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by Rick Riordian
Disney-Hyperion
Review by SF Winser
You ever read a book where it felt like the author had sat down and thought 'What would make that SF Winser melt with joy?'. Probably not. I'm sure you rarely have that thought. But substitute your name for mine in there... When was the last time you thought you might be the ideal reader for a book? Like the author had designed the prose just to make you, and just you, smile.
Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson did that for me. Which is strange, seeing as I only picked them up because (the notoriously crap) director Chris Columbus had adapted them into movies and I wanted to see what he was destroying.
Growing up, I was an odd kid with odd reading habits. I honestly can't remember whether I fell in love with fantasy because I loved mythology or vice versa. Riordan, here, has channeled my childhood.
This is the story of a boy who finds out that the Greek Gods are real. And one of them is his dad.
Percy (Perseus) Jackson is a Half-Blood. A Demi-God with one of the Olympian Gods as his father. You see, the Greek pantheon are still around, still fighting with each other and interacting with the world and sometimes they still fall in love with mortals. Percy is the result of one of the Gods' indiscretions.
This is a problem, because Half-Bloods don't fit in the world very well. They all have ADHD-like symptoms from the simple fact that they don't see the world like everyone else and have reactions and attention spans more suited to swinging swords in battle. If this weren't bad enough, Half-Bloods, by their very nature, attract monsters.
So Percy is sometimes distracted, acts a bit stupid sometimes, is often unaware of important things happening around him and even has attacks of 'being a teenager' (ie, sometimes a jerk). On top of which, he has to come to terms with his strange parentage and the fact that many people want him dead simply because of who he is. Some of these people are magical. Some of these people have claws.
The books tend to have a quest of some sort at their centre. The search for a Daedelus, a hunt for Zeus's stolen Lightning Bolt, and along the way there are encounters with many, many monsters and other mythological-style problems.
The 'ancient gods in a modern world' idea isn't new, but this is as well done a romp as any of the other versions. Better, in some ways.
The thing I liked most about this series—and I don't pretend the average teen reader will have the same background as me—is the way the Gods all have personalities similar to what they show in the old stories I loved. They have grown a bit in 3000 years, but Apollo is still self-absorbed yet brilliant, Hermes is a scamp, Zeus is powerful but at times pig-headed. The interaction between them and the mortals is often interesting and not always easy. The Gods do not unilaterally love Percy simply because he's a hero. At least one God hates him, several are miffed at his very existence and the Godly parent of one of his best friends quite seriously discusses his execution. I don't want to go too much into this because the plot of one book often relies on Percy and friends’ misunderstanding the nature of one of the Gods' motivations. And this had annoyed the crap out of me up to the point where we find out that that particular God wasn't who Percy originally thought.
It's a funny series, full of action and with some interesting character-building and relationships. The chapter titles themselves are often silly. 'In Which I become Supreme Lord of the Bathroom', 'Three Old Ladies Knit the Socks of Death' etc.. A lot of the humour comes from the incongruity of ancient ideas in a modern setting, which Riordan often plays with deliberate silliness, but he only rarely steps over the line into the ridiculous. He does sometimes miss, but not too often.
There are two major problems with the series and one or two minor ones. The major ones: It is very much like Harry Potter. I don't think this is plagiarism, it's just that the books cover similar stylistic ground and are bound to use similar tropes and archetypes. In a way, this is a compliment. The Olympians books are fun, funny, kid-friendly fantasy books. But coming across the 'Secret School', 'The Mischievous Twins', 'The Scholarly Lead Female' and many others, in very similar contexts, means that the similarities become distracting at times. I started thinking of the main female character 'Annabeth' as 'Hermiobeth'. Though, if I'm being honest, Annabeth has more spunk and less whinginess than Hermione and as a lead character, Percy is much more convincing than the at-times non-entity Harry. And Riordan doesn't let his characters spend too much time in the 'Secret School': they need to be out and about, traveling North America and fighting monsters.
The other major problem is the episodic nature of the middle of some of the books and the deus ex machina resolutions to some of the problems these episodes raise. Except... well... this is a story about modern Demi-Gods going on epic quests. Epics are often episodic. And very often have deus ex machina resolutions. In fact deus ex machina means 'God out of the Machine' and describes how in ancient Greek plays – where there was a very modern obsession with special effects – often had a God pop out of some ingenious bit of stage machinery and solve all the problems in the play with a wave of a divine wrist. If anyone were allowed – or even required – to have the odd bit of god-popping machinery, it's Riordan in these books. If you have Gods, you kind of have to use them every so often.
The challenges themselves are often encounters with ancient monsters or mythic puzzles. Riordan is at his best when he has his heroes take on these old ideas in new and interesting ways. Most of the time, these are well handled. Sometimes they aren't, but the hits outweigh the misses. I especially love Annabeth's encounter with a 'quiz-show-host' Sphinx, even though her reaction doesn't count as a resolution or even as clear thinking. It's simply hilarious the way her actions anticipated this reader's frustration with the crap the Sphinx is trying to pull. And Percy's encounter with Calypso in book #4 is simply wonderful and close to heartbreaking.
Minor problems include the fact that Percy spends so little time in the one place that could train him for his odd life. Everyone – including Percy – should be pushing for him to stay at Camp Half-Blood (The Demi-God training school) but mostly they encourage him to only come in summer, to spend half the summer on quests outside the camp and then the plot will often rely on him caring about the safety of the people in the camp. People he barely knows, and most of whom seem to treat him like crap on the rare occasions when he is there.
Another being that at least one of the books relies very heavily on dreams as a narrative device. For about a third of the book, it feels. The dreams are at least not the symbolic/poetic crap that gets old almost as the author types them – they're a way for various people to show Percy what his enemies and lost allies are up to - but they still wear thin long before they stop coming.
But I must admit I'm looking for problems. I'm deliberately stripping off my rose-tinted glasses. Then truth is that these are fun, funny books for teens and pre-teens (and willing adults) and I read them at a pace of one book a day for nearly a week, enjoying myself like a kid on a rollercoaster after the tenth caffeinated beverage. Yes there are issues and some clumsy parts. But, screw them. I noticed them and didn't care. These books were a blast and have shot to near the top of my recommend-to-younger-readers list. And I'll most likely reread them myself next time I need some innocent fun.
March 11, 2010
March 10, 2010
THE JOY OF COOKING
by Irma Rombauer
Bobbs Merrill Co., Publisher
Review by Maria Bustillos
The edition of the venerable Joy of Cooking which I am recommending is the 1953 one, though I do not doubt that the versions published by Mrs. Rombauer in 1931, 1936, 1941, 1942, 1946, 1951 and 1952 are all equally entertaining and informative. It's just that I've had a 1953 one for ages, and it is an old friend and companion.
Mrs. Rombauer's sunny, enlightened presence has, alas, slowly faded from modern versions, and, even more sadly, from the world at large. There may in fact be no one left like the original Rombauer. With what relish does she describe the disastrously inedible meal she first cooked her husband as a "young bride", for instance! (Martha Stewart, one feels sure, would never admit to so much as a stray peanut-butter cookie inadvertently scorched at the age of seven.) Mrs. Rombauer wears her mantle of greatness so lightly, so easily. In this 1013-page behemoth of a cookbook, the doughty authoress does not shrink from steaming brains with you, nor drawing wild birds, nor squirting paper cornucopias full of icing into daisy shapes (“although the botanist might not recognize these structures as such.”) Her giddy bonhomie never fails her. Our own neurotic age has lost the graceful art of tempering competence with humor and self-deprecation. For that reason alone, this is an illuminating, philosophical book--gentle, wise, and, occasionally, hilarious.
“My roots are Victorian,” Mrs. Rombauer writes in the Foreword, “but I have been modernized by life and my children.” Modernization in Mrs. Rombauer's case extended to mysterious and newfangled contraptions such as the home freezer (“Excess air within the frozen food package is a real enemy”), but her chapter on Frozen Foods is still the most detailed, useful primer on this confusing subject I have seen anywhere, and best among its many virtues, it begins with one of the most charming passages in modern letters:
“We are indebted to an Arctic explorer for the following Eskimo rule for a frozen dinner:
“Kill and eviscerate a medium-sized walrus. Net several flocks of small migrating birds and remove only one small wing feather from each wing. Store birds whole in interior of walrus. Sew up walrus and freeze. Then two years or so later, find the cache if you can, notify clan of a feast. Partially thaw walrus. Slice and serve.' Simplicity itself.”
The loveliest thing about this formidable recipe is Mrs. Rombauer's tacit acceptance of the fact that one might easily lose track of a frozen walrus in the space of two years; another ineluctable fact totally excluded from the dream universes of Martha Stewart, Anna Wintour and many other arbiters of taste in the modern world. Real cooking is full of such accidents; Mrs. Rombauer understood this, and rejoiced in it.
Bobbs Merrill Co., Publisher
Review by Maria Bustillos
The edition of the venerable Joy of Cooking which I am recommending is the 1953 one, though I do not doubt that the versions published by Mrs. Rombauer in 1931, 1936, 1941, 1942, 1946, 1951 and 1952 are all equally entertaining and informative. It's just that I've had a 1953 one for ages, and it is an old friend and companion.
Mrs. Rombauer's sunny, enlightened presence has, alas, slowly faded from modern versions, and, even more sadly, from the world at large. There may in fact be no one left like the original Rombauer. With what relish does she describe the disastrously inedible meal she first cooked her husband as a "young bride", for instance! (Martha Stewart, one feels sure, would never admit to so much as a stray peanut-butter cookie inadvertently scorched at the age of seven.) Mrs. Rombauer wears her mantle of greatness so lightly, so easily. In this 1013-page behemoth of a cookbook, the doughty authoress does not shrink from steaming brains with you, nor drawing wild birds, nor squirting paper cornucopias full of icing into daisy shapes (“although the botanist might not recognize these structures as such.”) Her giddy bonhomie never fails her. Our own neurotic age has lost the graceful art of tempering competence with humor and self-deprecation. For that reason alone, this is an illuminating, philosophical book--gentle, wise, and, occasionally, hilarious.
“My roots are Victorian,” Mrs. Rombauer writes in the Foreword, “but I have been modernized by life and my children.” Modernization in Mrs. Rombauer's case extended to mysterious and newfangled contraptions such as the home freezer (“Excess air within the frozen food package is a real enemy”), but her chapter on Frozen Foods is still the most detailed, useful primer on this confusing subject I have seen anywhere, and best among its many virtues, it begins with one of the most charming passages in modern letters:
“We are indebted to an Arctic explorer for the following Eskimo rule for a frozen dinner:
“Kill and eviscerate a medium-sized walrus. Net several flocks of small migrating birds and remove only one small wing feather from each wing. Store birds whole in interior of walrus. Sew up walrus and freeze. Then two years or so later, find the cache if you can, notify clan of a feast. Partially thaw walrus. Slice and serve.' Simplicity itself.”
The loveliest thing about this formidable recipe is Mrs. Rombauer's tacit acceptance of the fact that one might easily lose track of a frozen walrus in the space of two years; another ineluctable fact totally excluded from the dream universes of Martha Stewart, Anna Wintour and many other arbiters of taste in the modern world. Real cooking is full of such accidents; Mrs. Rombauer understood this, and rejoiced in it.
March 9, 2010
ACT ONE
by Moss Hart
456 pages, St. Martin's Griffin
Review by Maria Bustillos
The relative oldsters among us may recall that Mr. Hart was married to Kitty Carlisle, the star of “What's My Line” and other bizarre 60s TV shows. This rare and wonderful book is dedicated to her, “the book that she asked for.”
Mr. Hart confines this hefty work to the very first chapter of his illustrious career, and it reads more like an Indiana Jones cliffhanger than it does a stage autobiography. Living in abject poverty in Brooklyn with his family, he struggles manfully through play after rejected play; supporting them all by working as a stage manager in summer Catskills resorts of the kind depicted in (yuck!) Brighton Beach Memoirs. Mr. Hart evokes this world with painterly vividness. An exhausted producer suggests to him that he might try his hand at comedy (something that hasn't yet occurred to the twentysomething Hart, so enamored is he of the Theatre and Ibsen and Shaw and stuff like that.) Next thing you know, he is sitting at the feet of his hero, George S. Kaufman, hobnobbing with the likes of Harpo Marx, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. His chance at The Big Time has arrived: a collaboration with Kaufman. But there is a serious snag ...
They made a movie of this with George Hamilton in the lead role; I haven’t seen it, but I can’t imagine that Hamilton was the right guy, because it would take someone whose soul is starving and blazing at the same time, and surely Hamilton has spent his whole life in a glossily handsome and laid-back state(?) So, here is another wonderful book crying out for a new movie version.
Hart may have been more famous as a playwright than as the author of this book, but his prose is simply divine, sparkling, so full of energy and wit; as a memoirist he is perfect, too; his candor is engaging but not too much; he is modest about his triumphs, but not too modest; he whines just the right amount when things go wrong. He becomes your friend, confides in you, and shares the most exciting rags-to-riches story I think I've ever read.
Recent biographies have reported that Hart was gay, and unhappily so; he spent many years in therapy struggling with his homosexuality. These revelations add a terrible poignancy to Act One. You can sense a lot of depths in this troubled man that remain unplumbed in the book, but the way he’s chosen to tell his own story speaks to so many interesting questions of personality; what we can and cannot choose to be. It's a very noble work, written by a great-spirited and troubled man.
I shan't give any more away. I hardly remembered to breathe during the last hundred pages. One of the best things about this book is that an awful lot of people agreed with me about how great it is when it was first published in 1959. It came out in a huge book club edition, and I think every thrift store in the US must have at least two copies.
456 pages, St. Martin's Griffin
Review by Maria Bustillos
The relative oldsters among us may recall that Mr. Hart was married to Kitty Carlisle, the star of “What's My Line” and other bizarre 60s TV shows. This rare and wonderful book is dedicated to her, “the book that she asked for.”
Mr. Hart confines this hefty work to the very first chapter of his illustrious career, and it reads more like an Indiana Jones cliffhanger than it does a stage autobiography. Living in abject poverty in Brooklyn with his family, he struggles manfully through play after rejected play; supporting them all by working as a stage manager in summer Catskills resorts of the kind depicted in (yuck!) Brighton Beach Memoirs. Mr. Hart evokes this world with painterly vividness. An exhausted producer suggests to him that he might try his hand at comedy (something that hasn't yet occurred to the twentysomething Hart, so enamored is he of the Theatre and Ibsen and Shaw and stuff like that.) Next thing you know, he is sitting at the feet of his hero, George S. Kaufman, hobnobbing with the likes of Harpo Marx, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. His chance at The Big Time has arrived: a collaboration with Kaufman. But there is a serious snag ...
They made a movie of this with George Hamilton in the lead role; I haven’t seen it, but I can’t imagine that Hamilton was the right guy, because it would take someone whose soul is starving and blazing at the same time, and surely Hamilton has spent his whole life in a glossily handsome and laid-back state(?) So, here is another wonderful book crying out for a new movie version.
Hart may have been more famous as a playwright than as the author of this book, but his prose is simply divine, sparkling, so full of energy and wit; as a memoirist he is perfect, too; his candor is engaging but not too much; he is modest about his triumphs, but not too modest; he whines just the right amount when things go wrong. He becomes your friend, confides in you, and shares the most exciting rags-to-riches story I think I've ever read.
Recent biographies have reported that Hart was gay, and unhappily so; he spent many years in therapy struggling with his homosexuality. These revelations add a terrible poignancy to Act One. You can sense a lot of depths in this troubled man that remain unplumbed in the book, but the way he’s chosen to tell his own story speaks to so many interesting questions of personality; what we can and cannot choose to be. It's a very noble work, written by a great-spirited and troubled man.
I shan't give any more away. I hardly remembered to breathe during the last hundred pages. One of the best things about this book is that an awful lot of people agreed with me about how great it is when it was first published in 1959. It came out in a huge book club edition, and I think every thrift store in the US must have at least two copies.
March 8, 2010
KAI LUNG'S GOLDEN HOURS
by Ernest Bramah
240 pages, Dover Publications
Review by Maria Bustillos
Literature as Ornament
Ernest Bramah Smith is the nom de guerre of a mysterious Englishman who wrote detective stories in the early part of the 20th century. Being a slavish admirer of Kai Lung (whom I will get to, eventually), I once tried out one of these detective stories, and found it mildly disappointing; in the story, Bramah's blind detective, whose name is Max Carrados, was able to read the newspaper using his fingertips. Now anyone who has ever held a newspaper, even an English one from the 'teens, knows that the ink wicks right into the paper and thus the characters thereupon couldn't possibly be so descried, not even by the most sensitive fingertips.
Improbabilities such as these, however, cannot disturb the enchanted reader of this master's greatest works, the Kai Lung books (there are several, of which I would recommend Kai Lung's Golden Hours as an introduction). The eponymous hero, an itinerant Chinese storyteller whose ready wit and noble heart have more power to charm even than his bizarre, deliciously wrought rococo speech, inhabits a world where the impossible is merely fated. I hesitate to call these stories fairy tales, although some might be so tempted; rather, I would say that Kai Lung is the literary equivalent of the Brighton Pavilion, with all its fantastic spires and domes, its luminous enameled dragons and forests of egregiously fake bamboo. Just as the Brighton Pavilion transcends all its absurdity and elevates the visitor to new and dizzying heights of aesthetic and historical conjecture, so Kai Lung can waft one instantly from the ridiculous to the sublime, in his own inimitable, gravity-removing manner.
The chapter titles alone should be enough to sway the doubtful reader in Kai Lung's favor: 'The Degraded Persistence of the Effete Ming-shu' (Chap. III); 'The High-Minded Strategy of the Amiable Hwa-Mei' (Chap. VI); 'The Incredible Obtuseness of Those who had Opposed the Virtuous Kai Lung' (Chap. X). Bramah weaves his plots with Wodeousian intricacy; jokes abound, many of them capable of reducing the reader to helpless fits of laughter months later, on the freeway or in the supermarket; and the author's gentleness, his sense of justice and fair play, his lovely manners and his irresistible sense of humor, will remain long in the reader's mind, like a faint fragrance of jasmine.
240 pages, Dover Publications
Review by Maria Bustillos
Literature as Ornament
Ernest Bramah Smith is the nom de guerre of a mysterious Englishman who wrote detective stories in the early part of the 20th century. Being a slavish admirer of Kai Lung (whom I will get to, eventually), I once tried out one of these detective stories, and found it mildly disappointing; in the story, Bramah's blind detective, whose name is Max Carrados, was able to read the newspaper using his fingertips. Now anyone who has ever held a newspaper, even an English one from the 'teens, knows that the ink wicks right into the paper and thus the characters thereupon couldn't possibly be so descried, not even by the most sensitive fingertips.
