Drood (#97)

Drood by Dan Simmons

What I said then: 

A Victorian mystery which has Dickens and Wilkie Collins as its protagonists

What I say now:

It's possible that I did this book a major disservice by reading it immediately after I had read Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. Simmons' book is told in the first person, from Wilkie Collins' point of view, and the fact that I was juxtaposing real Wilkie Collins with fake Wilkie Collins made the fake version nigh-on unbearable. Every time Simmons got the voice wrong (which was often) it jolted me out of the story. Maybe with a bit more time and space in between them, all of Simmons' infelicities of style wouldn't have been so noticeable, or bothered me so much. As it is, his effort at literary ventriloquism struck me as a complete and utter failure.

Even more unfortunately, the story was annoying as hell. Charles Dickens, returning from a trip to France with his mistress (and ... the mother of his mistress?!), is involved in a horrific train crash. As he helps to pull people from the wreckage, he encounters a mysterious apparition: a disquieting man in a long black opera cape, with no nose and severed fingers, who has a lisping hiss of a voice and is named Drood. Drood, may or may not be an Egyptian hypnotist, a master criminal, a serial killer, or a figment of Dickens' and his protege Wilkie Collins' imaginations, or all of the above. Over the next five years, the last of Dickens' life, Drood haunts, beguiles and terrifies the famous author, and casts an even greater shadow over the grasping, peevish, Collins who narrates our tale.

Drood is 800 pages long, and is stuffed with incident, but it was all so haphazardly thrown together that I'd struggle to elongate that brief summary. Soooo much happened, but it was all soooo meaningless. Not once, but several times, there would come some extraordinary revelation that should have changed everything about the relationship between Dickens and Collins, only when next they met, everything would go on exactly as before. Sometimes no reason was given for this break from cause & effect storytelling, and sometimes Simmons fell back on the excuse of hypnotism (mesmerism, he calls it) to explain why events have no seeming consequence. I couldn't tell you which annoyed me more. There's even one moment, I shit you not, when an entire chapter is explained away with the old 'Then I woke up and it was all a dream' chestnut. Doesn't everybody in the world know that trope is dramatic death? Doesn't everybody know never to use it?

Collins --- jealous, drug-addicted, psychopathic, possibly mad and possibly hypnotised --- is an unreliable narrator, but his unreliability is never utilised for any purpose. The best unreliable narrator stories will still, at their close, offer satisfaction to the reader because they'll explain how, why, and in what way their narrator was concealing the truth. When Simmons closes Drood he leaves us still completely in the dark as to how much of the preceding 800 pages was madness, how much was hypnotism, how much was exaggeration and how much was true. At that point it's not clever, it's just frustrating.

My other beef was with Simmons' insistence on cramming in every damn bit of research he could find, regardless of whether it served his story or not. So much of this novel (not half of the total word count, maybe, but probably a third) consisted of tidbits about Dickens, or about Collins, or about the time they lived in, that simply had no need to be there. There'd be entire chapters in which the story would stop dead in its tracks while we were treated to a lovingly detailed description of what Dickens and Collins got up to in February of 1861. Okay, okay, I'm over-stating the case there ... but I'm overstating it by less than you might think.

All in all, this was a crushing disappointment. I've got Hyperion, another Dan Simmons novel on my shelf. It might be a very long while before I pull that one down and give it a go.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
books to go: 96

To Have and Have Not (#104)

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway


What I said then:

I inherited a Hemingway box-set from my sister, and this is one of the ones I've got left.

What I say now:

After I finished To Have and Have Not I did a little bit of research, looking up online reviews and stuff. And I was quite relieved to discover that this is generally considered Hemingway's weakest novel ... so I wasn't imagining things! Apparently Hemingway himself said it was written in a rush to fulfil contractual obligations with his publisher, and called it 'a pile of trash.' I don't know if I'd go so far as him, but he's in the ballpark.

During the Great Depression, Harry Morgan has for years made a living running contraband between Cuba and Florida. Now he's settling down, putting his criminal past behind him and trying to eke out a living taking rich arseholes out sport-fishing. When one of his customers stiffs him on a thousand dollar tab and leaves him penniless, Morgan agrees to take on that old cliche and do one last job.

