spectacular photographs of a Persian archaeological site. The text itself is informative, though very much focussed on the reigns of the Achaemenid kings; that is, it deals chronologically only with the era up to Alexander the Great, and sociologically with a very narrow slice of Persian society.

Which to some extent is understandable. The sources Cook was working from were primarily the Greek histories, which dealt with Persia mainly in terms of how the Persians affected Greece. A writer like Herodotus gives some description of the whole extent of the Persian Empire, but the viewpoint is still mainly Greek, mainly focussed on the western part of the Empire. Cook does a strong job of trying to reconstruct events and personalities from a Persian perspective, but the weight of his sources can’t help but pull him back to the Greeks.

I’m no expert in Persian history, but Cook’s own text seemed fine to me. He sedulously presents different interpretations and readings of sources; of course, it’s impossible to present all the evidence for and against an interpretation in a general history, but at least some note of other ideas is there. The writing is fine, if not gripping; structurally, the book reads well, though the next-to-last chapter, a geographical overview of the Persian lands, would probably have been better off at the start of the book. This is a solid book that tries its best to give a Persian focus to Persian history; I can’t help but wonder how much farther that aim has gone in the past quarter-century.

Readings 2K9: Lavinia

Lavinia

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin’s latest novel is incredibly strong, moving, and human. It’s the story of Lavinia, the wife of Aeneas, the legendary ancestor of Rome; it gently revises and expands Vergil’s Aeneid, with Vergil himself in a supporting role. So at one level the book is dealing with matter at the root of the Western cultural tradition — but at another level it’s the simple human tale of a woman in an unsophisticated society navigating her way in the world, building a life for herself and her loved ones. It’s a success both ways.

The language of the novel is simple, but resonant. Le Guin consistently finds the right phrases for the characters and their situations; the phrases echoing with the most meaning. One of the first descriptions of Aeneas comes when Lavinia, later in life — the novel elegantly shifts back and forth in time — describes her husband’s gear: “To see his armor hanging there is to realise what a large, powerful, man he is. He doesn’t look large, or even very muscular, because his body is in perfect proportion, and he moves lightly and gracefully, considerate of who and what is around him, not shoving forward as many big, strong men do. Yet I can hardly lift the armour he wears so easily.” How much is in those three sentences; how much of the character of Aeneas, how much of his essence, and how much of Lavinia’s emotion for him, how she sees him relative to other men, her understanding of power and responsibility.

The first two-thirds or so of the book follow the Aeneid from Lavinia’s perspective, with the remainder following her life after the close of the poem. There is a subtle but distinct shift in this later part of the book. The action is less pre-ordained, but also less freighted with meaning. But then this also means Lavinia is freer; this part of the story has not been written for her. 

One of the most impressive aspects of the book is its consciousness of its status as a story, and Lavinia’s own understanding herself as a character. Early in the book, she meets the figure of Vergil, a ghost of the future; she learns much of the story he will write. But then he himself admits he has been wrong about some things. Lavinia is haunted throughout the rest of the book by her knowledge that she herself is a character in this writer’s text, perhaps not even a text he finished or was particularly satisfied with. 

Le Guin plays with the question of how alive even the most self-aware of characters can be — “I am, now, only in this line of words I write,” says Lavinia near the beginning of the book, acknowledging her own status as a fiction: “As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all.” Hardly living, she cannot die. “My life is too contingent to lead to anything so absolute as death.” And yet, and yet. After her husband’s death, Lavinia lets his best friend tell the tale of his slaying again and again: “So long as Achates told me the story,” she says, “Aeneas was not dead.” Life and death have a complex relationship to stories.

Earlier, Lavinia mourns the poet’s absence in an unwittingly resonant phrase: “I have lost my guide, my Vergil.” And this recalls an earlier passage in the book, when she asks Vergil if he was with Aeneas in the underworld: “Who else would I be with?” asks Vergil, before becoming suddenly uncertain. “What man did I guide?” he asks himself. “I met him in a wood, like this. A dark wood, in the middle of the road. I came up from down there to meet him, to show him the way ...” And so we are gently reminded that even poets can be characters; and that this poet certainly is, a character in a book called Lavinia. Thus Lavinia has just as much life as he. By making Lavinia a character, a living, breathing character, Le Guin paradoxically gives her the ability to die — to go among the shades and to be with her husband, if only in our imaginations.

Lavinia is a subtle, marvellous book, which gives more rewards the more closely it is read. Le Guin has a knack (you can see it in many of her earlier books, the Earthsea series not least among them) for imagining and conveying the nature of life in a pre-literate or nearly pre-literate society; for bringing out the relationship of the people and the gods, for showing the shapes of communities, for illuminating the distance and the power of words. This in addition to her gifts for character and language and structure. All these things come together in Lavinia. Fittingly, like the best Roman art, it’s austere in style, and from that austerity derives a harmonious beauty; one imagines that Vergil himself would approve.

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.