Improbabilities such as these, however, cannot disturb the enchanted reader of this master's greatest works, the Kai Lung books (there are several, of which I would recommend Kai Lung's Golden Hours as an introduction). The eponymous hero, an itinerant Chinese storyteller whose ready wit and noble heart have more power to charm even than his bizarre, deliciously wrought rococo speech, inhabits a world where the impossible is merely fated. I hesitate to call these stories fairy tales, although some might be so tempted; rather, I would say that Kai Lung is the literary equivalent of the Brighton Pavilion, with all its fantastic spires and domes, its luminous enameled dragons and forests of egregiously fake bamboo. Just as the Brighton Pavilion transcends all its absurdity and elevates the visitor to new and dizzying heights of aesthetic and historical conjecture, so Kai Lung can waft one instantly from the ridiculous to the sublime, in his own inimitable, gravity-removing manner.
The chapter titles alone should be enough to sway the doubtful reader in Kai Lung's favor: 'The Degraded Persistence of the Effete Ming-shu' (Chap. III); 'The High-Minded Strategy of the Amiable Hwa-Mei' (Chap. VI); 'The Incredible Obtuseness of Those who had Opposed the Virtuous Kai Lung' (Chap. X). Bramah weaves his plots with Wodeousian intricacy; jokes abound, many of them capable of reducing the reader to helpless fits of laughter months later, on the freeway or in the supermarket; and the author's gentleness, his sense of justice and fair play, his lovely manners and his irresistible sense of humor, will remain long in the reader's mind, like a faint fragrance of jasmine.
March 7, 2010
POINT OMEGA
by Don Delillo
117 pages, Scribner
Review by Marc Nash
Delillo is my favourite living author. I even pre-ordered this in hardback, just like back in the day when I used to rush to the record shop on the day of release for a new album by whichever hot band I slavishly followed that year. Delillo and I have been together now for two decades or so.
117 pages. Like Roth, Delillo's late-career works seem to be getting shorter and shorter. Both men have written epic American novels, "American Pastoral" and "Underworld", and having come through the other side now seem so in control of their craft and language itself, that they require fewer words to convey their message.
With Delillo, it's all about the central metaphors and the sculpted words he plants as little word cluster bomblets that detonate in your reading mind as you progress, and stop you up short. "She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself". You don't need to say anything else to have a full picture of this person in your mind's eye.
Not much happens in recent Delillo novels. The main characters always seem to be waiting around; stuck in a traffic jam in a limo "Cosmopolis"; a couple waiting to see which one will die before the other in "White Noise"; characters either fully stuck, or taking tentative steps to move on after 9/11 in "Falling Man".
This too is a book about waiting. A civilian specialist adviser to the US military has retired to the most isolated place he can find in order to consider the meaning of his work. A film maker accompanies him, wanting to make a single-take movie of the man addressing the camera about his findings. In the name of research, as pre-production of a scriptless movie, they hang out together in the desert.
So there's your plot. But what lifts this into a whole mind-bending joy, are the ideas casually shucked straight into your consciousness. The book opens with a description of the effect of an art installation, in which Hitchcock's "Psycho" is slowed down to 2 frames a second. A viewer, as creepy as Norman Bates himself, goes in for each of the six days of the exhibit being open. There he obsessively studies every gesture, every muscular motion slowed down, and believes it to offer a new way of seeing things. A new reality. For mankind for the first time to genuinely see itself reflected (one is reminded of Eadweard Muybridge's studies anatomising motion in the early days of photography, which must have appeared revolutionary, or at least offered new paradigms of reflexive understanding).
24 frames per second is the speed the human eye normally processes visual information at; which the brain then compares to its pre-set templates and archetypes, linguistically captioned to be named and made sense of. So language is one prong the military adviser muses on. The word "Rendition" is dissected from its artistic and constructive origins, to the snatching away of a human body that it has become within modern warfare. Other linguistically forged images are as bleak as the desert setting itself, particularly the landscape when the film-maker goes off in search of a missing person it appears to have swallowed up.
The military advisor had been charged with providing new analytics and predictives for modern warfare. But he bemoans that his work is swallowed up in distancing jargon, words to bamboozle a public that is hostile to the war in the first place. His work sought to provide a new reality for warfare, but its discoveries are hijacked by the media and bureaucratised for new ways to sell a brand; brand interdiction, collateral damage and the like. This was not the new reality he had imagined. The plug is seemingly pulled on the whole enterprise, when he suffers a local and personal body blow, which I won't reveal as a spoiler. But suffice it to say, it opens up a whole new seam of what reality could actually entail. He was looking to merge with the stone of the desert rocks, to slow down human existence to a deeper, archeological time (two or less frames a second of perception?) The personal tragedy catapults him rapidly back into the human timescale of helter skelter and mortality. The opportunity for him to replant humanity on a different path of reflexive sensibility is lost, as is the film-maker’s opportunity to capture it on celluloid.
"Point Omega" challenges the reader to consider his way of seeing (and reading too, given its inquiry into language). It asks the question of just what is the point, of everything and anything, through the guise of a man coming towards the end of his life, but who has been at the cutting edge of power and seen the manipulations of human flesh in the ultimate form of war and conflict. At 200 pages, this might have been seen as indulgent. At only 117 it is a masterpiece of layered, dense economy. Each sentence is a carefully conceived chisel into the grain of a fine marble sculpture. Delillo delivers yet again.
117 pages, Scribner
Review by Marc Nash
Delillo is my favourite living author. I even pre-ordered this in hardback, just like back in the day when I used to rush to the record shop on the day of release for a new album by whichever hot band I slavishly followed that year. Delillo and I have been together now for two decades or so.
117 pages. Like Roth, Delillo's late-career works seem to be getting shorter and shorter. Both men have written epic American novels, "American Pastoral" and "Underworld", and having come through the other side now seem so in control of their craft and language itself, that they require fewer words to convey their message.
With Delillo, it's all about the central metaphors and the sculpted words he plants as little word cluster bomblets that detonate in your reading mind as you progress, and stop you up short. "She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself". You don't need to say anything else to have a full picture of this person in your mind's eye.
Not much happens in recent Delillo novels. The main characters always seem to be waiting around; stuck in a traffic jam in a limo "Cosmopolis"; a couple waiting to see which one will die before the other in "White Noise"; characters either fully stuck, or taking tentative steps to move on after 9/11 in "Falling Man".
This too is a book about waiting. A civilian specialist adviser to the US military has retired to the most isolated place he can find in order to consider the meaning of his work. A film maker accompanies him, wanting to make a single-take movie of the man addressing the camera about his findings. In the name of research, as pre-production of a scriptless movie, they hang out together in the desert.
So there's your plot. But what lifts this into a whole mind-bending joy, are the ideas casually shucked straight into your consciousness. The book opens with a description of the effect of an art installation, in which Hitchcock's "Psycho" is slowed down to 2 frames a second. A viewer, as creepy as Norman Bates himself, goes in for each of the six days of the exhibit being open. There he obsessively studies every gesture, every muscular motion slowed down, and believes it to offer a new way of seeing things. A new reality. For mankind for the first time to genuinely see itself reflected (one is reminded of Eadweard Muybridge's studies anatomising motion in the early days of photography, which must have appeared revolutionary, or at least offered new paradigms of reflexive understanding).
24 frames per second is the speed the human eye normally processes visual information at; which the brain then compares to its pre-set templates and archetypes, linguistically captioned to be named and made sense of. So language is one prong the military adviser muses on. The word "Rendition" is dissected from its artistic and constructive origins, to the snatching away of a human body that it has become within modern warfare. Other linguistically forged images are as bleak as the desert setting itself, particularly the landscape when the film-maker goes off in search of a missing person it appears to have swallowed up.
The military advisor had been charged with providing new analytics and predictives for modern warfare. But he bemoans that his work is swallowed up in distancing jargon, words to bamboozle a public that is hostile to the war in the first place. His work sought to provide a new reality for warfare, but its discoveries are hijacked by the media and bureaucratised for new ways to sell a brand; brand interdiction, collateral damage and the like. This was not the new reality he had imagined. The plug is seemingly pulled on the whole enterprise, when he suffers a local and personal body blow, which I won't reveal as a spoiler. But suffice it to say, it opens up a whole new seam of what reality could actually entail. He was looking to merge with the stone of the desert rocks, to slow down human existence to a deeper, archeological time (two or less frames a second of perception?) The personal tragedy catapults him rapidly back into the human timescale of helter skelter and mortality. The opportunity for him to replant humanity on a different path of reflexive sensibility is lost, as is the film-maker’s opportunity to capture it on celluloid.
"Point Omega" challenges the reader to consider his way of seeing (and reading too, given its inquiry into language). It asks the question of just what is the point, of everything and anything, through the guise of a man coming towards the end of his life, but who has been at the cutting edge of power and seen the manipulations of human flesh in the ultimate form of war and conflict. At 200 pages, this might have been seen as indulgent. At only 117 it is a masterpiece of layered, dense economy. Each sentence is a carefully conceived chisel into the grain of a fine marble sculpture. Delillo delivers yet again.
March 6, 2010
UNDER THE DOME (Review Part 3)
by Stephen King
877 pages, Hodder & Stoughton
Review by Paul Fenton
Part 3:
The residents of Chester's Mill were trapped Under the Dome for about a fortnight – I was under it for a considerably longer stretch (read review part 1 here and 2 here). Part of that is down to the book's sheer bulk, limiting its reading time to that brief mental twilight between slipping into bed and smacking into the bottom of a deep sleep-hole hard enough to loosen teeth. It's part of the reason, but not all of it.
Is it a good story? Yes, of course it is, and had it been written by anyone other than Stephen King I'd probably be waxing moronic on the brilliance of its wonderful loveliness. The problem, for me, is it WAS written by Stephen King; and because it was written by Stephen King, it was hard for me to be dazzled by the central plot; or by the finale, which didn't so much explode out of nowhere as approach at a comfortable pace from the other end of an empty football pitch, trying to whistle O Fortuna in a scary way and spitting way too much in the process.
You're probably thinking: this spoiled little brat has been raised on the condensed milk of cinema and expects every story to have a Keyser Söze or Tyler Durden ending. If you thought that, you'd be wrong: I'm not at all little. And no, I don't think every story should have a Keyser Söze or Tyler Durden ending, but if you're going to drop a gigantic, impenetrable Pyrex bowl over an entire town for a couple of weeks, then yes, I DO want a Keyser freaking Söze ending, or at the very least a Little Miss Sunshine. This felt more like the premise for a short story or novella, the catch-22 of course being the amount of scene-setting required to make the reactions of the townspeople plausible. And that really did seem to be the purpose of the book's bulk – wholesale characterisation. The core plot could have beensynopsied synopsisied summarised on a bookmark.
Plot aside, there were some excellent passages in the story, most notably around how the townspeople step up to the growing threat of dictatorship posed by Jim Rennie. And don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the whole thing. But again, because it was Stephen King, maybe I expected more. As a complete work I found Duma Key far more satisfying, and while this is pitched at the Epic level alongside The Stand, it's not close to being its equal. Maybe it should have been a Richard Bachman.
Perhaps if it had been written by someone other than King, the plot development might have had me gnawing the skin off my fingers, but I know what King is capable of, and where his favoured paths lead. If it had been a debut novelist, I'd have been blown away. If it had been James Patterson, I … okay, if it had been James Patterson I'd have never picked it up. If it had been Dean Koontz, I'd have expected the story to morph into a government conspiracy-fest supported by gloopy nice-guys and talking puppies and a cloying sentimentality, and I probably would have got what I expected.
But Stephen King is not Dean Koontz, and for that much, Constant Readers, we should all be truly thankful. Take what he gives us and look forward to the next one.
December 2009 - February 2010
London, England
877 pages, Hodder & Stoughton
Review by Paul Fenton
Part 3:
The residents of Chester's Mill were trapped Under the Dome for about a fortnight – I was under it for a considerably longer stretch (read review part 1 here and 2 here). Part of that is down to the book's sheer bulk, limiting its reading time to that brief mental twilight between slipping into bed and smacking into the bottom of a deep sleep-hole hard enough to loosen teeth. It's part of the reason, but not all of it.
Is it a good story? Yes, of course it is, and had it been written by anyone other than Stephen King I'd probably be waxing moronic on the brilliance of its wonderful loveliness. The problem, for me, is it WAS written by Stephen King; and because it was written by Stephen King, it was hard for me to be dazzled by the central plot; or by the finale, which didn't so much explode out of nowhere as approach at a comfortable pace from the other end of an empty football pitch, trying to whistle O Fortuna in a scary way and spitting way too much in the process.
You're probably thinking: this spoiled little brat has been raised on the condensed milk of cinema and expects every story to have a Keyser Söze or Tyler Durden ending. If you thought that, you'd be wrong: I'm not at all little. And no, I don't think every story should have a Keyser Söze or Tyler Durden ending, but if you're going to drop a gigantic, impenetrable Pyrex bowl over an entire town for a couple of weeks, then yes, I DO want a Keyser freaking Söze ending, or at the very least a Little Miss Sunshine. This felt more like the premise for a short story or novella, the catch-22 of course being the amount of scene-setting required to make the reactions of the townspeople plausible. And that really did seem to be the purpose of the book's bulk – wholesale characterisation. The core plot could have been
Plot aside, there were some excellent passages in the story, most notably around how the townspeople step up to the growing threat of dictatorship posed by Jim Rennie. And don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the whole thing. But again, because it was Stephen King, maybe I expected more. As a complete work I found Duma Key far more satisfying, and while this is pitched at the Epic level alongside The Stand, it's not close to being its equal. Maybe it should have been a Richard Bachman.
Perhaps if it had been written by someone other than King, the plot development might have had me gnawing the skin off my fingers, but I know what King is capable of, and where his favoured paths lead. If it had been a debut novelist, I'd have been blown away. If it had been James Patterson, I … okay, if it had been James Patterson I'd have never picked it up. If it had been Dean Koontz, I'd have expected the story to morph into a government conspiracy-fest supported by gloopy nice-guys and talking puppies and a cloying sentimentality, and I probably would have got what I expected.
But Stephen King is not Dean Koontz, and for that much, Constant Readers, we should all be truly thankful. Take what he gives us and look forward to the next one.
December 2009 - February 2010
London, England
March 5, 2010
UNDER THE SKIN
by Michel Faber
296 pages, Canongate
The New Flesh by Pat Black
Out all by herself on lonely roads, Isserley’s on the hunt for men. She drives past the hitchhikers in her little car, checking out what they’ve got. Sometimes she drives on; sometimes she turns in the road and goes back for them.
She likes her guys to have a little meat on their bones; muscular, macho types with broad shoulders and barrel chests, long-legged, thick-thighed. Weaklings and drips are allowed to keep walking. But those big boys...
As the guys slide into the passenger seat beside her, she takes a particularly close look at what sort of package they’ve got. Sometimes this can be misleading, she muses; the bulge can be mostly balls, with meat at a premium.
She engages these men in conversation, and most of them notice how large her chest is. A minority might reflect on how incongruent her bosom is to the rest of her body, almost as if she’d had porn star implants installed. Strange things to see on such a small, spindly frame. Almost tacked on, unnatural.
None of these men are ever seen again.
The answer to who Isserley is, and her motives in snaring these strapping lads in her car, isn’t too great a secret to hold back. But I won’t reveal it, as to introduce the premise might put some people off what is a beautifully-written book. Faber, a Dutch artist living in the wilds of Scotland (who also penned the door-stop Victorian novel The Crimson and the White), has constructed what is at once an outlandish and yet beguiling and carefully-crafted piece of work. There’s such a richness of theme in here – everything from animal rights, to basic human sympathy, to how society treats women, and how women in turn treat men. And yet you never once feel as if you’re being preached to, or that overtly political points are being made.
Head-hopping is a difficult trick to pull off, but it works well in the pick-up scenes. We go from Isserley’s perspective – her sometimes cold appraisals of the fleshy delights who get into her car – to the men’s views of this odd-looking girl. These range from the meat-headed wolf-whistlings of your average nightclub predator to kind feelings and even deep sympathy. Isserley is badly physically marked, or scarred, in some way. It’s hard to say just what it is that’s wrong with her – almost as if she was in an accident, and her body has slowly repaired itself after being bent out of shape. Some of the men – the really nice ones - wonder how deep those scars run. Although it seems trite to say that the full range of human emotions are on show from these brutes, one important point is well-made: we are all individuals, all unique, all capable of the full spectrum of feelings and emotions. And perhaps most complex organisms are.
As Isserley’s modus operandi is made clear, tension builds as she picks up each man. Will she be successful every time? Our sympathy is certainly being tweaked in some passages, particularly when the kind-hearted family man or the concerned boyfriend are the next to slip in beside Isserley. The ones whose thoughts are dominated not by the driver’s breasts, but by the idea of simply returning to wives and children.
We’re not all capable of love, though. Isserley manages to pick up one absolute monster who turns the situation on its head. In an unbearable scene he strips Isserley and, after a blunt appraisal of her strange, stricken frame, asks the question which lurked in the minds of the more humane passengers: “Have you been in an accident or something?”
She’s got a strange word for all these men; vodsels. Again, to detail their ultimate fate may be off-putting for some readers, but suffice to say it directly challenges the way humans behave towards their fellow creatures on earth. This is no tree-hugging polemic about looking after the planet or not consuming more than we can give back; it’s a sobering and horrifying look at the places mass-production leads us, and the unnatural ways in which we harvest and manipulate living creatures. If you haven’t guessed the central purpose of the hitchhiker collections by now, but can’t bear the suspense any longer, look up the word “vodsel” on Babelfish in Dutch.
One other thing to note is the setting. Taking place in the Highlands of Scotland – along those twisty roads in among the hillsides where the mist can suddenly descend, transporting you to another planet for a little while – Under The Skin manages to convey both the bleak beauty of the surroundings and also the sheer crapness of long-distance road travel. The concrete breaks in the greenery, the dire service stations with their peculiarly lonely staff, the unending asphalt pathways, the same road signs crawling past.
But Faber always has one eye on the stars. Even near the end, as Isserley finds her sympathies torn and her very identity fractured, she issues a prayer, a hope, that she will find her own immortality, somewhere out there in the firmament, a long time from now. As a coda to a very fine novel, it takes some beating.
296 pages, Canongate
The New Flesh by Pat Black
Out all by herself on lonely roads, Isserley’s on the hunt for men. She drives past the hitchhikers in her little car, checking out what they’ve got. Sometimes she drives on; sometimes she turns in the road and goes back for them.
She likes her guys to have a little meat on their bones; muscular, macho types with broad shoulders and barrel chests, long-legged, thick-thighed. Weaklings and drips are allowed to keep walking. But those big boys...
As the guys slide into the passenger seat beside her, she takes a particularly close look at what sort of package they’ve got. Sometimes this can be misleading, she muses; the bulge can be mostly balls, with meat at a premium.