At this point, it's pretty entertaining. Hemingway does a good, economical job of introducing us to Morgan, a man who's fed up and out of his depth, and forcing him to plunge back into a life of crime. It could be the start of a decent little thriller. But, after agreeing to ferry a dozen Chinese from Cuba to the U.S., Morgan turns from a hapless dupe into a stone-cold psycho. He throttles the leader of the Chinese, dumps the rest overboard, and steals their money. For no reason. It runs absolutely counter to the character we've been introduced to, and makes me lose any interest whatsoever in Morgan's fate. This being a Hemingway novel, he eventually gets what's coming to him, but from throttling-Mr-Sing on, it is absolutely impossible to invest any emotion in Harry Morgan, or anything that happens to him. I was reading it to finish it, not for any pleasure.

Hemingway also does something bizarre with the last third of the book: suddenly, after Morgan and Morgan alone has been the focus for the first two-thirds, Hemingway starts tossing in secondary, and tertiary, and quaternary (look it up!) characters by the armful. He's the literary equivalent of Bernard Black making wine, only not nearly as much fun. We're suddenly introduced to a whole new set of rich arseholes (the equivalent, I suppose, of the rich arsehole who screwed over Morgan at the beginning) and asked to care about their insipid affairs, decaying marriages and inevitable suicides. It's really strange, and utterly pointless.

The writing itself is quite good (though I could have done without the random swinging between first and third person), but it can't make up for a plot composed almost entirely of holes. I've still got For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises to come; I hope they're better than this.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The March by E.L. Doctorow
books to go: 103

Gomorrah (#107)

Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano

What I said then:

An expose of the Camorra, rivals to the Mafia as Italy’s most dangerous network of murderers and thieves.

What I say now:

Gomorrah was absolutely dreadful, to the point that it was painful to read. For the first time since I began this challenge I was tempted to chuck a book in the bin and cross it off the list that way. Not even Jane Eyre got my goat to this extent.

Saviano is a native of Naples, a city which has been effectively taken over by the Camorra (the local equivalent of the Sicilian Mafia) at every single level of its bureaucracy. And when he's writing about the Camorra, about things that they are doing or things that they have done, then the book is fascinating. Unfortunately, most of the book is not about the Camorra, but about Roberto Saviano's reaction to living in a Camorra-infested city. Saviano obviously believes himself part-poet, part-prophet, part-philosopher, and the majority of the book is taken up with self-important, pseudo-psychological blather about the meaning of what's being described. It's completely insufferable.

Let me give an example of what I mean. After a chapter detailing a war between rival Camorra clans (a chapter that consists almost entirely of a massive list of dead men's names, with no context given ... but that's another complaint), Saviano writes this: "It was as if I had an indefinable odor on me. Like the smell that permeates your clothing when you go to one of those fried-food places. When you leave, the smell gradually becomes less noticeable, blending with the poison of car exhaust, but it's still there. You can take countless showers, soak for hours in heavily perfumed bath salts and oils, but you can't get rid of it. And not because --- like the sweat of a rapist --- it has penetrated your flesh, but because you realise it was already inside you. As if it were emanating from a dormant gland that all of a sudden started secreting, activated more by a sensation of truth than of fear. As if something inside your body were able to tell when you are staring at the truth, perceiving it with all your senses, with no mediation."

A couple of things about this passage (and seriously, there are hundreds just like it scattered throughout the book): the observant among you might have noticed that it's not about anything! The whole passage is a metaphor (it starts "It was as if I had...") with not one, but two similes ("like the smell that permeates your clothing" and "like the sweat of a rapist") contained inside the metaphor! That's just horrendous writing, confusing as hell ... and worse, it's completely devoid of content. What does the Camorra have to do with the above passage? Not a god-damn thing. And that's not even mentioning the bizarrely melodramatic language, which goes past 'so bad it's good' and ends up back at 'dreadful' again. "Like the sweat of a rapist [...] it has penetrated your flesh." Seriously, Roberto? SERIOUSLY?!?!?

The shame of it is, that when Saviano actually has something to say, it's worth listening to. The best moments of the book are the moments of actual reportage, when he's simply telling a tale, rather than commenting on it. There's the enthusiastic Camorrista who uses his connections to travel to Russia for an audience with his hero Mikhael Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47. Or the teenage kids who drive trucks of toxic waste to illegal dumpsites because ordinary truckers won't go near them, then boast of their bravery. Or the junkie girl who revives her overdosing boyfriend by laying a handkerchief across his face and urinating on it (don't ask me how that worked ... but apparently it did). If Saviano had reported the facts, rather than insisting on intruding on them, he could have written a hell of a book. As is, unfortunately, you have to slog through endless BS to get to the good stuff.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
books to go: 106

Roadside Picnic (#112)

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

What I said then:

Russian science-fiction with a literary bent.

