The Player of Games (#73)

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks


What I said then:

The second book in his Culture sci-fi series, about a 'game' so complicated and vast that it consumes its players entire lives.

What I say now:

I read the first of Banks' set of novels about The Culture (a massive alliance of organic and AI civilisations, so advanced that they've created a post-scarcity world in which anybody can have anything, at any time, and never works a day in their life) a few years ago and liked it quite a lot. So here I am for a second go round, and The Player of Games didn't disappoint.

The thing I most appreciate about Banks' sci-fi writing is the perfect tone: they're page-turners, but they're smart. They contain interesting ideas, but never sacrifice the plot to those ideas. A lot of sci-fi disappears up its own arse trying to explain everything, and a lot of it is just fantasy in space, with science so inexplicable that it's basically magic. Banks manages very nicely to tread the line down the middle, and for that more than anything else, I'm a fan.

In The Player of Games, Gurgeh, one of The Culture's most brilliant (human) minds has devoted his life to games, and game theory. He is a born adept, picking up the rules, strategies and subtleties of any world's games as naturally as breathing. Basically, if Earth joined The Culture, Gurgeh would be the best chess player in history half an hour later. When The Culture discovers a (by their standards) barbaric empire called Azad whose power structure is based on a sprawling, incredibly complicated game (also called Azad), they send Gurgeh in to play. At stake is Azad's future and, as he moves through the tournament that will end with the winner crowned emperor, Gurgeh's life.

Gurgeh's story takes a while to get going: fully a third of the book is taken up with his time on his home orbital (kind of a man-made inverse planet) before he ever even leaves for Azad. In retrospect, it felt like much too long, and his relationships with a couple of drones weren't so interesting that I needed a hundred pages of them. Once we hit Azad, whose society Banks sketches with elegance (and some wonderful oddball flourishes) things start to pick up.

My main criticism from that point on would be that we never come to understand the game of Azad like we do the place. Given how much time Gurgeh spends playing, Banks remains pretty vague about how exactly the game works. I'm not unsympathetic: having made absolutely clear to us that Azad is the most complicated game anyone's ever seen, it would be impossible to actually follow through and invent the most complicated game anyone's ever seen. Still, a little more detail would have been nice. As Gurgeh is learning the game, we discover that some of the pieces are biological life-forms themselves, altering the way they're played based on the player's mood ... which is kind of a cool idea, but which is barely mentioned again.

The closer Gurgeh gets to the pointy end of the great tournament, the more the tension really ratchets up (certain political facets within Azad simply cannot allow a stranger to beat them at their own game), and I read the last hundred pages in a single setting.

Ultimately The Player of Games is a rollicking good read, and it's pitched right at the perfect level of intelligence that I'm looking for in a page-turner. It's never so philosophically minded that it becomes hard work, but it's also never dumbed down enough that I feel guilty about enjoying it. It really was just a blast.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Dracula by Bram Stoker
books to go: 71

Hello America (#74)

Hello America by J.G. Ballard


What I said then:

I love J.G. Ballard. I'm determined that before I die I will read everything he ever wrote. This one will be next, I suppose.

What I say now:

Yep, still love him.

Ballard began his career in science-fiction (though writing much more wonky, arty sci-fi than could normally be found in the early sixties), then went through this incredible period in the seventies where he fused his sci-fi themes with everyday (but off-kilter) settings and plots; The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise are the books I'm thinking of. Hello America came out in 1981, just after that golden period and just before his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (which, in its way, holds the key to all of his work), and it marked a brief return to the dystopias of his earlier works.

A hundred years in the future, an energy crisis has left North America a barren wasteland, the deserts of the southwest U.S.A. having spread to cover the entire continent. With severe oil rationing over the rest of the globe, most technologies have ground to a stand-still, or even devolved to mimic earlier, pre-Industrial Revolution times. A team of research scientists --- and one stowaway --- who are all descended from American refugees, land their ship at the edge of the dunes of New York City and set out on horseback to explore. Lo and behold, they find that the American Dream isn't quite as dead as they had imagined ...

If I'm being honest with myself, this is a fairly minor entry in Ballard's canon. He is usually at his best when describing one or two obsessive loners, driven characters who dance around each other under the influence of whatever bizarro concept he's dreamed up this time. The size of the cast here feels limiting, rather than the opposite: we're introduced to several scientists, and the stowaway, and the research ship's captain, yet because they all share similar motives, none of them emerges from the pack to become a distinct focal point for the book. It seems Ballard felt this too: there's a chapter in the middle in which he uses one character's diary entries to skip over a period of about three months, and incidentally to kill off a couple of people as well, just to keep things from getting too unwieldy.

Another flaw is the hamminess of a lot of his satire. Sure, I'm writing from thirty years in the future (and having studied postmodernism ad nauseam at university) but giving the 'native Americans' (those who never abandoned the continent, and have become Bedouin-like drifters through the desert) brand names for names? It's just trite, and silly ... and the kind of thing I'd have come up with while I was at university. When Heinz, Xerox, GM and Pepsodent turn up I'll admit, I was a little disappointed in the obviousness on show.