She engages these men in conversation, and most of them notice how large her chest is. A minority might reflect on how incongruent her bosom is to the rest of her body, almost as if she’d had porn star implants installed. Strange things to see on such a small, spindly frame. Almost tacked on, unnatural.
None of these men are ever seen again.
The answer to who Isserley is, and her motives in snaring these strapping lads in her car, isn’t too great a secret to hold back. But I won’t reveal it, as to introduce the premise might put some people off what is a beautifully-written book. Faber, a Dutch artist living in the wilds of Scotland (who also penned the door-stop Victorian novel The Crimson and the White), has constructed what is at once an outlandish and yet beguiling and carefully-crafted piece of work. There’s such a richness of theme in here – everything from animal rights, to basic human sympathy, to how society treats women, and how women in turn treat men. And yet you never once feel as if you’re being preached to, or that overtly political points are being made.
Head-hopping is a difficult trick to pull off, but it works well in the pick-up scenes. We go from Isserley’s perspective – her sometimes cold appraisals of the fleshy delights who get into her car – to the men’s views of this odd-looking girl. These range from the meat-headed wolf-whistlings of your average nightclub predator to kind feelings and even deep sympathy. Isserley is badly physically marked, or scarred, in some way. It’s hard to say just what it is that’s wrong with her – almost as if she was in an accident, and her body has slowly repaired itself after being bent out of shape. Some of the men – the really nice ones - wonder how deep those scars run. Although it seems trite to say that the full range of human emotions are on show from these brutes, one important point is well-made: we are all individuals, all unique, all capable of the full spectrum of feelings and emotions. And perhaps most complex organisms are.
As Isserley’s modus operandi is made clear, tension builds as she picks up each man. Will she be successful every time? Our sympathy is certainly being tweaked in some passages, particularly when the kind-hearted family man or the concerned boyfriend are the next to slip in beside Isserley. The ones whose thoughts are dominated not by the driver’s breasts, but by the idea of simply returning to wives and children.
We’re not all capable of love, though. Isserley manages to pick up one absolute monster who turns the situation on its head. In an unbearable scene he strips Isserley and, after a blunt appraisal of her strange, stricken frame, asks the question which lurked in the minds of the more humane passengers: “Have you been in an accident or something?”
She’s got a strange word for all these men; vodsels. Again, to detail their ultimate fate may be off-putting for some readers, but suffice to say it directly challenges the way humans behave towards their fellow creatures on earth. This is no tree-hugging polemic about looking after the planet or not consuming more than we can give back; it’s a sobering and horrifying look at the places mass-production leads us, and the unnatural ways in which we harvest and manipulate living creatures. If you haven’t guessed the central purpose of the hitchhiker collections by now, but can’t bear the suspense any longer, look up the word “vodsel” on Babelfish in Dutch.
One other thing to note is the setting. Taking place in the Highlands of Scotland – along those twisty roads in among the hillsides where the mist can suddenly descend, transporting you to another planet for a little while – Under The Skin manages to convey both the bleak beauty of the surroundings and also the sheer crapness of long-distance road travel. The concrete breaks in the greenery, the dire service stations with their peculiarly lonely staff, the unending asphalt pathways, the same road signs crawling past.
But Faber always has one eye on the stars. Even near the end, as Isserley finds her sympathies torn and her very identity fractured, she issues a prayer, a hope, that she will find her own immortality, somewhere out there in the firmament, a long time from now. As a coda to a very fine novel, it takes some beating.
March 4, 2010
THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO
by Patrick Ness
478 pages, Walker Books
Review by SF Winser
Wow. Simply wow.
Let's just get straight to it: This book blew me away. I want to thrust it upon friends, acquaintances, random people in the street. Complex, interesting characters. Terrifying action. Meaning as deep as the soul itself. Prose that sings. Awesome.
Continuing Booksquawk's run of YA books that have wonderful things to offer, 'The Knife of Never Letting Go' is probably the first book where I think that even if the author died and never completed the trilogy, this book would stand on its own.
And the best... worst.. umm.. completely inaccurate way of describing this book is 'Huckleberry Finn in Space'. Which tells you the setting, but gives no hints of the excellence. Even then that probably gives you ideas about spaceships and lasers when, for most of the book, the most advanced technology used is a pair of binoculars and a simple, but high-quality, knife.
There are so many lies and twists in this book about honesty and bald-thoughts that it's almost impossible to sum up the plot – or even talk about much – without ruining the experience. I can't talk about some of the more interesting aspects of the book because the reveals – and the way they are revealed – are important to the reader's experience. The main reason I want others to read this book is so I have someone to talk to about it.
I'll do what I can...
Todd Hewitt is the last boy. The youngest male human alive. The people of Prentisstown arrived as settlers on a new world many years ago. They started as peaceful settlers and ended fighting a war with the native/aliens the 'Spacks'.
The Spacks released two germ-warfare agents in the course of the short, bloody war. The first made every animal on the planet able to talk. (This doesn't mean that they had much to say. Croc-analogues: 'Wait...wait...wait... BITE!'. Squirrels tease, dogs are loyal but stupid and obsessed with bodily functions. And sheep have a one word vocabulary of 'Sheep').
The second germ-agent did two things. It made every male human project his thoughts in an uncontrollable 'Noise' of psychic power. Every male has a cloud of images and concepts around his head. And he physically manifests the sounds of every word he thinks. Luckily, this mess makes the stuff hard to read. It's, quite literally, noise. One can pick up strong thoughts, emotions and random bits but it's like watching three TV stations at once. It makes lying hard. It drives many insane.
The second part of this second germ-attack killed every human woman on the planet. This drove the remaining men to kill every last Spack.
So Todd Hewitt isn't just the youngest boy in Prentisstown. He's the last child there'll ever be. He's raised by men in a town of men, never knowing what a baby is. Never knowing what children are. Not even remembering his own mother.
Days before his birthday. Days before he's due to officially become a man, Todd finds a patch of silence in the noisy, noisy world...
And now he needs to die. He needs to run. Because... Well... I can't really tell you why.
The book (mostly) describes Todd's run downriver to... anywhere that might be safe. But it covers so much more. It deals with lies and honesty. With friendship and love and trust. Above all, it examines what it is to be a man. To be moral. To fail and try again. This is a book about, more than anything, keeping a moral compass in a complex and demanding world. In this, above all else, 'Knife' is about the here and now. The world Todd grows up in is weird and complex. So is our world. Todd's world has many instances of hard moral choices, of temptations to evil where everyone else is telling you you're right, when you know you're wrong. And hard choices where the right path can't be chosen easily, and you don't know, even afterward, if it you've made the correct choice.
The depth of this aspect of the book is where Ness excels. This is a book about morality in the same way 'A Clockwork Orange' and 'Lord of the Flies' are about morality. With as much to say about the difference between a man and a boy and moral choices.
We get three levels with Todd. We get his narration – a Huck-Finn-esque vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling style – his actions, and the illustration of his Noise. We always know what Todd is thinking and feeling one way or another. (He always explayns what direkshun his thinking is going, to slip into Todd-speak for a moment). And we need all of this to follow him through some complex choices and ideas. And we watch him grow and increase in self-awareness and awareness of others.
The writing from the first page is juvenile and wonderful. And I mean juvenile in the fact that it's about a teen protagonist and uses potty humour at times. Every so often, the book sparks with humour from the oddest directions but it's not juvenile 'cheap', it's juvenile 'true'.
The only real issue I have with the book is the fact that much of what happens to Todd relies on him being nearly illiterate while carrying an important message he can't quite read. He has good reasons not to ask others to read it for him, and they have good reasons not to. But the time it takes for the message to actually get read seems too stretched out.
And that's it. That's all I got to complain about. There's one more point revolving around a death that doesn't quite work that I can't go into without major spoilers and probably an essay.
The prose is sometimes a bit too obviously down-homey but rarely strikes an actual bad tone. The central conceit around Todd's chase is potentially unconvincing, until one factors in the simple insanity and Machiavellian determination of his pursuers. These are people obsessed with morality and other people's thoughts and who have a mad plan they are determined to see through. A plan they have obsessed over for more than a decade. Their objectives when it comes to Todd don't need to make rational sense as long as they make sense to the people involved.
See? Every time I try to bring a cynical, reviewing eye upon this book I end up being wholly unconvincing. I have milquetoast criticisms. I should just come out and say it: This is a damn fine book.
478 pages, Walker Books
Review by SF Winser
Wow. Simply wow.
Let's just get straight to it: This book blew me away. I want to thrust it upon friends, acquaintances, random people in the street. Complex, interesting characters. Terrifying action. Meaning as deep as the soul itself. Prose that sings. Awesome.
Continuing Booksquawk's run of YA books that have wonderful things to offer, 'The Knife of Never Letting Go' is probably the first book where I think that even if the author died and never completed the trilogy, this book would stand on its own.
And the best... worst.. umm.. completely inaccurate way of describing this book is 'Huckleberry Finn in Space'. Which tells you the setting, but gives no hints of the excellence. Even then that probably gives you ideas about spaceships and lasers when, for most of the book, the most advanced technology used is a pair of binoculars and a simple, but high-quality, knife.
There are so many lies and twists in this book about honesty and bald-thoughts that it's almost impossible to sum up the plot – or even talk about much – without ruining the experience. I can't talk about some of the more interesting aspects of the book because the reveals – and the way they are revealed – are important to the reader's experience. The main reason I want others to read this book is so I have someone to talk to about it.
I'll do what I can...
Todd Hewitt is the last boy. The youngest male human alive. The people of Prentisstown arrived as settlers on a new world many years ago. They started as peaceful settlers and ended fighting a war with the native/aliens the 'Spacks'.
The Spacks released two germ-warfare agents in the course of the short, bloody war. The first made every animal on the planet able to talk. (This doesn't mean that they had much to say. Croc-analogues: 'Wait...wait...wait... BITE!'. Squirrels tease, dogs are loyal but stupid and obsessed with bodily functions. And sheep have a one word vocabulary of 'Sheep').
The second germ-agent did two things. It made every male human project his thoughts in an uncontrollable 'Noise' of psychic power. Every male has a cloud of images and concepts around his head. And he physically manifests the sounds of every word he thinks. Luckily, this mess makes the stuff hard to read. It's, quite literally, noise. One can pick up strong thoughts, emotions and random bits but it's like watching three TV stations at once. It makes lying hard. It drives many insane.
The second part of this second germ-attack killed every human woman on the planet. This drove the remaining men to kill every last Spack.
So Todd Hewitt isn't just the youngest boy in Prentisstown. He's the last child there'll ever be. He's raised by men in a town of men, never knowing what a baby is. Never knowing what children are. Not even remembering his own mother.
Days before his birthday. Days before he's due to officially become a man, Todd finds a patch of silence in the noisy, noisy world...
And now he needs to die. He needs to run. Because... Well... I can't really tell you why.
The book (mostly) describes Todd's run downriver to... anywhere that might be safe. But it covers so much more. It deals with lies and honesty. With friendship and love and trust. Above all, it examines what it is to be a man. To be moral. To fail and try again. This is a book about, more than anything, keeping a moral compass in a complex and demanding world. In this, above all else, 'Knife' is about the here and now. The world Todd grows up in is weird and complex. So is our world. Todd's world has many instances of hard moral choices, of temptations to evil where everyone else is telling you you're right, when you know you're wrong. And hard choices where the right path can't be chosen easily, and you don't know, even afterward, if it you've made the correct choice.
The depth of this aspect of the book is where Ness excels. This is a book about morality in the same way 'A Clockwork Orange' and 'Lord of the Flies' are about morality. With as much to say about the difference between a man and a boy and moral choices.
We get three levels with Todd. We get his narration – a Huck-Finn-esque vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling style – his actions, and the illustration of his Noise. We always know what Todd is thinking and feeling one way or another. (He always explayns what direkshun his thinking is going, to slip into Todd-speak for a moment). And we need all of this to follow him through some complex choices and ideas. And we watch him grow and increase in self-awareness and awareness of others.
The writing from the first page is juvenile and wonderful. And I mean juvenile in the fact that it's about a teen protagonist and uses potty humour at times. Every so often, the book sparks with humour from the oddest directions but it's not juvenile 'cheap', it's juvenile 'true'.
The only real issue I have with the book is the fact that much of what happens to Todd relies on him being nearly illiterate while carrying an important message he can't quite read. He has good reasons not to ask others to read it for him, and they have good reasons not to. But the time it takes for the message to actually get read seems too stretched out.
And that's it. That's all I got to complain about. There's one more point revolving around a death that doesn't quite work that I can't go into without major spoilers and probably an essay.
The prose is sometimes a bit too obviously down-homey but rarely strikes an actual bad tone. The central conceit around Todd's chase is potentially unconvincing, until one factors in the simple insanity and Machiavellian determination of his pursuers. These are people obsessed with morality and other people's thoughts and who have a mad plan they are determined to see through. A plan they have obsessed over for more than a decade. Their objectives when it comes to Todd don't need to make rational sense as long as they make sense to the people involved.
See? Every time I try to bring a cynical, reviewing eye upon this book I end up being wholly unconvincing. I have milquetoast criticisms. I should just come out and say it: This is a damn fine book.
March 3, 2010
CALIBER: FIRST CANON OF JUSTICE
by Sam Sarkar (script) and Garrie Gastonny (art)
Radical Publishing
Review by Hereward L.M. Proops
The enduring popularity of the Arthurian legend needs little explanation. At its heart is a classic tale of good guys (Arthur and his knights of the round table) versus the forces of evil (led by Mordred). Throw in a handful of beasties, a wizard and a love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot and you’ve got the recipe for a great story.
Thomas Malory was one of the first to capitalise on the popularity of King Arthur and the recent innovation of the printing press with Morte D’Arthur but the stories had been around for long before he collected them in that imposing volume. Since Malory, the stories have undergone numerous different interpretations. In the nineteenth century, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King gave Arthur more humanity by making him an idealistic but flawed hero. The Pre-Raphaelite artists plundered the Arthurian legend for their paintings.
The thirst for Arthuriana had not abated by the twentieth century and countless books were printed, recycling the old stories for new audiences. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King made the tales accessible for a younger audience and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon retold the legends with a feminist slant. Cinema-goers have been treated to the legends of Arthur in animation (Disney’s The Sword in the Stone), comedy (Monty Python and the Holy Grail), drama (John Boorman’s Excalibur) and pieces of shit (2004’s King Arthur).
The most successful reinterpretations of the Arthurian legend seem to be those which stick most closely to the tried and tested formula of knights in shining armour, damsels in distress and the round table at Camelot. Needless to say, I did not have high hopes for Caliber, a graphic novel which takes the legend to the American old west, replacing knights with gunslingers and wizards with American Indian shamans. It was hard for me to approach this one with an open mind. Being the patriotic type, I was extremely dubious of the premise – after all, how can this most British of heroes be relocated across the pond? Quite easily, it seems.
The first thing that one notices about Caliber is the beautiful artwork. Garrie Gastonny’s drawings seem to leap off the pages, each panel carrying so much depth and richness that reading the book is akin to watching a brilliantly directed movie. Much of the story takes place in the town of Telacoma and it is clear that a great deal of work has gone into creating a setting whose architecture is an intriguing combination of old west and Victorian neo-gothic. Action is conveyed with a wonderful sense of the kinetic: long hair and duster coats billow in the wind, characters gallop on horseback between beautiful locations and the frenetic gunplay is equally heavily stylised. The downside of such complex illustrations is that some frames are so crammed with incident, one can occasionally lose track of what is going on. This is a rare occurrence and for the most part, the reader will be swept along by the breathless pace and exuberance of the story.
There are some fans of graphic novels who will tell you that computer enhancement of comic art is cheating but Imaginary Friends Studios have done an amazing job on the colours and after-effects of Gastonny’s drawings. The murky hues and sepia tones perfectly capture the feel of the mythic Old West whilst the digitally added rain, fog and lightning help to make the illustrations all the more dramatic and awe-inspiring.
Like the rest of the book, the characters are wonderfully drawn, but what makes Caliber work as a graphic novel is the thought and care that has gone into reimagining the established archetypes into characters that are familiar yet fresh. Arthur is a youthful, rugged hero whose brooding good looks match his introspective personality. His passionate belief in the law leads him into conflict with the corrupt rulers of Telacoma. As is befitting a Western, there are no swords to be seen. Excalibur is replaced by an imposing looking hand cannon, supposedly forged from the same steel as the legendary sword. Only Arthur is capable of wielding the weapon, something he does a great deal of in the exhilarating final pages of the book. The Merlin character is an American Indian shaman called Whitefeather whose magic is far more subtle than previous incarnations of the sorcerer. His spells are rooted in the American Indians’ belief in the power of the natural world and are dependent on lengthy ceremonies and rituals. The character of Lady Guinevere is re-imagined as Gwen, a flame-haired dancing-gal in the local saloon. Though scantily clad for a significant portion of the narrative, Gwen’s character is plucky and resourceful. My personal favourite character in the book is Lance Lake, the cursed gunslinger who fills the position of the Sir Lancelot. Those with keen eyes will notice that Lance Lake bears more than a passing resemblance to the actor Colin Farrell. Haunted by the ghosts of those he has killed, Lake would seem to be a sombre figure were it not for his wonderfully dry wit which helps to lighten proceedings when things get a little too serious.
Caliber: First Canon of Justice is clearly intended to be the first part of a series and the story itself is used largely to introduce the main protagonists. The book ends as Arthur is appointed sheriff and thinking back to the source material, this would be the point at which young Arthur is crowned king of Britain, meaning there are still huge amounts of the Arthurian legend left to be (re)told in preceding volumes. I can’t wait to see how Sarkar and Gastonny tackle such adventures as the quest for the holy grail, the affair of Guinevere and Lancelot and the battle between Arthur and his bastard son Mordred. This is an essential purchase for fans of Westerns, the Arthurian legend and those who love a good graphic novel. My only hope is that we won’t be kept waiting too long for further instalments.
Hereward L.M. Proops
Radical Publishing
Review by Hereward L.M. Proops
The enduring popularity of the Arthurian legend needs little explanation. At its heart is a classic tale of good guys (Arthur and his knights of the round table) versus the forces of evil (led by Mordred). Throw in a handful of beasties, a wizard and a love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot and you’ve got the recipe for a great story.
Thomas Malory was one of the first to capitalise on the popularity of King Arthur and the recent innovation of the printing press with Morte D’Arthur but the stories had been around for long before he collected them in that imposing volume. Since Malory, the stories have undergone numerous different interpretations. In the nineteenth century, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King gave Arthur more humanity by making him an idealistic but flawed hero. The Pre-Raphaelite artists plundered the Arthurian legend for their paintings.
The thirst for Arthuriana had not abated by the twentieth century and countless books were printed, recycling the old stories for new audiences. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King made the tales accessible for a younger audience and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon retold the legends with a feminist slant. Cinema-goers have been treated to the legends of Arthur in animation (Disney’s The Sword in the Stone), comedy (Monty Python and the Holy Grail), drama (John Boorman’s Excalibur) and pieces of shit (2004’s King Arthur).