What I say now:

Hmm. More like 'Russian science-fiction with an annoying bent.' As with a lot of sci-fi, the ideas are really interesting ... but the story ain't.

Years before Roadside Picnic begins, aliens arrived on earth, hung about for a while, then nicked off. There was no contact between humanity and the aliens while they were here, but when they went, they left behind them a bunch of mysterious debris of dangerously advanced technologies. The Zone, where they were encamped, has been quarantined by the government to allow for study. But the black market in alien artefacts leads a reckless band of so-called 'stalkers' to make illicit trips into the Zone, hunting for goodies. Red Schuhart, drunken bum and gifted stalker, makes various trips into the Zone, at the urging of crooks, scientists, and government functionaries.

So far, so good. Some of the best writing in the book is saved for Red's trips into the Zone, and the bizarre and fantastical conditions that are at play there. Red must read the air and the light, because even the slightest disturbance could herald the coming of something terrible, and deadly. During those (genuinely tense) scenes in which Red slowly, carefully, picks the meat from the bones, the novel really works.

Unfortunately, once the Strugatskys enter the realms of character, emotion and motivation, they are obviously much less comfortable ... and much less skilful. The plot, such as it is in a book as slender as this one (144 pages), is a disjointed, rambling mess. As a reader, you're never allowed to know why people are acting the way they are, or why they feel the way they do. Characters are introduced, then dropped and never seen again. The protagonist changes for a chapter, to no apparent purpose, then changes back. The Zone suddenly develops new abilities halfway through the book, which pass unremarked. It's all a hopeless muddle.

A book as small and as disappointing as this one doesn't leave a whole lot for me to say, I'm afraid. Oh well.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
books to go: 111

Jane Eyre (#116)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

What I said then:

Because I should, I suppose. (side note --- sheesh, can you sense my reluctance?)

What I say now:

Fucking Jane Eyre. 

Okay, before I start ripping into an acknowledged classic, I should at least own up to the fact that it was absolutely the wrong book at the wrong time. I doubt I'd have loved it no matter when I read it, but coming at the height of my Christmas-retail-insanity inspired snarkiness, I don't think I'm going to give it a very fair hearing. So please, take all these criticisms with a grain of salt, I'm almost certainly gonna bag it way more than it deserves.

So Jane, the titular character, is an orphan who's looked after by her mean aunt. Then she gets sent to a badly run school where her best friend dies. Then we skip ahead about eight years, and Jane leaves the school to become a governess, working for the mysterious, brooding Mr. Rochester. She falls in love with him. But (gasp!) Mr. Rochester has a dark secret that will keep them apart. Etcetera, etcetera. I bet you can't guess how it ends.

The novel is written in the first person, from Jane's point-of-view. Unfortunately, I found Jane to be a very dull character. She is, in her own quiet way, entirely good ... which is a fact that doesn't really lend itself to a dramatic narrative. While Jane has many obstacles placed in front of her, it's utterly predictable how she'll react to all of them, because she's entirely good. She has no inner turmoil, no personal demons to face, because she's entirely good. She's boring as hell, because she's entirely good.

Mr. Rochester, on the other hand, is kind of a prick. Sarcastic and mean, there's never any hint of a reason why Jane should fall in love with him (except for the fact that he's the only adult male she's ever had any prolonged contact with). Jane herself goes out of her way to inform us that he's ugly, ill-tempered, callous and cruel. So, to me, the entire 'romance' was without foundation, and therefore hopelessly compromised. I could feel nothing for either of them, because I couldn't see any reason why they'd feel anything for each other.

Huge chunks of the book have no bearing on the rest of the story. There's a very long sequence at the beginning with Jane as a young girl, first at her aunt's house and then at school. This takes up nearly a quarter of the book, yet has no real bearing on the movement of the narrative. In my edition, (spoilers ahead) Jane and Rochester attempt to be married for the first time on page 380. That could easily have been page 80, for all the import that the early scenes had on what followed.

Also, there's a 'mad' character. And I know Bronte was writing before the whole science of psychology even existed, but her treatment of insanity was unsympathetic and inane. It really annoyed the hell out of me.

And THEN, if all that wasn't enough to piss me off, about three-quarters of the way in to the novel, the whole story turns on a narrative coincidence so preposterous, so ridiculous, so unlikely, so ... well ... so fucking STUPID, that I consider it an unforgivable sin on the part of the writer. It was so dumb it actually made me laugh aloud. And if Jane Eyre hadn't lost me yet, it sure did then.

Ugh, I'm going to go read some sci-fi to get this stain out of my brain.

Yours in frustration, JC

about to read: The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

books to go: 115