Also, setting an apocalyptic showdown in Las Vegas? Again, kind of obvious. Of course that mirage of a city, the decadent neon heart of America's love affair with everything tacky and shiny and loud, is a perfect setting for a book that's all about the core of American culture, but it just feels ... done. Hello America followed Stephen King's The Stand by just a few years, and surely Ballard was aware of it. I dunno, again, I was just a little disappointed that Ballard, whose imagination is normally off-the-charts original, was reduced to reproducing elements I'd seen before. He did it well, sure, but I come to his novels expecting to have my brain exploded. Didn't happen this time around.

Almost the most interesting aspect of the book for me was in a short interview with Ballard that the publishers have included in the back. In it, Ballard talks about his childhood in 1930's Shanghai as being more influenced by American culture than British, and how his return to Britain after the war had it seeming dismal and dull by comparison. His infatuation with, and critiques of, American culture are ever-present in his work, and that little bit of detail shed a lot of light on novels of his that I'd read previously. Even when they're set in England, they're about aspects of our culture that we'd usually regard as American: cars, and TV, and advertising, and Hollywood mythologising. Having glimpsed an American(ish) culture as a boy, then being forced into exile from it in ration-starved England, Ballard's obsessions become more understandable. In some ways those obsessions reach their apogee (if not their finest expression) in Hello America, and for that alone it's worth a read for a Ballard nut like myself.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Dracula by Bram Stoker
books to go: 71

Before They Are Hanged (#81) & The Last Argument of Kings (#80a)

Before They are Hanged & The Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie


What I said then:

Books 2 & 3 in a schlocky fantasy trilogy that, surprise surprise, is actually pretty good (so far).

What I say now:

In terms of contemporary fantasy stuff, Abercrombie is considered one of the best young writers going around. I've gotta admit, though, that these two books didn't really do it for me (and didn't really live up to the promise of The Blade Itself, the first in the trilogy which I liked quite a lot).

I've got no problem with an author playing with genre conventions, and making unusual narrative choices (and in a genre as stultifyingly conservative as fantasy, I'd really much prefer it), so long as those choices add up to something. Or go somewhere. Or make sense.

Unfortunately there were whole swathes of Abercrombie's work that led to a complete dead-end, story wise. Honestly, you could pretty much cut all of Before They are Hanged from the trilogy, and not even really miss it. Too much of what was going on in both of these books was inessential. They were chock full of pleasant-enough diversions, with interesting-enough things going on ... but which didn't have anything to do with anything else. I was willing to let that stuff ride in book 1, because there's always the chance it comes back later. By the time the trilogy was done, and  all those loose ends were simply left dangling, it was getting on my nerves.

Heck, there are entire major characters who Abercrombie simply can't find a use for them in the end. After spending three books in their company, it'd be nice if they had something to do, when the ginormous battle gets going ...

In terms of the prose, for a quick, pacy read like this, it's generally pretty good. He does have a habit of dropping into sentence fragments during more 'action-y' moments which grates after a while. I understand there are people out there who love that shit ... I'm just not one of them. I know you can write a proper sentence, Joe, why stop now? Do you really think the words 'and' and 'the' are going to slow down the action that much?

These were a disappointment, to say the least, and I probably won't be reading Abercrombie again.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
books to go: 78

Necronomicon (#82)

Necronomicon by H.P. Lovecraft

 
What I said then:

When I realised there was actually a book called the Necronomicon, I had to have it. Classic, bleak horror. Fun!

What I say now:

Actually, this wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd hoped. Lovecraft wrote a multitude of horror stories for American pulp magazines in the twenties and thirties, and Necronomicon is a chronologically arranged collection of some of his best, and most well known, tales. It's also eight hundred pages long.

There was my real error. If I'd picked up a book which contained a small handful of stories, and maybe one longer novella, I might have been able to appreciate the good things Lovecraft does. He's pretty good at establishing atmosphere; he sets most of his stories in a tainted, haunted version of rural New England, a setting which is pretty off-beat and unusual; and he definitely had a flair for inventing demons and ghouls and alien consciousnesses.

Unfortunately, under the weight of eight hundred god damn pages, all these positives came to seem repetitive and dreary. Honestly, the vast majority of the stories contained in this collection are incredibly similar: similar in setting, in tone, in language. Once I'd read five stories, I wasn't surprised (or even particularly interested) again.

Add to the repetitiveness his exorbitantly 'gothic' language, which sometimes was so overblown as to almost serve as its own parody. Check this sentence out (a character has just heard a horrifying sound): "To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones." Yikes.

That sentence gets at another of my issues with Lovecraft: he has an almost complete fear of actually describing anything. He won't tell you about the horrible monster or whatever, he'll relate how horrible his characters feel upon beholding it. Describing something's effects, rather than the thing itself, is always a good way to get on my nerves. (There is one way to make this work, which is to have me care so deeply about the characters, and know them so well, that hearing about the creature/alien/thing's effect on them is enough to sustain the drama. Unfortunately Lovecraft's characters are, without exception, two-dimensional nobodies, so this option wasn't available to him.)