The most successful reinterpretations of the Arthurian legend seem to be those which stick most closely to the tried and tested formula of knights in shining armour, damsels in distress and the round table at Camelot. Needless to say, I did not have high hopes for Caliber, a graphic novel which takes the legend to the American old west, replacing knights with gunslingers and wizards with American Indian shamans. It was hard for me to approach this one with an open mind. Being the patriotic type, I was extremely dubious of the premise – after all, how can this most British of heroes be relocated across the pond? Quite easily, it seems.
The first thing that one notices about Caliber is the beautiful artwork. Garrie Gastonny’s drawings seem to leap off the pages, each panel carrying so much depth and richness that reading the book is akin to watching a brilliantly directed movie. Much of the story takes place in the town of Telacoma and it is clear that a great deal of work has gone into creating a setting whose architecture is an intriguing combination of old west and Victorian neo-gothic. Action is conveyed with a wonderful sense of the kinetic: long hair and duster coats billow in the wind, characters gallop on horseback between beautiful locations and the frenetic gunplay is equally heavily stylised. The downside of such complex illustrations is that some frames are so crammed with incident, one can occasionally lose track of what is going on. This is a rare occurrence and for the most part, the reader will be swept along by the breathless pace and exuberance of the story.
There are some fans of graphic novels who will tell you that computer enhancement of comic art is cheating but Imaginary Friends Studios have done an amazing job on the colours and after-effects of Gastonny’s drawings. The murky hues and sepia tones perfectly capture the feel of the mythic Old West whilst the digitally added rain, fog and lightning help to make the illustrations all the more dramatic and awe-inspiring.
Like the rest of the book, the characters are wonderfully drawn, but what makes Caliber work as a graphic novel is the thought and care that has gone into reimagining the established archetypes into characters that are familiar yet fresh. Arthur is a youthful, rugged hero whose brooding good looks match his introspective personality. His passionate belief in the law leads him into conflict with the corrupt rulers of Telacoma. As is befitting a Western, there are no swords to be seen. Excalibur is replaced by an imposing looking hand cannon, supposedly forged from the same steel as the legendary sword. Only Arthur is capable of wielding the weapon, something he does a great deal of in the exhilarating final pages of the book. The Merlin character is an American Indian shaman called Whitefeather whose magic is far more subtle than previous incarnations of the sorcerer. His spells are rooted in the American Indians’ belief in the power of the natural world and are dependent on lengthy ceremonies and rituals. The character of Lady Guinevere is re-imagined as Gwen, a flame-haired dancing-gal in the local saloon. Though scantily clad for a significant portion of the narrative, Gwen’s character is plucky and resourceful. My personal favourite character in the book is Lance Lake, the cursed gunslinger who fills the position of the Sir Lancelot. Those with keen eyes will notice that Lance Lake bears more than a passing resemblance to the actor Colin Farrell. Haunted by the ghosts of those he has killed, Lake would seem to be a sombre figure were it not for his wonderfully dry wit which helps to lighten proceedings when things get a little too serious.
Caliber: First Canon of Justice is clearly intended to be the first part of a series and the story itself is used largely to introduce the main protagonists. The book ends as Arthur is appointed sheriff and thinking back to the source material, this would be the point at which young Arthur is crowned king of Britain, meaning there are still huge amounts of the Arthurian legend left to be (re)told in preceding volumes. I can’t wait to see how Sarkar and Gastonny tackle such adventures as the quest for the holy grail, the affair of Guinevere and Lancelot and the battle between Arthur and his bastard son Mordred. This is an essential purchase for fans of Westerns, the Arthurian legend and those who love a good graphic novel. My only hope is that we won’t be kept waiting too long for further instalments.
Hereward L.M. Proops
March 2, 2010
LOGICOMIX: AN EPIC SEARCH FOR TRUTH
by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou , Alecos Papadatos, Annie Di Donna
Bloomsbury
Review by SF Winser
I love interesting failures. They may be among my favorite things to read and not from some cynical feeling that I'm glad it wasn't me who did that. It's good to see people genuinely attempting to stretch boundaries.
Logicomix is an interesting failure. It doesn't quite work. Yet, I read it cover to cover and enjoyed it sincerely.
The problem here is the competing needs of the artists and writers. There were four people involved in this project. All of them talented and creative and smart. All seeking something slightly different from this book.
And the needs of the story also competed with all these needs. It's a big, complicated story.
All of these make the actual execution uncohesive. The book rambles in places and glosses over important points in others, often in entertaining ways, but not always in helpful ways.
This is the life of the philosopher/mathematician/logician Bertrand Russell, told in graphic novel format. Which, because Russell was a philosopher in some very deep, very complex matters, means it's also a quick run-down of the nature of Formal Logic. If it wasn't, you wouldn't understand why Russell's work was so ambitious and consuming. It's also a dramatic tale of the Story of Logic – not just Russell's work in the area. And it's also a thematic exploration of the link between madness and genius.
Madness and genius, you say? Again? What a long disproven, overused idea!
But, it is in this that Logicomix actually has something interesting to say. Eventually.
Logicomix thinks that smart people from dangerously unstable backgrounds are attracted to the philosophy of Logic in order to escape their shaky upbringings. Madness and genius don't cause each other, they just occur together in some people. Correlation, not causation.
But it's still a failure. The creators are written in to the comic itself as a Greek Chorus in a vain attempt to provide some sort of outlet for the exposition and thematic discussion that couldn't be shoehorned into the actual narrative. Sometimes this works, sometimes it's a transparent and heavy-handed story device. There is even a nice little ending revolving around a Greek Tragedy and the triumph of wisdom over anger. But... the rather interesting life of Russell suffers at the hand of the story of Russell's wrestling with Formal Logic, which suffers in it's turn by the need to illustrate a thematic idea, which is never quite as present in the story as it needs to be because of the depth of the other background ideas that need to be explored in order to understand Logic itself and, therefore, the entire friggin' novel.
We end up with vignettes of Russell's life – and this is an interesting life. We, the reader, deserve more than vignettes, barely explored. We also get a not-quite-deep-enough look at Russell's ideas and not-quite-enough of the actual story of Logic itself.
It would have been better if it had set out, more deliberately, to teach Logic, but using Russell as a base. Or just tell Russell's life story without the odd evasions. At one point Russell is suddenly onto a second wife... with no explanation of how or where this woman came from. First wife: just gone. We know the reasons – Russell was a philandering prick - just not the circumstances. One minute Russell is married to one woman, a few pages later he's married to another: deal with it. And this is only one of the more glaring examples of a story of Bertrand Russell's life not actually telling the story of Bertrand Russell's life. Or even if the book had focused more – and more faithfully – on the instances of madness and illogic in the lives of Logicians, that may have helped, too. As it is, no one story-direction gets the attention it deserves. And so, the book fails.
Luckily, the artists and writers ARE talented. The art is fun. The writing interesting. The ideas well explained (if not deeply enough). So this is a very readable and interesting work. It just fails to be all that it could be. It's the kind of thing I'd recommend to people to read. But I'd add a thousand caveats. And I'd still hope they'd read it anyway. It's long, ambitious, well-done and deep. It's just not what it needs to be. I suppose the best way to show how I feel about it is that if these guys collaborated on another book, I'd quite happily read it and expect good things. In fact, I kind of wish they'd chosen to do a life of Alan Turing, instead. There's a life dramatic and tragic that would have been a great base for the Story of Logic. In fact, I hope that they do that next. That's a book with potential.
Bloomsbury
Review by SF Winser
I love interesting failures. They may be among my favorite things to read and not from some cynical feeling that I'm glad it wasn't me who did that. It's good to see people genuinely attempting to stretch boundaries.
Logicomix is an interesting failure. It doesn't quite work. Yet, I read it cover to cover and enjoyed it sincerely.
The problem here is the competing needs of the artists and writers. There were four people involved in this project. All of them talented and creative and smart. All seeking something slightly different from this book.
And the needs of the story also competed with all these needs. It's a big, complicated story.
All of these make the actual execution uncohesive. The book rambles in places and glosses over important points in others, often in entertaining ways, but not always in helpful ways.
This is the life of the philosopher/mathematician/logician Bertrand Russell, told in graphic novel format. Which, because Russell was a philosopher in some very deep, very complex matters, means it's also a quick run-down of the nature of Formal Logic. If it wasn't, you wouldn't understand why Russell's work was so ambitious and consuming. It's also a dramatic tale of the Story of Logic – not just Russell's work in the area. And it's also a thematic exploration of the link between madness and genius.
Madness and genius, you say? Again? What a long disproven, overused idea!
But, it is in this that Logicomix actually has something interesting to say. Eventually.
Logicomix thinks that smart people from dangerously unstable backgrounds are attracted to the philosophy of Logic in order to escape their shaky upbringings. Madness and genius don't cause each other, they just occur together in some people. Correlation, not causation.
But it's still a failure. The creators are written in to the comic itself as a Greek Chorus in a vain attempt to provide some sort of outlet for the exposition and thematic discussion that couldn't be shoehorned into the actual narrative. Sometimes this works, sometimes it's a transparent and heavy-handed story device. There is even a nice little ending revolving around a Greek Tragedy and the triumph of wisdom over anger. But... the rather interesting life of Russell suffers at the hand of the story of Russell's wrestling with Formal Logic, which suffers in it's turn by the need to illustrate a thematic idea, which is never quite as present in the story as it needs to be because of the depth of the other background ideas that need to be explored in order to understand Logic itself and, therefore, the entire friggin' novel.
We end up with vignettes of Russell's life – and this is an interesting life. We, the reader, deserve more than vignettes, barely explored. We also get a not-quite-deep-enough look at Russell's ideas and not-quite-enough of the actual story of Logic itself.
It would have been better if it had set out, more deliberately, to teach Logic, but using Russell as a base. Or just tell Russell's life story without the odd evasions. At one point Russell is suddenly onto a second wife... with no explanation of how or where this woman came from. First wife: just gone. We know the reasons – Russell was a philandering prick - just not the circumstances. One minute Russell is married to one woman, a few pages later he's married to another: deal with it. And this is only one of the more glaring examples of a story of Bertrand Russell's life not actually telling the story of Bertrand Russell's life. Or even if the book had focused more – and more faithfully – on the instances of madness and illogic in the lives of Logicians, that may have helped, too. As it is, no one story-direction gets the attention it deserves. And so, the book fails.
Luckily, the artists and writers ARE talented. The art is fun. The writing interesting. The ideas well explained (if not deeply enough). So this is a very readable and interesting work. It just fails to be all that it could be. It's the kind of thing I'd recommend to people to read. But I'd add a thousand caveats. And I'd still hope they'd read it anyway. It's long, ambitious, well-done and deep. It's just not what it needs to be. I suppose the best way to show how I feel about it is that if these guys collaborated on another book, I'd quite happily read it and expect good things. In fact, I kind of wish they'd chosen to do a life of Alan Turing, instead. There's a life dramatic and tragic that would have been a great base for the Story of Logic. In fact, I hope that they do that next. That's a book with potential.
March 1, 2010
SERVANT OF THE UNDERWORLD
by Aliette de Bodard
Review by Hereward L.M. Proops
One of the great things about writing reviews for Booksquawk is that I am often obliged to pick up recently published books which have not yet received the level of critical attention that might bias my own review. I approached Aliette de Bodard’s first novel, Servant of the Underworld without any expectations. I knew nothing of the author and only that the book was a historical fantasy.
Choosing the rich and alien Aztec civilisation as her setting, de Bodard weaves a substantial air of magic and wonder into her narrative. The novel works with the premise that the ancient Aztec gods are real and that their priests wield supernatural powers with which they can shape their world and do battle with the numerous threats to their society. For the most part, de Bodard is successful –she has created a complex and believable world where mortal men are subject to the cruel and often whimsical gods. The Aztec deities are placated and worshipped with sacrifice and the powerful magic of the priestly caste also relies on the spilling of blood.
The strangeness of this ancient world may at first seem overwhelming to a reader accustomed to more generic works of fantasy. Indeed, there are few writers who dare to stray outside the fantasy comfort zone of elves and dragons. Those that do are seldom as popular as those that tread the well-worn path through Middle Earth (or the hundreds of identical fantasy-lands).
Whilst Aliette de Bodard should be praised for trying something genuinely different with her setting, there are a few problems with this novel which stop it from being a really great book. The first is the abundance of bafflingly complicated names. Now, you might say that it is hypocrisy for a man called Hereward to be bitching about strange names but this is actually a major stumbling block for the narrative. The reader is bombarded with names such as Axayacatl-tzin, Huitzilpochtli and Mictlantecuhtli and though the author provides a list of characters at the end of the book and tries to remind her readers who they are, the lack of detailed characterisation in the supporting cast means that one often struggles to remember who Ceyaxochitl was or what on earth an Ahuizotl should actually look like. It is hard to have any sympathy for a character whose name you can barely pronounce and have forgotten by the time you turn the next page.
The central character is better drawn than most. Acatl-tzin starts the novel as an unwilling hero and narrator, struggling to balance his role as High Priest of the Dead with his introverted nature. When his successful brother, the Jaguar Knight Neutemoc, is accused of murder, Acatl-tzin must investigate the crime to prove his sibling’s innocence. His investigations uncover a number of uncomfortable personal truths for Acatl-tzin himself and he is forced to examine what it was that caused him to become estranged from his own family in the first place.
Whilst I would like to sing the praises of Aliette de Bodard’s magical mystery, the novel is hamstrung by its own overreaching ambitions. A great setting is swamped by an overly-complicated plot that loses the reader as opposed to engaging them. Although there are occasional glimpses of brilliance within the pages, there are not enough of them to truly grip the reader from start to finish. Servant of the Underworld is a bold, ambitious first novel. Part fantasy, part murder mystery, part historical novel – the book tries so hard to be original that the end result is unfortunately weaker than the sum of its parts. However, those looking for something truly different could do much worse than check out this novel. Whilst not perfect, Aliette de Bodard’s debut shows a great deal of potential which could be better realised in the inevitable sequels. Fingers crossed.
Hereward L.M. Proops
Review by Hereward L.M. Proops
One of the great things about writing reviews for Booksquawk is that I am often obliged to pick up recently published books which have not yet received the level of critical attention that might bias my own review. I approached Aliette de Bodard’s first novel, Servant of the Underworld without any expectations. I knew nothing of the author and only that the book was a historical fantasy.
Choosing the rich and alien Aztec civilisation as her setting, de Bodard weaves a substantial air of magic and wonder into her narrative. The novel works with the premise that the ancient Aztec gods are real and that their priests wield supernatural powers with which they can shape their world and do battle with the numerous threats to their society. For the most part, de Bodard is successful –she has created a complex and believable world where mortal men are subject to the cruel and often whimsical gods. The Aztec deities are placated and worshipped with sacrifice and the powerful magic of the priestly caste also relies on the spilling of blood.
The strangeness of this ancient world may at first seem overwhelming to a reader accustomed to more generic works of fantasy. Indeed, there are few writers who dare to stray outside the fantasy comfort zone of elves and dragons. Those that do are seldom as popular as those that tread the well-worn path through Middle Earth (or the hundreds of identical fantasy-lands).
Whilst Aliette de Bodard should be praised for trying something genuinely different with her setting, there are a few problems with this novel which stop it from being a really great book. The first is the abundance of bafflingly complicated names. Now, you might say that it is hypocrisy for a man called Hereward to be bitching about strange names but this is actually a major stumbling block for the narrative. The reader is bombarded with names such as Axayacatl-tzin, Huitzilpochtli and Mictlantecuhtli and though the author provides a list of characters at the end of the book and tries to remind her readers who they are, the lack of detailed characterisation in the supporting cast means that one often struggles to remember who Ceyaxochitl was or what on earth an Ahuizotl should actually look like. It is hard to have any sympathy for a character whose name you can barely pronounce and have forgotten by the time you turn the next page.
The central character is better drawn than most. Acatl-tzin starts the novel as an unwilling hero and narrator, struggling to balance his role as High Priest of the Dead with his introverted nature. When his successful brother, the Jaguar Knight Neutemoc, is accused of murder, Acatl-tzin must investigate the crime to prove his sibling’s innocence. His investigations uncover a number of uncomfortable personal truths for Acatl-tzin himself and he is forced to examine what it was that caused him to become estranged from his own family in the first place.
Whilst I would like to sing the praises of Aliette de Bodard’s magical mystery, the novel is hamstrung by its own overreaching ambitions. A great setting is swamped by an overly-complicated plot that loses the reader as opposed to engaging them. Although there are occasional glimpses of brilliance within the pages, there are not enough of them to truly grip the reader from start to finish. Servant of the Underworld is a bold, ambitious first novel. Part fantasy, part murder mystery, part historical novel – the book tries so hard to be original that the end result is unfortunately weaker than the sum of its parts. However, those looking for something truly different could do much worse than check out this novel. Whilst not perfect, Aliette de Bodard’s debut shows a great deal of potential which could be better realised in the inevitable sequels. Fingers crossed.
Hereward L.M. Proops
February 28, 2010
THE DEVIL'S PAINTBRUSH
by Jake Arnott
296 pages, Sceptre
Review by Marc Nash
Jake Arnott writes about crims and rent boys. In the same way that Quentin Tarantino really needs to make a movie without a gun, it's about time Arnott extends his palate. And in "The Devil's Paintbrush" he does just that, bringing together dark magician Aleister Crowley and a General of the British Army disgraced by his penchant for colonial youths (age uncertain), to offer a broad sweep of Victorian history, colonialism, new technology and arcana. Props to him for moving out of his 1960's comfort zone.
But this book is CLUNKY! It takes place in Paris over 24 hours or so, meaning Arnott crowbars in great tracks of back story and actual history of Empire in leaden flashbacks. The worst of these is when Crowley slips the General a substance to conduct him on to the astral plane, which is fine, but the General then demonstrates an amazing narrative coherence to relay tale after tale, as his imagination fills in the blanks on acts and events he never personally witnessed. To give you an idea of the ill-fitting structure, a Dervish attack on the British forces in Sudan is intercut with a black mass being held in Paris, which in theory could work rather well as the gatling machine guns chew up the flesh of myriads of spear-carrying Dervish, only the black mass is as clichéd and trite as you could imagine and only a chicken cops for it...
Which leads me to the real problem of the novel. For a book about transgressive desires, be they Crowley's unspeakable dark arts, or the General's homosexuality that can never be admitted, there is a curious lack of libidinousness on offer. It's about as transgressive as a suburban wife-swap party where everyone puts their keys to their Volvos into a Tiffany bowl. If you want to read about piercing, enslaving desire, then go read Neil Bartlett's "Skin Lane". I also wonder about the politics of this, since the implication is that the General's tastes are deserving of punishment and censure; while I accept this would have been the opinion of the 19th Century, I'm a little uncomfortable with the author's lack of skill in trying to offer up even a hint of a rebutting view. None of his characters seem to merit any of our sympathy. The General is shown to have a weak personality and his sexual urges are ineluctably tied up with his repressions and anxieties, rather than being genuine and of a flourishing. Crowley is not portrayed with any of the mesmerising charisma that he must have possessed in real life. The best Arnott can offer is the hypnotic power of his blue eyes, but come on, that is feeble. I'm neither an acolyte or a disser of Crowley, but I imagine any of his fans picking up this book to read about their master, will be rather irritated with his representation. At points he is far from inviolable, letting slip his human small-mindedness and proving physically weak. The weird thing is Arnott doesn't really seem to ask us to judge him, to come down either in favour of his adventurism or virulently against his depravity. He just seems to be the deux ex humana to bring about the General's fate.
And finally, a brief example of Arnott's info-dump. About to ravish the Whore of Babylon in human form, (actually a con-artist initiated into the role of chosen one by a paymaster and not terribly convincing at it), the woman points to a birthmark on Crowley who proceeds to meander through a page full of history of its coincidental symbolism ending up at the swastika, rather than hurry on down to make the beast with two backs with her. This is on page 269, ie 30 pages from the end, yet Arnott cannot resist heaping more evidence of how well researched he is upon us. I don't doubt there is a novel lurking in these themes and characters - apparently the two protagonists did meet once in real life, but this version ain't it. It is good on the British colonial drive, but lamentable about the pursuit of dark knowledge and a bit mechanical in its characterisation and the reason why humans do the things they do. Everything arises from human neuroses, a rather Freudian view.
I actually like Jake Arnott. To me he's akin to Nick Hornby, steady, unspectacular prose that still manages to deliver good tales, well told, with recognisable characters. But this effort is way off beam. Maybe he should stick to his 1960's schtick after all. I'm off to read the new Delilo to get the taste of lead out of my mouth.
296 pages, Sceptre
Review by Marc Nash
Jake Arnott writes about crims and rent boys. In the same way that Quentin Tarantino really needs to make a movie without a gun, it's about time Arnott extends his palate. And in "The Devil's Paintbrush" he does just that, bringing together dark magician Aleister Crowley and a General of the British Army disgraced by his penchant for colonial youths (age uncertain), to offer a broad sweep of Victorian history, colonialism, new technology and arcana. Props to him for moving out of his 1960's comfort zone.
But this book is CLUNKY! It takes place in Paris over 24 hours or so, meaning Arnott crowbars in great tracks of back story and actual history of Empire in leaden flashbacks. The worst of these is when Crowley slips the General a substance to conduct him on to the astral plane, which is fine, but the General then demonstrates an amazing narrative coherence to relay tale after tale, as his imagination fills in the blanks on acts and events he never personally witnessed. To give you an idea of the ill-fitting structure, a Dervish attack on the British forces in Sudan is intercut with a black mass being held in Paris, which in theory could work rather well as the gatling machine guns chew up the flesh of myriads of spear-carrying Dervish, only the black mass is as clichéd and trite as you could imagine and only a chicken cops for it...
Which leads me to the real problem of the novel. For a book about transgressive desires, be they Crowley's unspeakable dark arts, or the General's homosexuality that can never be admitted, there is a curious lack of libidinousness on offer. It's about as transgressive as a suburban wife-swap party where everyone puts their keys to their Volvos into a Tiffany bowl. If you want to read about piercing, enslaving desire, then go read Neil Bartlett's "Skin Lane". I also wonder about the politics of this, since the implication is that the General's tastes are deserving of punishment and censure; while I accept this would have been the opinion of the 19th Century, I'm a little uncomfortable with the author's lack of skill in trying to offer up even a hint of a rebutting view. None of his characters seem to merit any of our sympathy. The General is shown to have a weak personality and his sexual urges are ineluctably tied up with his repressions and anxieties, rather than being genuine and of a flourishing. Crowley is not portrayed with any of the mesmerising charisma that he must have possessed in real life. The best Arnott can offer is the hypnotic power of his blue eyes, but come on, that is feeble. I'm neither an acolyte or a disser of Crowley, but I imagine any of his fans picking up this book to read about their master, will be rather irritated with his representation. At points he is far from inviolable, letting slip his human small-mindedness and proving physically weak. The weird thing is Arnott doesn't really seem to ask us to judge him, to come down either in favour of his adventurism or virulently against his depravity. He just seems to be the deux ex humana to bring about the General's fate.
And finally, a brief example of Arnott's info-dump. About to ravish the Whore of Babylon in human form, (actually a con-artist initiated into the role of chosen one by a paymaster and not terribly convincing at it), the woman points to a birthmark on Crowley who proceeds to meander through a page full of history of its coincidental symbolism ending up at the swastika, rather than hurry on down to make the beast with two backs with her. This is on page 269, ie 30 pages from the end, yet Arnott cannot resist heaping more evidence of how well researched he is upon us. I don't doubt there is a novel lurking in these themes and characters - apparently the two protagonists did meet once in real life, but this version ain't it. It is good on the British colonial drive, but lamentable about the pursuit of dark knowledge and a bit mechanical in its characterisation and the reason why humans do the things they do. Everything arises from human neuroses, a rather Freudian view.
I actually like Jake Arnott. To me he's akin to Nick Hornby, steady, unspectacular prose that still manages to deliver good tales, well told, with recognisable characters. But this effort is way off beam. Maybe he should stick to his 1960's schtick after all. I'm off to read the new Delilo to get the taste of lead out of my mouth.
February 27, 2010
MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN
by Jonathan Lethem
311 pages
Review by Marc Nash
Jonathan Lethem has a new book out, but since it's in hardback & I'm a cheapskate, I was going to take a chance on an author new to me with something cheaper and in paperback. I plumped for 1999's "Motherless Brooklyn" for this voyage of discovery.
This book contains quite possibly the best opening chapter I have ever read. It introduces you to the voice of the main character, a Tourette's Syndrome sufferer, so from the off we are shown dazzling linguistic play as he tics and forms thrilling, improbable phrases. But in addition it paints convincing voices for other characters, depicts a milieu and drags you headlong through it at breakneck pace. Quite simply it does everything an opening should do; introduce, make out, go all the way and then light a cigarette and bask in the glow. And it doesn't employ any rubber prophylactic. Dangerous, breathless stuff.
Of course Chapter 2 eases up on the freneticism and the linguistic pyrotechnics in favour of extended flashbackstory, which is a pity, but Lethem has banked a lot of credits with me so I'll forgive him. The noirish plot too is a bit mundane, though stylistically it pays homage in all the rights ways (a body of water in Brooklyn being described as "made up of 90% guns"). The last 2 chapters tying up loose plot ends is really low key and could even be disposed of altogether were it not for a presumption of closure required by the reader.
But I want to focus on the extraordinary language and themes of this book. At its centrality is Tourette's Syndrome, but this is used for a wider consideration of the workings of the human mind. The mentor of "Motherless Brooklyn", the man who takes four orphans and gives them odd jobs to do within his streetwise, bit of this-bit of that commercial empire, has a hip, caustic street language. His bosses are a couple of Soprano-like Wise Guys who talk with stilted English as second language menace, mangling grammar in order to establish status through what lies behind and unsaid. While instantly recognisable to the reader's ear, Lethem is skilled enough to offer them as mere alternative idioms to that of the Tourettic explosions of language. They are glibber, but no less exotic than the eructions from Lionel the Tourette's sufferer's mouth. We each have our own schtick. Again Lethem dissects each dialogue he offers, to show who has the greater status at any one point and who has lost it in the verbal negotiation. Lionel never has any status, because people think he's an idiot, a "freakshow", which endows him with unseen power since he interacts with the world on more levels than most: he feels its bumps, warts and all, like a phrenologist.
When Lionel leaves NYC for the first time in his life in an extended chase into Maine, he realises he is unfamiliar with the wider world beyond. And his ticcing and language react accordingly, trying to wedge new words and phrases into his brain with which to cope with a strange new landscape. This is a brilliant evocation of how language works to organise our sensory impressions for us. Through the device of someone who struggles to organise it, because his language is untamable. The imagination displayed by the author in offering up new linguistic combinations, in the form of Tourettic outbursts is a marvel. But it is also the physical compulsions he writes about. Counting and touching in an OCD manner, yet which is also about straightening edges, rubbing off rough burs of asymmetry, trying to make the world regular and predictable. His is a mind that cannot co-exist with physical reality in the manner we may take it for granted. He constantly has to reinvent it through direct manipulation. And through his deeper interactions with it, he possesses a deeper knowledge and appreciation than most. Even more than the Buddhist students in the book, who look to meditate their way towards the great unknown truths. Their stillness is clearly the wrong approach; they should adopt the incessant energy and questioning of the Tourettic. We all should, or failing that, read this book. It's depth of vision is breathtaking, given that it takes the guise of a humble thriller.
Okay, I'm going to have to get that hardback now. And I no longer have any birthday book tokens left, since I used them to buy this book. Still, with my twins' birthday coming up, maybe I'll get the chance to steal any they get.
Marc Nash
311 pages
Review by Marc Nash
Jonathan Lethem has a new book out, but since it's in hardback & I'm a cheapskate, I was going to take a chance on an author new to me with something cheaper and in paperback. I plumped for 1999's "Motherless Brooklyn" for this voyage of discovery.
This book contains quite possibly the best opening chapter I have ever read. It introduces you to the voice of the main character, a Tourette's Syndrome sufferer, so from the off we are shown dazzling linguistic play as he tics and forms thrilling, improbable phrases. But in addition it paints convincing voices for other characters, depicts a milieu and drags you headlong through it at breakneck pace. Quite simply it does everything an opening should do; introduce, make out, go all the way and then light a cigarette and bask in the glow. And it doesn't employ any rubber prophylactic. Dangerous, breathless stuff.
Of course Chapter 2 eases up on the freneticism and the linguistic pyrotechnics in favour of extended flashbackstory, which is a pity, but Lethem has banked a lot of credits with me so I'll forgive him. The noirish plot too is a bit mundane, though stylistically it pays homage in all the rights ways (a body of water in Brooklyn being described as "made up of 90% guns"). The last 2 chapters tying up loose plot ends is really low key and could even be disposed of altogether were it not for a presumption of closure required by the reader.
But I want to focus on the extraordinary language and themes of this book. At its centrality is Tourette's Syndrome, but this is used for a wider consideration of the workings of the human mind. The mentor of "Motherless Brooklyn", the man who takes four orphans and gives them odd jobs to do within his streetwise, bit of this-bit of that commercial empire, has a hip, caustic street language. His bosses are a couple of Soprano-like Wise Guys who talk with stilted English as second language menace, mangling grammar in order to establish status through what lies behind and unsaid. While instantly recognisable to the reader's ear, Lethem is skilled enough to offer them as mere alternative idioms to that of the Tourettic explosions of language. They are glibber, but no less exotic than the eructions from Lionel the Tourette's sufferer's mouth. We each have our own schtick. Again Lethem dissects each dialogue he offers, to show who has the greater status at any one point and who has lost it in the verbal negotiation. Lionel never has any status, because people think he's an idiot, a "freakshow", which endows him with unseen power since he interacts with the world on more levels than most: he feels its bumps, warts and all, like a phrenologist.
When Lionel leaves NYC for the first time in his life in an extended chase into Maine, he realises he is unfamiliar with the wider world beyond. And his ticcing and language react accordingly, trying to wedge new words and phrases into his brain with which to cope with a strange new landscape. This is a brilliant evocation of how language works to organise our sensory impressions for us. Through the device of someone who struggles to organise it, because his language is untamable. The imagination displayed by the author in offering up new linguistic combinations, in the form of Tourettic outbursts is a marvel. But it is also the physical compulsions he writes about. Counting and touching in an OCD manner, yet which is also about straightening edges, rubbing off rough burs of asymmetry, trying to make the world regular and predictable. His is a mind that cannot co-exist with physical reality in the manner we may take it for granted. He constantly has to reinvent it through direct manipulation. And through his deeper interactions with it, he possesses a deeper knowledge and appreciation than most. Even more than the Buddhist students in the book, who look to meditate their way towards the great unknown truths. Their stillness is clearly the wrong approach; they should adopt the incessant energy and questioning of the Tourettic. We all should, or failing that, read this book. It's depth of vision is breathtaking, given that it takes the guise of a humble thriller.
Okay, I'm going to have to get that hardback now. And I no longer have any birthday book tokens left, since I used them to buy this book. Still, with my twins' birthday coming up, maybe I'll get the chance to steal any they get.
Marc Nash
February 26, 2010
BEING ALIVE
Edited by Neil Astley
Bloodaxe Books, Northumberland, 2004
Review by Bill Kirton
The opening sentence I wanted to write was ‘Gone are the days when admitting you read poetry immediately threw doubt on your sexual orientation’ but the trouble is that, in our crude, glottal-stopped culture, the mistrust of effete dandies, a scorn for swooning ladies, and the conviction that the consumptive guy starving in the attic should get up off his arse and get a job still prevail. There’s also the nagging feeling, even amongst the enlightened few, that some of the modern poets are taking the piss, rather like Tracey Emin and Damien Hurst in the visual arts. I’m not a poet but I’ve written Vogon poetry for fun and I’ve dashed off parodies of ‘modern verse’ which have on occasion been taken seriously. (Vogon poetry, for the uninitiated, is the ‘the third worst poetry in the Universe’ and was unveiled in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) There are still far too many occasions when I read a poem and wonder why the lines stop where they do and what distinguishes it from prose.
All of which suggests I’m not the man to write a review of a poetry anthology. But I was directed towards Being Alive by a poet friend and lo, the scales have fallen from my eyes. (Well, mostly.) It’s a highly enjoyable (and often tear-producing) book. Well over 400 pages of poetry which, for me, meet the editor’s desire to ‘give readers as many hair-raising, head-lifting poems as possible … balancing heart-rending, gut-wrenching poems of explosive power with gentler, playful, witty, thought-provoking poems of tenderness and sensuality’. While I can’t make much informed comment about their technical worth, I can record that very few of them produced my habitual yawn response or the feeling that I was faced with pretentious, meaningless crap, and most of them triggered that wonderful sensation of hearing something said which I’d thought or experienced before but never heard articulated so accurately or with such resonance. Also, as a writer, I’m stunned by the way in which so many of these images or turns of phrase open up huge internal distances and possibilities, extend seemingly simple meanings into vast associations.
Poetry is unjustly relegated to the realms of the esoteric; it’s still the purest form of expression. And the examples chosen here prove that it’s also very accessible. There are countless mini-narratives, self-contained poems focusing on a seemingly tiny incident or looking back over a life, many lives, or lives that never managed to begin, still-births – actual or of the imagination – full and empty lives, glimpsed possibilities. In other words, it evokes all the familiar human experiences from joys to the bleakest sorrows. And beyond that, the collection is organised in a way that also implies an overall narrative. The poems are grouped in sections whose titles are self-explanatory: Exploring the World, Taste and See, Family, Love Life, Men and Women, Being and Loss, Daily Round, Lives, Mad World, Ends and Beginnings. In each there are poems exploring the theme from different angles. I want very much to quote some examples in order to show their range and power but, in the end, that would turn this review into a list. There are just so many brilliantly conceived and executed pieces – an achingly apt image, an individual line or couplet, entire poems. But which would I leave out? And anyway, would my choices be the ones you’d respond to? Instead, I’ll just quote one line which was part of my poet friend’s email to suggest I might be interested to read this. It’s not one of the heartbreakers or lightning flashes of wit but it is an example of the poet’s apparent artlessness, a choice of words which opens meanings that keep shifting and unfolding. It’s from Fleur Adcock who, in a poem called Weathering, delights in her beautiful surroundings and notes that her face may be weather-beaten by the wind off the snow-line but accepts it willingly because:
‘to look out of my window at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what
my soul may wear over its new complexion’.
If I could get that sort of concision into my writing, my novels might only be pamphlets but they’d be bloody good.
One last point: I dip into being alive most days and read two or three poems aloud and it’ll keep me going for a long time. But what I didn’t know before I bought it is that it’s a sequel to a collection called Staying Alive, which almost as soon as it was published (2002) became Britain’s most popular poetry book. I’ve ordered that one too.
I urge you to banish images of condemned young men reclining palely on their chaises longues, dabbing their fevered (possibly even tubercular) brows with silk kerchiefs, and rediscover the mystery of language at its most powerful.
Bloodaxe Books, Northumberland, 2004
Review by Bill Kirton
The opening sentence I wanted to write was ‘Gone are the days when admitting you read poetry immediately threw doubt on your sexual orientation’ but the trouble is that, in our crude, glottal-stopped culture, the mistrust of effete dandies, a scorn for swooning ladies, and the conviction that the consumptive guy starving in the attic should get up off his arse and get a job still prevail. There’s also the nagging feeling, even amongst the enlightened few, that some of the modern poets are taking the piss, rather like Tracey Emin and Damien Hurst in the visual arts. I’m not a poet but I’ve written Vogon poetry for fun and I’ve dashed off parodies of ‘modern verse’ which have on occasion been taken seriously. (Vogon poetry, for the uninitiated, is the ‘the third worst poetry in the Universe’ and was unveiled in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) There are still far too many occasions when I read a poem and wonder why the lines stop where they do and what distinguishes it from prose.
All of which suggests I’m not the man to write a review of a poetry anthology. But I was directed towards Being Alive by a poet friend and lo, the scales have fallen from my eyes. (Well, mostly.) It’s a highly enjoyable (and often tear-producing) book. Well over 400 pages of poetry which, for me, meet the editor’s desire to ‘give readers as many hair-raising, head-lifting poems as possible … balancing heart-rending, gut-wrenching poems of explosive power with gentler, playful, witty, thought-provoking poems of tenderness and sensuality’. While I can’t make much informed comment about their technical worth, I can record that very few of them produced my habitual yawn response or the feeling that I was faced with pretentious, meaningless crap, and most of them triggered that wonderful sensation of hearing something said which I’d thought or experienced before but never heard articulated so accurately or with such resonance. Also, as a writer, I’m stunned by the way in which so many of these images or turns of phrase open up huge internal distances and possibilities, extend seemingly simple meanings into vast associations.
Poetry is unjustly relegated to the realms of the esoteric; it’s still the purest form of expression. And the examples chosen here prove that it’s also very accessible. There are countless mini-narratives, self-contained poems focusing on a seemingly tiny incident or looking back over a life, many lives, or lives that never managed to begin, still-births – actual or of the imagination – full and empty lives, glimpsed possibilities. In other words, it evokes all the familiar human experiences from joys to the bleakest sorrows. And beyond that, the collection is organised in a way that also implies an overall narrative. The poems are grouped in sections whose titles are self-explanatory: Exploring the World, Taste and See, Family, Love Life, Men and Women, Being and Loss, Daily Round, Lives, Mad World, Ends and Beginnings. In each there are poems exploring the theme from different angles. I want very much to quote some examples in order to show their range and power but, in the end, that would turn this review into a list. There are just so many brilliantly conceived and executed pieces – an achingly apt image, an individual line or couplet, entire poems. But which would I leave out? And anyway, would my choices be the ones you’d respond to? Instead, I’ll just quote one line which was part of my poet friend’s email to suggest I might be interested to read this. It’s not one of the heartbreakers or lightning flashes of wit but it is an example of the poet’s apparent artlessness, a choice of words which opens meanings that keep shifting and unfolding. It’s from Fleur Adcock who, in a poem called Weathering, delights in her beautiful surroundings and notes that her face may be weather-beaten by the wind off the snow-line but accepts it willingly because:
‘to look out of my window at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what
my soul may wear over its new complexion’.
If I could get that sort of concision into my writing, my novels might only be pamphlets but they’d be bloody good.
One last point: I dip into being alive most days and read two or three poems aloud and it’ll keep me going for a long time. But what I didn’t know before I bought it is that it’s a sequel to a collection called Staying Alive, which almost as soon as it was published (2002) became Britain’s most popular poetry book. I’ve ordered that one too.
I urge you to banish images of condemned young men reclining palely on their chaises longues, dabbing their fevered (possibly even tubercular) brows with silk kerchiefs, and rediscover the mystery of language at its most powerful.
February 25, 2010
MALICE
by Chris Wooding
400 pages, Scholastic
Review by SF Winser
Malice is a novel with some graphic-novel bits. It's the typical 'kids get lost in a computer game/book/movie' kind of plot, with the added bonus that since the kids get lost in a comic book, and the novel has graphic novel bits, writing it in this form means that the reader gets to see the comic itself, helping to make the premise that much more involving.
It also has a gimmicky raised/embossed cover that is annoying to read and annoying to put on a shelf but looks really cool.
The comic book itself is called 'Malice'. It's a secret, forbidden comic that adults rarely hear about and most kids think is an urban legend. It's a comic book that has no real plot and no main characters. It simply shows vignettes of the lives of children who have supposedly been trapped in a world, also called 'Malice'. Malice is not a nice place and these snapshots are rarely happy.
However, Malice the book (and not Malice the comic. Or Malice the world) is a fun book. The main characters are well-drawn. The main male protag is interestingly gung-ho. He's an extreme sport, take all risks kind of kid, which works well within the plot. Only people who are stupid, or curious, or brave and motivated would get into Malice and the first two options make for less-than-convincing narratives. 'Just because I was curious' doesn't fly as a plot-turn and 'Der... I'z dumb' is kind of annoying. Having a kid addicted to risk-taking who also has a friend missing in Malice is a good base for the plot. The reader doesn't ask, at any time: 'Why'd he do something so obviously dumb and dangerous like heading to Malice on purpose?'. We know his reasons and they're character-true.
There's a twist or two - at least one involving memory loss - that are really well handled. The clues are dropped really deliberately and obviously in front of the reader and then Wooding, like a consummate magician, diverts attention elsewhere, so you forget them until the big reveal. There's a proper sense of danger, too. The evil antagonists are at times two-dimensional but that's because they're almost 90's comic-book style attempts at emotion-provoking caricatures. And they are very creepy. Creepy guy with a van, creepy old house style creepy.
The use of the graphical sections is spare. At times I wanted just a bit more. They are well used in action scenes and in showing new creatures. Wooding doesn't have to try to explain what a 'strange monkey robot thing' looks like if you first see it in the context of the comic: the reader already knows what it looks like when we get back to the text. They are used in just the right way, in just the right spots.
The execution, though, is sometimes more cluttered than is really good for storytelling. The idea behind the comics is that they are being drawn by a mysterious, magical artist as he sees the action. So the rushed nature of the (actual) art is fitting. This makes some of the panels and artwork feel almost undernourished, though. There isn't enough art or enough panels for packed action, so we lose track at times of what is happening in certain scenes. I don't know if this was because of space requirements, deadline requirements or inept/inexperienced execution. The internal panel-design and staging veers between brilliant and terrible. As does the artwork. The shading/lighting is similarly sometimes excellent, sometimes heavy-handed. Yes, Malice is a dark world with a dark tone, but sometimes a black form, in shadows, in an already dark room... just becomes a polar bear in a snowstorm, to use an exactly inapposite metaphor.
Anyhoo, if it were a stand-alone comic this would get a B-, at best, if I were feeling generous and the Gods were smiling. The creature design is often excellent but the character design of human beings is only okay-ish. And I've already gone into the structural issues. It feels like the artist commissioned to pull this off (Dan Chernett) has never really attempted a comic before and has simultaneously been restricted in learning the art by deadlines and space allowances. A quick internet search suggests this hunch is correct – Chernett turns up as an illustrator but not a graphic-novel artist.
But this is all my adult, graphic-novel nerddom showing through. If I weren't being a picky, elitist Scott-McCloud-reading prat, the comic works just fine and does its job quite well. I wouldn't be surprised to see Chernett's work becoming more accomplished as further novels in the series are released.
Tonally, 'Malice' is a dark book – almost horror fantasy. But it's also pitch-perfect darkness for YA readers. Kids graduating from R.L. Stine and not yet up to Steven King would have a ball with this. I'm not usually a big horror reader and I enjoyed this a lot. Yes, even the graphic bits I've just been whinging about. I especially enjoyed the way Wooding used the fact that this was going to be a graphic-heavy book to play a bit with textual lay-outs, fonts and paging. This book is designed to suck kids in, keep 'em interested and keep 'em reading with any trick necessary. As a by-product it did the same to me.
400 pages, Scholastic
Review by SF Winser
Malice is a novel with some graphic-novel bits. It's the typical 'kids get lost in a computer game/book/movie' kind of plot, with the added bonus that since the kids get lost in a comic book, and the novel has graphic novel bits, writing it in this form means that the reader gets to see the comic itself, helping to make the premise that much more involving.
It also has a gimmicky raised/embossed cover that is annoying to read and annoying to put on a shelf but looks really cool.
The comic book itself is called 'Malice'. It's a secret, forbidden comic that adults rarely hear about and most kids think is an urban legend. It's a comic book that has no real plot and no main characters. It simply shows vignettes of the lives of children who have supposedly been trapped in a world, also called 'Malice'. Malice is not a nice place and these snapshots are rarely happy.
However, Malice the book (and not Malice the comic. Or Malice the world) is a fun book. The main characters are well-drawn. The main male protag is interestingly gung-ho. He's an extreme sport, take all risks kind of kid, which works well within the plot. Only people who are stupid, or curious, or brave and motivated would get into Malice and the first two options make for less-than-convincing narratives. 'Just because I was curious' doesn't fly as a plot-turn and 'Der... I'z dumb' is kind of annoying. Having a kid addicted to risk-taking who also has a friend missing in Malice is a good base for the plot. The reader doesn't ask, at any time: 'Why'd he do something so obviously dumb and dangerous like heading to Malice on purpose?'. We know his reasons and they're character-true.
There's a twist or two - at least one involving memory loss - that are really well handled. The clues are dropped really deliberately and obviously in front of the reader and then Wooding, like a consummate magician, diverts attention elsewhere, so you forget them until the big reveal. There's a proper sense of danger, too. The evil antagonists are at times two-dimensional but that's because they're almost 90's comic-book style attempts at emotion-provoking caricatures. And they are very creepy. Creepy guy with a van, creepy old house style creepy.
The use of the graphical sections is spare. At times I wanted just a bit more. They are well used in action scenes and in showing new creatures. Wooding doesn't have to try to explain what a 'strange monkey robot thing' looks like if you first see it in the context of the comic: the reader already knows what it looks like when we get back to the text. They are used in just the right way, in just the right spots.
The execution, though, is sometimes more cluttered than is really good for storytelling. The idea behind the comics is that they are being drawn by a mysterious, magical artist as he sees the action. So the rushed nature of the (actual) art is fitting. This makes some of the panels and artwork feel almost undernourished, though. There isn't enough art or enough panels for packed action, so we lose track at times of what is happening in certain scenes. I don't know if this was because of space requirements, deadline requirements or inept/inexperienced execution. The internal panel-design and staging veers between brilliant and terrible. As does the artwork. The shading/lighting is similarly sometimes excellent, sometimes heavy-handed. Yes, Malice is a dark world with a dark tone, but sometimes a black form, in shadows, in an already dark room... just becomes a polar bear in a snowstorm, to use an exactly inapposite metaphor.
Anyhoo, if it were a stand-alone comic this would get a B-, at best, if I were feeling generous and the Gods were smiling. The creature design is often excellent but the character design of human beings is only okay-ish. And I've already gone into the structural issues. It feels like the artist commissioned to pull this off (Dan Chernett) has never really attempted a comic before and has simultaneously been restricted in learning the art by deadlines and space allowances. A quick internet search suggests this hunch is correct – Chernett turns up as an illustrator but not a graphic-novel artist.
But this is all my adult, graphic-novel nerddom showing through. If I weren't being a picky, elitist Scott-McCloud-reading prat, the comic works just fine and does its job quite well. I wouldn't be surprised to see Chernett's work becoming more accomplished as further novels in the series are released.
Tonally, 'Malice' is a dark book – almost horror fantasy. But it's also pitch-perfect darkness for YA readers. Kids graduating from R.L. Stine and not yet up to Steven King would have a ball with this. I'm not usually a big horror reader and I enjoyed this a lot. Yes, even the graphic bits I've just been whinging about. I especially enjoyed the way Wooding used the fact that this was going to be a graphic-heavy book to play a bit with textual lay-outs, fonts and paging. This book is designed to suck kids in, keep 'em interested and keep 'em reading with any trick necessary. As a by-product it did the same to me.
February 24, 2010
THE BUTT
by Will Self
355 pages, Bloomsbury
Review by Paul Fenton
Tom Brodzinski stands on the balcony of his holiday apartment, smoking what he has decided will be his last cigarette, and he flicks the smouldering butt into the oppressive midday heat of a quasi-Aussie hell. Because I'd paid attention to the title of the book, even I realised this was a mistake on Brodzinski's part.
So begins The Butt, Will Self's Kafkaesque story about the absurdly dire consequences of a seemingly innocent act. (Look, I used "Kafkaesque" in a sentence, and I think it might even be contextually accurate!)
The freefalling butt lands on the sunbathing head of Lincoln, who receives some nasty burns which subsequently turn septic, but who is otherwise understanding and conciliatory; his wife, not so much. His wife, you see, is Tayswengo, and Tayswengo tribal law isn't always in line with the white man's rule.
Before you rush off to Wikipedia to look up Tayswengo, don't. I already tried that. Ditto for Google. Tayswengo is a pure Self invention, a fictional tribe in a fictional country. Imagine Australia (easy for me, I'm from there - if you're not from there, or you've never been there, rent "Crocodile Dundee" and "The Castle" and watch them both back-to-back, that'll give you a flavour), heavily populate it with Maori/Aborigine hybrids, and tie it all together with a "Mad Max" attitude to conflict resolution. The indigenous tribes have their own brand of pidgin, their own mythology and customs, and the way it is all so impossibly integrated into the colonial culture tags it as unmistakably fictional. True, the Australian Aborigine do maintain their own tribal law, but it is kept at a long distance from the legislature. Not so in The Butt.
As Brodzinski prepares to return home with his family, he is abruptly arrested and charged with attempted murder. The cigarette butt, or "the projectile" as the prosecution refers to it, was launched into the open air by Brodzinski when he flicked it away, which might only have exposed him to a charge of littering had it not described a parabola which crossed into public airspace (proven by forensic analysts), thereby violating the country's very, very strict anti-smoking laws. If that weren't bad enough, because Lincoln is married to a Tayswengo, he is considered to be a member of their tribe, and a crime committed against the tribe must be tried under tribal law, and Tayswengo tribal law says: there are no such things as accidents. The discarded butt was a weapon, Lincoln was the victim, and Brodzinski was the aggressor, whether he realised it or not. Brodzinski's defence is taken up by the charismatic and possibly mad Jethro Swai-Phillips, who manages to haggle Brodzinski's's sentence down to a journey of reparation into the lawless colon of the country.
I enjoyed much of this book, perhaps more than I should have. If I were more blindly patriotic I might have taken offence to Self's repeated pot-shots the locals' persistent interrogative speech patterns. But I didn't? Because, you know, I kind of agreed with it? And it bugs me too, especially when I do it? Like I'm inviting someone to disagree with me?
The superstitious notions of astande (dominant) and inquivoo (passive) sounded uncannily authentic, and managed to burrow their way into my inner ear where they whispered to me for two weeks after I finished the book. It took a Hopi ear candle to get them out. What I was waiting for, though, was for the mystery to unravel, for motivations to crystallise, and in all likelihood that's exactly what happened but I was just too stupid to see it. I'm sure there were all kind of allegories and themes and other fancy ideas in the mix, but I just wanted to read about the guy who got harshly nicked for flicking away an old cigarette butt. Subconsciously I'm sure I'm all the richer for the experience, somehow, but if anyone does have a clear synopsis of the plot, please email it to me. Because I'm not sure if I'm being thick, or if Self's being too clever?
Or if I'm assuming the book is cleverer than it is?
Or if I was too distracted by the Aussie stereotype-bashing to pick up on the big themes?
Or if it was all a dream?
(Don't worry, that wasn't a spoiler.)
355 pages, Bloomsbury
Review by Paul Fenton
Tom Brodzinski stands on the balcony of his holiday apartment, smoking what he has decided will be his last cigarette, and he flicks the smouldering butt into the oppressive midday heat of a quasi-Aussie hell. Because I'd paid attention to the title of the book, even I realised this was a mistake on Brodzinski's part.
So begins The Butt, Will Self's Kafkaesque story about the absurdly dire consequences of a seemingly innocent act. (Look, I used "Kafkaesque" in a sentence, and I think it might even be contextually accurate!)
The freefalling butt lands on the sunbathing head of Lincoln, who receives some nasty burns which subsequently turn septic, but who is otherwise understanding and conciliatory; his wife, not so much. His wife, you see, is Tayswengo, and Tayswengo tribal law isn't always in line with the white man's rule.
Before you rush off to Wikipedia to look up Tayswengo, don't. I already tried that. Ditto for Google. Tayswengo is a pure Self invention, a fictional tribe in a fictional country. Imagine Australia (easy for me, I'm from there - if you're not from there, or you've never been there, rent "Crocodile Dundee" and "The Castle" and watch them both back-to-back, that'll give you a flavour), heavily populate it with Maori/Aborigine hybrids, and tie it all together with a "Mad Max" attitude to conflict resolution. The indigenous tribes have their own brand of pidgin, their own mythology and customs, and the way it is all so impossibly integrated into the colonial culture tags it as unmistakably fictional. True, the Australian Aborigine do maintain their own tribal law, but it is kept at a long distance from the legislature. Not so in The Butt.
As Brodzinski prepares to return home with his family, he is abruptly arrested and charged with attempted murder. The cigarette butt, or "the projectile" as the prosecution refers to it, was launched into the open air by Brodzinski when he flicked it away, which might only have exposed him to a charge of littering had it not described a parabola which crossed into public airspace (proven by forensic analysts), thereby violating the country's very, very strict anti-smoking laws. If that weren't bad enough, because Lincoln is married to a Tayswengo, he is considered to be a member of their tribe, and a crime committed against the tribe must be tried under tribal law, and Tayswengo tribal law says: there are no such things as accidents. The discarded butt was a weapon, Lincoln was the victim, and Brodzinski was the aggressor, whether he realised it or not. Brodzinski's defence is taken up by the charismatic and possibly mad Jethro Swai-Phillips, who manages to haggle Brodzinski's's sentence down to a journey of reparation into the lawless colon of the country.
I enjoyed much of this book, perhaps more than I should have. If I were more blindly patriotic I might have taken offence to Self's repeated pot-shots the locals' persistent interrogative speech patterns. But I didn't? Because, you know, I kind of agreed with it? And it bugs me too, especially when I do it? Like I'm inviting someone to disagree with me?
The superstitious notions of astande (dominant) and inquivoo (passive) sounded uncannily authentic, and managed to burrow their way into my inner ear where they whispered to me for two weeks after I finished the book. It took a Hopi ear candle to get them out. What I was waiting for, though, was for the mystery to unravel, for motivations to crystallise, and in all likelihood that's exactly what happened but I was just too stupid to see it. I'm sure there were all kind of allegories and themes and other fancy ideas in the mix, but I just wanted to read about the guy who got harshly nicked for flicking away an old cigarette butt. Subconsciously I'm sure I'm all the richer for the experience, somehow, but if anyone does have a clear synopsis of the plot, please email it to me. Because I'm not sure if I'm being thick, or if Self's being too clever?
Or if I'm assuming the book is cleverer than it is?
Or if I was too distracted by the Aussie stereotype-bashing to pick up on the big themes?
Or if it was all a dream?
(Don't worry, that wasn't a spoiler.)
February 23, 2010
THE POWER OF THE DARK SIDE
by Pamela Jaye Smith
242 pages, Michael Wiese Productions
Review by Hereward L.M. Proops
What’s not to love about a great villain? The goody-two-shoes hero may triumph at the end of the day but more often than not, it’s the bad guy who provides the best lines and the biggest thrills. Personally, I’ve always been a fan of villains. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t condone their wicked deeds and murderous rampages, I just can’t imagine a decent adventure without them.
The simple fact is that without a top-notch adversary to go up against, the main protagonist in any story can often seem a singularly dull individual. Try to imagine Bond without Blofeld, Beowulf without Grendel or King Arthur without Mordred. Let’s face it, Darth Vader was a far more interesting character than Luke Skywalker. The brief snippets of information we are given about Sauron in The Lord of the Rings is enough to keep one going through the books in the hope that he will be revealed in his full malevolent glory (imagine my disappointment when he finally appears at the end of The Return of the King as a bloody big cloud). A good villain can make a good story just as surely as a flat one will leave a reader cold.
I’m currently in the planning stages of a new novel featuring my stoic Victorian police inspector Edmund Forrester. Having sent him up against all manner of strange and fantastic foes, I want to give him an adversary in my next book who is not just bad, but truly, deeply wicked. My research has led me to creepy websites about serial killers, Sax Rohmer’s tales of Fu Manchu and repeated viewings of Daniel Day Lewis’ terrifying performance in There Will Be Blood. Most recently, I was thrilled to discover Pamela Jaye Smith’s The Power of the Dark Side, a guide for writers to help create great villains and dangerous situations. The book is not solely aimed at novelists but also screenwriters and those in the gaming industry. Great villains, she tells us, can be found everywhere. Her eclectic sources reflect this belief. I’ve never read a book that so comfortably cites Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Basic Instinct in the same breath. As one is bombarded with different examples of villainy from multiple genres and mediums, it quickly becomes clear that Pamela Jaye Smith certainly knows her topic.
The Power of the Dark Side is structured in a very logical way, helping to make it accessible and easy to dip in and out of. Such accessibility is vitally important for a good reference book as one is unlikely to read them cover-to-cover. In this instance, the subject matter was so fascinating and well-laid out that I actually did read the book in this way. Early chapters define the dark side, examining personal, impersonal and supra-personal forces at work. The mid-section of the book looks at the different types of evil characters: the anti-heroes, the witches, the supernatural forces or evil organisations against whom your protagonist can struggle. The closing chapters of the book provide motivations for evil characters and the ways in which a hero can confront them.
With such a detailed breakdown of the dark side, it is highly unlikely that any wannabe writer could make it all the way through the book without finding some form of inspiration. Unfortunately, this does not mean that the book is perfect. Smith’s examination of evil is by no means exhaustive. Those looking for an in-depth analysis of dark forces will find themselves disappointed. No sooner has Smith started on one topic does she skip onto the next. For example, just as I was getting my teeth into a juicy section on witchcraft, another subject was introduced. Frustratingly, my curiosity had been roused but not satisfied.
Another aspect of the book which might annoy readers – especially aspiring novelists – is Smith’s habit of writing in note form rather than expanding into fuller, clearer sentences. Using such a format to summarise chapters is all very well but one occasionally gets the feeling that important information might not be getting the right kind of exposure.
The Power of the Dark Side is undoubtedly an entertaining read. Bursting at the seams with ideas, Smith provides numerous pointers to help shape your baddies into true villains, your fiends into monsters and your cads into total rotters. Whilst the book gives a great overview of villainy, one is left with the feeling that this decent but ultimately disposable book could have been an essential reference tool had it the depth to match its broad scope.
Hereward L.M. Proops
242 pages, Michael Wiese Productions
Review by Hereward L.M. Proops
What’s not to love about a great villain? The goody-two-shoes hero may triumph at the end of the day but more often than not, it’s the bad guy who provides the best lines and the biggest thrills. Personally, I’ve always been a fan of villains. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t condone their wicked deeds and murderous rampages, I just can’t imagine a decent adventure without them.
The simple fact is that without a top-notch adversary to go up against, the main protagonist in any story can often seem a singularly dull individual. Try to imagine Bond without Blofeld, Beowulf without Grendel or King Arthur without Mordred. Let’s face it, Darth Vader was a far more interesting character than Luke Skywalker. The brief snippets of information we are given about Sauron in The Lord of the Rings is enough to keep one going through the books in the hope that he will be revealed in his full malevolent glory (imagine my disappointment when he finally appears at the end of The Return of the King as a bloody big cloud). A good villain can make a good story just as surely as a flat one will leave a reader cold.
I’m currently in the planning stages of a new novel featuring my stoic Victorian police inspector Edmund Forrester. Having sent him up against all manner of strange and fantastic foes, I want to give him an adversary in my next book who is not just bad, but truly, deeply wicked. My research has led me to creepy websites about serial killers, Sax Rohmer’s tales of Fu Manchu and repeated viewings of Daniel Day Lewis’ terrifying performance in There Will Be Blood. Most recently, I was thrilled to discover Pamela Jaye Smith’s The Power of the Dark Side, a guide for writers to help create great villains and dangerous situations. The book is not solely aimed at novelists but also screenwriters and those in the gaming industry. Great villains, she tells us, can be found everywhere. Her eclectic sources reflect this belief. I’ve never read a book that so comfortably cites Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Basic Instinct in the same breath. As one is bombarded with different examples of villainy from multiple genres and mediums, it quickly becomes clear that Pamela Jaye Smith certainly knows her topic.
The Power of the Dark Side is structured in a very logical way, helping to make it accessible and easy to dip in and out of. Such accessibility is vitally important for a good reference book as one is unlikely to read them cover-to-cover. In this instance, the subject matter was so fascinating and well-laid out that I actually did read the book in this way. Early chapters define the dark side, examining personal, impersonal and supra-personal forces at work. The mid-section of the book looks at the different types of evil characters: the anti-heroes, the witches, the supernatural forces or evil organisations against whom your protagonist can struggle. The closing chapters of the book provide motivations for evil characters and the ways in which a hero can confront them.
With such a detailed breakdown of the dark side, it is highly unlikely that any wannabe writer could make it all the way through the book without finding some form of inspiration. Unfortunately, this does not mean that the book is perfect. Smith’s examination of evil is by no means exhaustive. Those looking for an in-depth analysis of dark forces will find themselves disappointed. No sooner has Smith started on one topic does she skip onto the next. For example, just as I was getting my teeth into a juicy section on witchcraft, another subject was introduced. Frustratingly, my curiosity had been roused but not satisfied.
Another aspect of the book which might annoy readers – especially aspiring novelists – is Smith’s habit of writing in note form rather than expanding into fuller, clearer sentences. Using such a format to summarise chapters is all very well but one occasionally gets the feeling that important information might not be getting the right kind of exposure.
The Power of the Dark Side is undoubtedly an entertaining read. Bursting at the seams with ideas, Smith provides numerous pointers to help shape your baddies into true villains, your fiends into monsters and your cads into total rotters. Whilst the book gives a great overview of villainy, one is left with the feeling that this decent but ultimately disposable book could have been an essential reference tool had it the depth to match its broad scope.
Hereward L.M. Proops
February 22, 2010
FLESH AND FIRE
Book One of the Vineart War
by Laura Anne Gilman
374 pages, Pocket Books
Review by Melissa Conway
Ask a roomful of agents and editors to tell you what they’re looking for in a novel and you’ll get a mish-mash of answers. But one thing they all agree on: a fresh take on an old conceit (that’s editor-speak for ‘concept’) makes their little hearts go pitter-patter.
Flesh and Fire is very conceited.
We’re all familiar with the various kinds of magic out there: witches brew magic potions; wizards chant magic incantations, genies grant wishes, etc., and if we stumbled upon a bubbling cauldron, a book of runes, or a dusty lamp, we’d recognize it as the tool of a magical being.
If we happened upon one of the Vinearts in Laura Anne Gilman’s high-concept (that’s editor-speak for ‘broadly appealing’) story, we wouldn’t see the magic coming. I certainly wouldn’t run screaming from a man taking a mere sip of wine. But that’s where Gilman’s fresh conceit takes us—into a world where the magic is in the vines, in the grapes, in the fermentation process, in the men who were born to craft spellwines.
All across Italy—I mean the Vin Lands, because the Church—I mean the Collegeium, tells them so, people believe in the same legend. The ancient Kings—I mean Prince-Mages, misused their power and were smote by Jesus—I mean Sin Washer. Now it’s up to the Vinearts to keep tradition, and magic, alive while simultaneously curbing any curiosity that strays outside the strict limits Sin Washer foisted upon them long ago. Peace has reigned for 14 centuries, so the system works—no matter that Vinearts are soulless bastards who keep slaves to run their vineyards. That’s actually just another tradition. You see, a Vineart must know humiliation by having been a slave himself before being selected to train under the master.
I poke fun, but the writing is crisp and the premise isn’t really hard to swallow. Gilman’s main character, Jerzy, a prepubescent slave who’s just been selected by the master to learn the Vineart secrets, takes us from the slave field to the main house and beyond. We grow with him as he changes from a cowering urchin who’s never owned a pair of shoes or soaked in a bathtub, to an outwardly confident (inside he questions just about every decision he makes) young apprentice. I’d like to say there’s romance in Jerzy’s life, but something about the magic makes Vinearts’ little soldiers flaccid.
But Change is a-comin’! Weird things have been happening. Strange never-before-seen magics have been popping up and causing deadly root-glow and making gross monsters and influencing people to do bad things. Some of the Vinearts are concerned, including Jerzy’s stone-cold master, Malech (early on, he casts judgment on an accident-prone child-slave with the simple order, “Kill it.” So we don’t like him much). Malech senses that Jerzy has some strong mojo, and it might be just the thing to, I’m not sure, use his power to win over the other steeped-in-tradition Vinearts before the mysterious causer-of-weird-things destroys its competition? Malech has cultivated our young hero for something, but by the time we get to the end of this first book, we have no idea what.
In fact, Flesh and Fire ends rather abruptly, but it’s forgivable. We know there’s a second and probably a third book coming, so we don’t need resolution for the many dangling plot threads. Personally, since we also know the old traditions are going to have to be flaunted in order to stop this “new” havoc-causing magic, I hope Gilman lets poor Jerzy figure out why drinking magic wine makes his member droop. If he could overcome that unfortunate side effect, maybe the next book will have a little more flesh and fire.
by Laura Anne Gilman
374 pages, Pocket Books
Review by Melissa Conway
Ask a roomful of agents and editors to tell you what they’re looking for in a novel and you’ll get a mish-mash of answers. But one thing they all agree on: a fresh take on an old conceit (that’s editor-speak for ‘concept’) makes their little hearts go pitter-patter.
Flesh and Fire is very conceited.
We’re all familiar with the various kinds of magic out there: witches brew magic potions; wizards chant magic incantations, genies grant wishes, etc., and if we stumbled upon a bubbling cauldron, a book of runes, or a dusty lamp, we’d recognize it as the tool of a magical being.
If we happened upon one of the Vinearts in Laura Anne Gilman’s high-concept (that’s editor-speak for ‘broadly appealing’) story, we wouldn’t see the magic coming. I certainly wouldn’t run screaming from a man taking a mere sip of wine. But that’s where Gilman’s fresh conceit takes us—into a world where the magic is in the vines, in the grapes, in the fermentation process, in the men who were born to craft spellwines.
All across Italy—I mean the Vin Lands, because the Church—I mean the Collegeium, tells them so, people believe in the same legend. The ancient Kings—I mean Prince-Mages, misused their power and were smote by Jesus—I mean Sin Washer. Now it’s up to the Vinearts to keep tradition, and magic, alive while simultaneously curbing any curiosity that strays outside the strict limits Sin Washer foisted upon them long ago. Peace has reigned for 14 centuries, so the system works—no matter that Vinearts are soulless bastards who keep slaves to run their vineyards. That’s actually just another tradition. You see, a Vineart must know humiliation by having been a slave himself before being selected to train under the master.
I poke fun, but the writing is crisp and the premise isn’t really hard to swallow. Gilman’s main character, Jerzy, a prepubescent slave who’s just been selected by the master to learn the Vineart secrets, takes us from the slave field to the main house and beyond. We grow with him as he changes from a cowering urchin who’s never owned a pair of shoes or soaked in a bathtub, to an outwardly confident (inside he questions just about every decision he makes) young apprentice. I’d like to say there’s romance in Jerzy’s life, but something about the magic makes Vinearts’ little soldiers flaccid.
But Change is a-comin’! Weird things have been happening. Strange never-before-seen magics have been popping up and causing deadly root-glow and making gross monsters and influencing people to do bad things. Some of the Vinearts are concerned, including Jerzy’s stone-cold master, Malech (early on, he casts judgment on an accident-prone child-slave with the simple order, “Kill it.” So we don’t like him much). Malech senses that Jerzy has some strong mojo, and it might be just the thing to, I’m not sure, use his power to win over the other steeped-in-tradition Vinearts before the mysterious causer-of-weird-things destroys its competition? Malech has cultivated our young hero for something, but by the time we get to the end of this first book, we have no idea what.
In fact, Flesh and Fire ends rather abruptly, but it’s forgivable. We know there’s a second and probably a third book coming, so we don’t need resolution for the many dangling plot threads. Personally, since we also know the old traditions are going to have to be flaunted in order to stop this “new” havoc-causing magic, I hope Gilman lets poor Jerzy figure out why drinking magic wine makes his member droop. If he could overcome that unfortunate side effect, maybe the next book will have a little more flesh and fire.
February 21, 2010
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
by H.G. Wells
180 pages, Penguin Classics
Review by Dave Loftus
Think of the word Martian; I bet you haven’t in a long time. You definitely wouldn’t classify it as a competent ‘baddy’ anymore would you? It’s too childish a monster, too garish and clichéd. The shiny, hovering, ray-gun-wielding Martians are too connected to the 1950s, to the point that they seem as outdated as the decade itself. Think of Marvin the Martian from Looney Tunes with his stupid hat and nasal whine of a voice. I ain’t afraid of no Martians.
And yet, there’s still a morbidly alluring glimmer locked in the word. It has an eerie otherworldliness. If it turned out the Martians were coming tomorrow, you’d run for the hills and not look back. For that animalistic mistrust of something entirely fictional, you have H.G. Wells to thank.
I’ll admit now I approached The War of the Worlds with trepidation. It seemed so irrevocably entangled within popular culture it gave me claustrophobia. Imagine if you had to explain the events of the 20th century to a goose, using only TV catchphrases. It was just like that. Wikipedia has an entry simply listing adaptations of the book. Film, radio, TV, comics, games- it has seemingly caressed every medium with diminishing levels of quality. Part of me also feared that the grandfather of alien invasion wouldn’t stand up to the streamlined muscle of its descendants, that the prose would seem clunky or outdated and the birth of the most popular science fiction genre would come away laughable, patchy or just downright sad.
It delights me how wrong I was. Abandoning florid prose in favour of a stark chronological account, the story feels concreted in reality, absorbing you into the unkempt hysteria of a most unreal kind.
After a cylinder fired from the red planet crashes into Horshell Common in South England, villagers flock to see it open and a hideous creature emerge. Locals initially wave a white flag but a truckload of wrong arrives when the Martian deploys a fearsome heat-ray, killing the witnesses. The beauty of the story at this early stage is the snail’s pace at which the horror unfolds. With people lying scorched on the common and thus unable to report back, the panic is basically non-existent; hard to imagine nowadays when news can circle the globe in seconds.
Villagers begin to chat, great artillery guns and troops make their way to the scene and the narrator remarks on the ‘dovetailing of the commonplace habits of our social order with the first beginnings of the series of events that was to topple that social order headlong.’ Little else happens. This may sound dull but I was enraptured. Action can be overrated. Here we have a simmering tension on the boil and a delicious dread in the air.
Soon enough the story kicks into gear when the Martians, who’ve been constructing frightening metallic tripods, clamber from the pit and become unstoppable. Merry old England’s precious villages are razed to the ground and hundreds flee to the capital. ‘It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind,’ the narrator says as London itself begins to empty.
Invasion literature was in full swing during this time. Bram Stoker’s Dracula told people they weren’t safe in their own bodies. The War of the Worlds told people they weren’t safe in their own civilisation. London was the booming heart of the Industrial Revolution and a global empire, so to have it zapped to shrapnel by ‘intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic’ would have been a crushing blow.
Victorian writing and the lavish period dramas of today paint an image of the time as one of stiff corsets and gleeful rapscallions. H.G. Wells went for something different- a Lark Rise to Navarone if you will, either that or one of Dickens’s worst nightmares.
What makes the story stand out to a modern reader is the baffling incongruity generated between Victorian London (crashing omnibuses, panicking street urchins) against the ghastly horror of the cosmic invaders (lasers, poison gas, robotics). I had to keep reminding myself that this tumult wasn’t just some lazy steampunk, where the writer sticks a whisk in the stuffiest society in history and sees what happens. No, this was written at the time it was set. Think about that for a second. This is a tale about extraterrestrials trouncing the iron might of the British Empire, written five years before mankind had even got aeroplanes working.
For all its sprawling progeny, the original 1898 text of The War of the Worlds remains unique. It mashes together epic, barrelling chaos with the polite quaintness of Victorian England and still ends up coming away looking fresher and more terrifying than any sci-fi blockbuster of the here-and-now. Even today, Wells must be looking down with impatience, waiting for us to catch up.
180 pages, Penguin Classics
Review by Dave Loftus
Think of the word Martian; I bet you haven’t in a long time. You definitely wouldn’t classify it as a competent ‘baddy’ anymore would you? It’s too childish a monster, too garish and clichéd. The shiny, hovering, ray-gun-wielding Martians are too connected to the 1950s, to the point that they seem as outdated as the decade itself. Think of Marvin the Martian from Looney Tunes with his stupid hat and nasal whine of a voice. I ain’t afraid of no Martians.
And yet, there’s still a morbidly alluring glimmer locked in the word. It has an eerie otherworldliness. If it turned out the Martians were coming tomorrow, you’d run for the hills and not look back. For that animalistic mistrust of something entirely fictional, you have H.G. Wells to thank.
I’ll admit now I approached The War of the Worlds with trepidation. It seemed so irrevocably entangled within popular culture it gave me claustrophobia. Imagine if you had to explain the events of the 20th century to a goose, using only TV catchphrases. It was just like that. Wikipedia has an entry simply listing adaptations of the book. Film, radio, TV, comics, games- it has seemingly caressed every medium with diminishing levels of quality. Part of me also feared that the grandfather of alien invasion wouldn’t stand up to the streamlined muscle of its descendants, that the prose would seem clunky or outdated and the birth of the most popular science fiction genre would come away laughable, patchy or just downright sad.
It delights me how wrong I was. Abandoning florid prose in favour of a stark chronological account, the story feels concreted in reality, absorbing you into the unkempt hysteria of a most unreal kind.
After a cylinder fired from the red planet crashes into Horshell Common in South England, villagers flock to see it open and a hideous creature emerge. Locals initially wave a white flag but a truckload of wrong arrives when the Martian deploys a fearsome heat-ray, killing the witnesses. The beauty of the story at this early stage is the snail’s pace at which the horror unfolds. With people lying scorched on the common and thus unable to report back, the panic is basically non-existent; hard to imagine nowadays when news can circle the globe in seconds.
Villagers begin to chat, great artillery guns and troops make their way to the scene and the narrator remarks on the ‘dovetailing of the commonplace habits of our social order with the first beginnings of the series of events that was to topple that social order headlong.’ Little else happens. This may sound dull but I was enraptured. Action can be overrated. Here we have a simmering tension on the boil and a delicious dread in the air.
Soon enough the story kicks into gear when the Martians, who’ve been constructing frightening metallic tripods, clamber from the pit and become unstoppable. Merry old England’s precious villages are razed to the ground and hundreds flee to the capital. ‘It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind,’ the narrator says as London itself begins to empty.
Invasion literature was in full swing during this time. Bram Stoker’s Dracula told people they weren’t safe in their own bodies. The War of the Worlds told people they weren’t safe in their own civilisation. London was the booming heart of the Industrial Revolution and a global empire, so to have it zapped to shrapnel by ‘intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic’ would have been a crushing blow.
Victorian writing and the lavish period dramas of today paint an image of the time as one of stiff corsets and gleeful rapscallions. H.G. Wells went for something different- a Lark Rise to Navarone if you will, either that or one of Dickens’s worst nightmares.
What makes the story stand out to a modern reader is the baffling incongruity generated between Victorian London (crashing omnibuses, panicking street urchins) against the ghastly horror of the cosmic invaders (lasers, poison gas, robotics). I had to keep reminding myself that this tumult wasn’t just some lazy steampunk, where the writer sticks a whisk in the stuffiest society in history and sees what happens. No, this was written at the time it was set. Think about that for a second. This is a tale about extraterrestrials trouncing the iron might of the British Empire, written five years before mankind had even got aeroplanes working.
For all its sprawling progeny, the original 1898 text of The War of the Worlds remains unique. It mashes together epic, barrelling chaos with the polite quaintness of Victorian England and still ends up coming away looking fresher and more terrifying than any sci-fi blockbuster of the here-and-now. Even today, Wells must be looking down with impatience, waiting for us to catch up.
February 20, 2010
FOUR STAGES OF GREEK THOUGHT
by John Finley
Stanford University Press, 1966
108 pages
Review by Marc Nash
Since I started Booksquawking, my choices of reading matter have failed to bowl me over. My bad. Actually no, scrub that, the bad of contemporary literature, seeing that my choices included the great white hope of American lit and the Nobel Laureate. It’s therefore ironic that my first disproportionate, decidedly unBritish enthusiasm on this site comes from a work of non-fiction. Come on Fiction, pull your finger out of the orifice it’s currently residing in…
I never studied Ancient Greek. Latin and Classical Hebrew (the lingo of the OT) yes, but when I expressed a desire to add Greek to the triune, my Father put his foot down declaring that there were only so many dead languages one could uselessly not find a use for. And yet I have come to the centrality of Greek etymology within our language through my writing. At least two of my novels abound with Greek derived words and full-on Greek concepts expressed in words. And no, neither were hubris nor catharsis.
So I’ve picked up bits and bobs of Greek thought along the journey of life, but in no more of a systematic way than a magpie picks up baubles and secrets them in its nest. I’ve read the Odyssey but only parts of the Iliad at school. I studied Plato & Aristotle, but only what they wrote on political thought. I’ve seen a couple of the Greek Tragedies performed, but preferred reading Sartre’s “The Flies” in the style of…
So I need all these stray flyaways combing into an elegant, readily accessible coiffure. And via a heads up somewhere from the Blogosphere, someone put me on to Finley's book. Based on 4 lectures delivered in 1965, this 108 page book is divided into, unsurprisingly, 4 chapters delineating 4 stages of Greek thought. Moving from Epic, oral poetry, through tragic plays, then the comedies and ultimately into the philosophy of Plato & Aristotle. Finley titles the Chapters, "The Heroic", "The Visionary", "The Theoretical" and "The Rational", but intimates all stem from the Heroic and still were defined by it even in opposition.
It was really the opening chapter that got my pulses racing. As a treatise of all Heroic literature it was explained with such crystal clarity I almost wept (okay, bit of an exaggeration there, but then I'm not heroic). Heroic literature works with recognisable archetypes (don't forget the audience is listening to vocalised words, not reading them). But Finley's point is that this entails a strict one-to-one correspondence to reality as perceived through the senses. There is perception, but there is no interpretation. No ideational musing, for this is pre-formal epistemology. This is literature (once it was set down), but interestingly it is not literary. Words do not seek to recast the world, only uphold it.
The rest of the book sees the introduction of ideas, analysis and a quest for knowledge. The heroes represented the ultimate living fully in the world. Cynosures burning brightly but briefly, shunning the domestic world for the life of a warrior at Troy. Dialectic is introduced, so that even knowledge itself ploughs forward through the synthesis of former analysis. This is a dynamic period and begins to subtly shift the gods sideways as man contemplates his place in the universe. The primacy of the senses are challenged by the superimposition of thought trying to organise and arrange them. Similes are replaced by metaphors.
I didn't quite get the subtleties of Chapter 3, it didn't seem to move the argument on much from the ideas behind Chapter 2 and kept harking back to the Heroic epic. It seemed to be making the point that it reconciled the mundane, domestic life by putting them in art, side by side with the stories of cursed monarchs’ blighted communities. As part of this, Finley paints in well the social context of the War between Athens & Sparta as the backdrop to such a period and the development of the city-states with their differing notions of citizenship.
Chapter 4 was a bit too brief for considering the mighty works of Plato & Aristotle, given that they set the terms of intellectual debate for all Western thought for the next 2000 years and both were heavily transfused into Christian theology. For me, Plato's nominalism and theory of the Ideal Forms is absolutely the key concept that needs to be challenged in language and in literature. It gets cursory treatment here. But then there is so much also to fill in on the notion of virtu, of living a good life, being a good citizen of the polis. This era was the triumph of both the specialised tutors and the middle classes who could send their kids there as well as the landed gentry. With such freedom to meditate, small, everyday objects came even more into focus and again became the subject for art. These Greeks searched for the order that lay beneath the surface of the observable and governed it. A final, delicate balance of the Greek sensibility and the inquiring Greek mind. Plato located the ordering principle in a divine ideal of form, Aristotle plumped for natural laws. My meagre contention is if you replace Plato's ideal forms with the nominalism of language naming them, then you have the dialectic between the two. But I'll save that for a novel.
Our house is very small. So small that it can’t afford me the space to shelve books. Fortunately there is a summer house at the bottom of our small garden, where all my books are stored. When it’s warm, if I need to reference something directly from the source, it’s no great labour to tromp down and get the book. The winter is a different story… So I have a limited shelf above my writing desk in which to lodge strategic texts for reference. A book on anatomy. A book on the history of the letters in the alphabet. Another book on typography. A book on the history of the Metropolitan Police. A book on the history of sex. A book on the German language. A dictionary of myth and folklore. And now this delightful slim volume on the history of Greek Thought. If another invaluable source book comes along, I WILL have to eject one of these august titles. I’ll take votes now.
Stanford University Press, 1966
108 pages
Review by Marc Nash
Since I started Booksquawking, my choices of reading matter have failed to bowl me over. My bad. Actually no, scrub that, the bad of contemporary literature, seeing that my choices included the great white hope of American lit and the Nobel Laureate. It’s therefore ironic that my first disproportionate, decidedly unBritish enthusiasm on this site comes from a work of non-fiction. Come on Fiction, pull your finger out of the orifice it’s currently residing in…
I never studied Ancient Greek. Latin and Classical Hebrew (the lingo of the OT) yes, but when I expressed a desire to add Greek to the triune, my Father put his foot down declaring that there were only so many dead languages one could uselessly not find a use for. And yet I have come to the centrality of Greek etymology within our language through my writing. At least two of my novels abound with Greek derived words and full-on Greek concepts expressed in words. And no, neither were hubris nor catharsis.
So I’ve picked up bits and bobs of Greek thought along the journey of life, but in no more of a systematic way than a magpie picks up baubles and secrets them in its nest. I’ve read the Odyssey but only parts of the Iliad at school. I studied Plato & Aristotle, but only what they wrote on political thought. I’ve seen a couple of the Greek Tragedies performed, but preferred reading Sartre’s “The Flies” in the style of…
So I need all these stray flyaways combing into an elegant, readily accessible coiffure. And via a heads up somewhere from the Blogosphere, someone put me on to Finley's book. Based on 4 lectures delivered in 1965, this 108 page book is divided into, unsurprisingly, 4 chapters delineating 4 stages of Greek thought. Moving from Epic, oral poetry, through tragic plays, then the comedies and ultimately into the philosophy of Plato & Aristotle. Finley titles the Chapters, "The Heroic", "The Visionary", "The Theoretical" and "The Rational", but intimates all stem from the Heroic and still were defined by it even in opposition.
It was really the opening chapter that got my pulses racing. As a treatise of all Heroic literature it was explained with such crystal clarity I almost wept (okay, bit of an exaggeration there, but then I'm not heroic). Heroic literature works with recognisable archetypes (don't forget the audience is listening to vocalised words, not reading them). But Finley's point is that this entails a strict one-to-one correspondence to reality as perceived through the senses. There is perception, but there is no interpretation. No ideational musing, for this is pre-formal epistemology. This is literature (once it was set down), but interestingly it is not literary. Words do not seek to recast the world, only uphold it.
The rest of the book sees the introduction of ideas, analysis and a quest for knowledge. The heroes represented the ultimate living fully in the world. Cynosures burning brightly but briefly, shunning the domestic world for the life of a warrior at Troy. Dialectic is introduced, so that even knowledge itself ploughs forward through the synthesis of former analysis. This is a dynamic period and begins to subtly shift the gods sideways as man contemplates his place in the universe. The primacy of the senses are challenged by the superimposition of thought trying to organise and arrange them. Similes are replaced by metaphors.
I didn't quite get the subtleties of Chapter 3, it didn't seem to move the argument on much from the ideas behind Chapter 2 and kept harking back to the Heroic epic. It seemed to be making the point that it reconciled the mundane, domestic life by putting them in art, side by side with the stories of cursed monarchs’ blighted communities. As part of this, Finley paints in well the social context of the War between Athens & Sparta as the backdrop to such a period and the development of the city-states with their differing notions of citizenship.
Chapter 4 was a bit too brief for considering the mighty works of Plato & Aristotle, given that they set the terms of intellectual debate for all Western thought for the next 2000 years and both were heavily transfused into Christian theology. For me, Plato's nominalism and theory of the Ideal Forms is absolutely the key concept that needs to be challenged in language and in literature. It gets cursory treatment here. But then there is so much also to fill in on the notion of virtu, of living a good life, being a good citizen of the polis. This era was the triumph of both the specialised tutors and the middle classes who could send their kids there as well as the landed gentry. With such freedom to meditate, small, everyday objects came even more into focus and again became the subject for art. These Greeks searched for the order that lay beneath the surface of the observable and governed it. A final, delicate balance of the Greek sensibility and the inquiring Greek mind. Plato located the ordering principle in a divine ideal of form, Aristotle plumped for natural laws. My meagre contention is if you replace Plato's ideal forms with the nominalism of language naming them, then you have the dialectic between the two. But I'll save that for a novel.
Our house is very small. So small that it can’t afford me the space to shelve books. Fortunately there is a summer house at the bottom of our small garden, where all my books are stored. When it’s warm, if I need to reference something directly from the source, it’s no great labour to tromp down and get the book. The winter is a different story… So I have a limited shelf above my writing desk in which to lodge strategic texts for reference. A book on anatomy. A book on the history of the letters in the alphabet. Another book on typography. A book on the history of the Metropolitan Police. A book on the history of sex. A book on the German language. A dictionary of myth and folklore. And now this delightful slim volume on the history of Greek Thought. If another invaluable source book comes along, I WILL have to eject one of these august titles. I’ll take votes now.
February 19, 2010
A MATTER OF CLASS
by Mary Balogh
190 pages, Vanguard Press
Review by Melissa Conway
My go-to movie when I’m in need of a little romance in my life is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the one with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen (although I’m also partial to the A&E mini-series with Colin Firth). I love the music; the repeating ‘pianoforte’ tune played by different persons with varying levels of skill. I love the scenery; vast pre-Victorian brick homes surrounded by thriving gardens and farmland. And I love the characters; the perfect Knightley (except, bless her, for the endearing crookedness of her teeth) and the sexy Madfadyen, whose expressive eyes soon won me over, even though I’d rebelled at thinking of him as Darcy after so many viewings of Firth in the part.
Other than my sporadic intimacy with Jane Austen’s work (I’ve read the novel and seen and liked a few Emma’s, etc.), I’m not terribly knowledgeable about Historical Romance as a genre.
I don’t know why I picked up ‘A Matter of Class.’ Maybe I felt a sudden need for my go-to movie while browsing at the bookstore and gravitated to the romance section. I had never read author Mary Balogh before—never even heard of her—but the cover of the book has a single lady standing in one of those feminine Regency high-waisted dresses, wearing white gloves and holding a lace umbrella, and I immediately thought of Pride and Prejudice. Plus, the slim volume looked like a quick read (quick enough to maybe mitigate the guilt of avoiding the pile of books I’m supposed to be reading), so I brought it home.
The story starts out with our hero Reginald putting on a petulant show for his father in a discussion that sets the plot firmly in stone. Reginald is to marry the daughter of his father’s sworn enemy, a young woman who has disgraced herself by attempting to run off with the groomsman. This marriage is being forced upon the foppish Reginald to curb his spending, gambling, womanizing ways.
Lady Annabelle, the disgraced, newly affianced woman in question, is unhappy but resigned to the match. Her cold father, the Earl of Havercroft, can think of no other way to redeem her reputation but to marry her off, even to the son of new, and therefore distastefully crass, money.
Interspersed between Reginald and Annabelle’s points of view of the impending wedding are flashbacks to their childhood friendship. They meet at different stages of childhood along the river that acts as a boundary between the two families’ property. The reader sees that a romantic attachment has formed, so the “twist” at the end isn’t so much a surprise as a happy, “I knew it!”
The story is lighter than P&P, and not in a comedic sort of way. I’m used to Austen’s portrayal of characters whose depth is emphasized through clever insights into the quirks of their personalities. The people who populate Balogh’s Class are exactly what I’d expect to find in a book set in a different era, and a different class, than my own—people whose motivations escape me. Austen wrote her novel prior to 1813 and barring a few phrases that could only be found in the Urban Dictionary of the time, I felt like every word resonated. I wasn’t surprised to find, according to Balogh’s back cover flap, that she’s written, “more than seventy novels and almost thirty novellas” since 1985. Seventy! Balogh must be cranking these babies out in her sleep (which is what it takes to make a decent living as a mid-list author these days, I hear).
I must say, she’s clearly in her groove when writing in this genre. With all her experience, the clothing, architecture, politics, and word usage that set the story in its time-frame must be ingrained in her brain. Some of my favorites are words and phrases that wouldn’t be caught dead in a modern book (but showed up here again and again and again) (and again, I kid you not): various forms of “plucky,” “haughty,” “chit,” “dash it” or “dash it all,” and my personal favorite “vulgar.” The characters purse their lips more than the fish on Finding Nemo. Reggie shudders elegantly, Annabelle gazes disdainfully, and everyone’s eyebrows are in a constant state of raisedness. Oh, and I would be remiss in describing this novel’s true charm if I left out the following, a new take on an old cliché that had me laughing out loud:
“Indignation did marvels for the bosom of a lady wearing stays and a flimsy gown. Hers heaved and looked for a moment as if it might pop free of her bodice. Alas, it did not happen. But it drew Reggie’s eyes, and it heated his blood.”
Please don’t get me wrong. I actually enjoyed this story. It was exactly the quick read I was looking for, and I suspect the author doesn’t take herself too seriously when producing (or mass-producing?) these books, assuming her other works of fiction are in a similar vein. If you read Regency Romance, you might like the light-hearted ‘A Matter of Class.” I don’t, and I did.
190 pages, Vanguard Press
Review by Melissa Conway
My go-to movie when I’m in need of a little romance in my life is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the one with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen (although I’m also partial to the A&E mini-series with Colin Firth). I love the music; the repeating ‘pianoforte’ tune played by different persons with varying levels of skill. I love the scenery; vast pre-Victorian brick homes surrounded by thriving gardens and farmland. And I love the characters; the perfect Knightley (except, bless her, for the endearing crookedness of her teeth) and the sexy Madfadyen, whose expressive eyes soon won me over, even though I’d rebelled at thinking of him as Darcy after so many viewings of Firth in the part.
Other than my sporadic intimacy with Jane Austen’s work (I’ve read the novel and seen and liked a few Emma’s, etc.), I’m not terribly knowledgeable about Historical Romance as a genre.
I don’t know why I picked up ‘A Matter of Class.’ Maybe I felt a sudden need for my go-to movie while browsing at the bookstore and gravitated to the romance section. I had never read author Mary Balogh before—never even heard of her—but the cover of the book has a single lady standing in one of those feminine Regency high-waisted dresses, wearing white gloves and holding a lace umbrella, and I immediately thought of Pride and Prejudice. Plus, the slim volume looked like a quick read (quick enough to maybe mitigate the guilt of avoiding the pile of books I’m supposed to be reading), so I brought it home.
The story starts out with our hero Reginald putting on a petulant show for his father in a discussion that sets the plot firmly in stone. Reginald is to marry the daughter of his father’s sworn enemy, a young woman who has disgraced herself by attempting to run off with the groomsman. This marriage is being forced upon the foppish Reginald to curb his spending, gambling, womanizing ways.
Lady Annabelle, the disgraced, newly affianced woman in question, is unhappy but resigned to the match. Her cold father, the Earl of Havercroft, can think of no other way to redeem her reputation but to marry her off, even to the son of new, and therefore distastefully crass, money.
Interspersed between Reginald and Annabelle’s points of view of the impending wedding are flashbacks to their childhood friendship. They meet at different stages of childhood along the river that acts as a boundary between the two families’ property. The reader sees that a romantic attachment has formed, so the “twist” at the end isn’t so much a surprise as a happy, “I knew it!”
The story is lighter than P&P, and not in a comedic sort of way. I’m used to Austen’s portrayal of characters whose depth is emphasized through clever insights into the quirks of their personalities. The people who populate Balogh’s Class are exactly what I’d expect to find in a book set in a different era, and a different class, than my own—people whose motivations escape me. Austen wrote her novel prior to 1813 and barring a few phrases that could only be found in the Urban Dictionary of the time, I felt like every word resonated. I wasn’t surprised to find, according to Balogh’s back cover flap, that she’s written, “more than seventy novels and almost thirty novellas” since 1985. Seventy! Balogh must be cranking these babies out in her sleep (which is what it takes to make a decent living as a mid-list author these days, I hear).
I must say, she’s clearly in her groove when writing in this genre. With all her experience, the clothing, architecture, politics, and word usage that set the story in its time-frame must be ingrained in her brain. Some of my favorites are words and phrases that wouldn’t be caught dead in a modern book (but showed up here again and again and again) (and again, I kid you not): various forms of “plucky,” “haughty,” “chit,” “dash it” or “dash it all,” and my personal favorite “vulgar.” The characters purse their lips more than the fish on Finding Nemo. Reggie shudders elegantly, Annabelle gazes disdainfully, and everyone’s eyebrows are in a constant state of raisedness. Oh, and I would be remiss in describing this novel’s true charm if I left out the following, a new take on an old cliché that had me laughing out loud:
“Indignation did marvels for the bosom of a lady wearing stays and a flimsy gown. Hers heaved and looked for a moment as if it might pop free of her bodice. Alas, it did not happen. But it drew Reggie’s eyes, and it heated his blood.”
Please don’t get me wrong. I actually enjoyed this story. It was exactly the quick read I was looking for, and I suspect the author doesn’t take herself too seriously when producing (or mass-producing?) these books, assuming her other works of fiction are in a similar vein. If you read Regency Romance, you might like the light-hearted ‘A Matter of Class.” I don’t, and I did.
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