There are more than a few stories where, having told us in exruciating detail about every step in an expedition into some haunted, blighted place, Lovecraft completely wimps out and says 'Oh, what they saw there was so horrifying that I can't even relate it to you, that's how scary it is! The end.' Seriously. That rivals 'and then they woke up and it was all a dream' as one of the worst ways you can end a story, and Lovecraft did it over and over again.

There were occasional stories that stepped out of his usual, frustrating patterns, and they were by far the highlights. The stories being arranged chronologically, it was also really interesting to follow his growth as a writer across the years: he definitely became a better writer with time and practice. Those occasional moments of interest were nowhere near enough to make up for wading through the rest of it though.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
books to go: 79
note: I've fallen way behind with my reviews (sorry 'bout that), which is why the numbers don't quite add up here. Not that anybody probably pays attention to this stuff, but I'm totally anal-retentive, so I feel compelled to explain.

Ghostwritten (#93)

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell


What I said then: 

Cloud Atlas was a little bit insane, but a lot brilliant. Here’s hoping this matches it.

What I say now:

Ghostwritten, Mitchell's first novel, certainly shares many strangenesses with Cloud Atlas, his best known. Both are hugely, ridiculously ambitious, trying to sum up the very essence of what it means to be a human being alive on this earth. And both are tapestries constructed from the fragments of multiple, disparate, barely-connected storylines.

In the case of Ghostwritten we get nine chapters, taking place in nine different locations, narrated by nine different characters. They are: a Japanese domestic terrorist hiding out after gassing a subway; a moony, indecisive kid working in a record store; a hopelessly corrupt banker; a Chinese tea-house owner; a non-corporeal spirit that can inhabit humans and control them like puppets; a Russian member of a group of art thieves; a womanising Londoner; an Irish physicist on the run from the CIA; and an irascible late-night New York DJ. The chapters are linked, but just barely. A character glimpsed in chapter five might momentarily reappear in chapter seven, then narrate chapter eight. Often the connections feel forced and unnatural, and they didn't seem to add a great deal to the book. He could have hit all his thematic targets just as well with wholly disconnected stories, I think.

Mitchell is a very good writer, and he performs the schtick of writing in nine different styles so well that I nearly forgot it was a schtick ... but I only nearly forgot. Given the eclectic collection of narrators, I felt Mitchell never quite changed his narrative voice enough with each narrative jump. A Chinese peasant and an Irish physicist should sound completely different, but too much of David Mitchell seeped through the writing. Cloud Atlas, which follows a similar pattern, is actually more successful in its literary ventriloquism because the different styles at play in that novel are so wildly disparate, there's no way they can blend into each other. (Briefly: Cloud Atlas doesn't just jump all over the world, it also spans a period of thousands of years, beginning in the 19th Century before leaping to the 1930's, the 1970's, the present, and then into the far-distant future.)

The problem with humanity, according to Mitchell, seems to be that we're a species of ghostwriters. We say things we don't mean, we parrot the words of others, we control other people and tell them what to say and do. We let ourselves be told what to say and do. We deny responsibility for our actions. This idea has its most literal expression during the chapter in which a disembodied spirit, moving from unknowing host to unknowing host, searches for clues to its own nature. The spirit can control its hosts (or rather, victims), forcing them to do anything it wants, and the same dynamic is at play in every other chapter in some form or other. The subway terrorist has given his will to the leader of a cult; the contents of the Irish physicist's brain are so valuable that the CIA is determined to confine her to a lifetime of captivity; the Russian art thief is the pawn of various gangsters; and so on.

Given the episodic nature of the book, obviously some chapters are going to work better than others. I suspect each reader will have different opinions as to which sections are the best. It's also pretty much impossible to judge the book until you've read the whole thing, and have the whole pattern complete in your mind (I loved reading Cloud Atlas, but it didn't really reveal itself until the very last sentence). The final chapter, which drifts into the realm of science-fiction, works beautifully. Not only does it do a good job of summing up the novel's themes, but everything that came before it was made better by knowing where we'd ended up.

Mitchell is an extravagantly talented writer, and (once I'm freed up) I'll continue to read his work (Heck, I've already got a copy of his most recent book sitting in a box under my bed). Ghostwritten is his first novel, though, so there are some cracks here that weren't apparent in Cloud Atlas. Still, better that he's getting better than getting worse, right?

Cheers, JC

about to read: A Clergyman's Daughter by George Orwell

books to go: 92

Stand on Zanzibar (#94)

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner.


What I said then:

Classic sci-fi that, according to the blurb at least, seems strangely prescient.

What I say now:

Oh. What a fool I am.

After my disastrous experience reading Jane Eyre over the Christmas period last year, when this December rolled around I thought 'How 'bout a sci-fi classic this time? How dense and difficult could it possibly be? It's probably an action-packed romp!'

I picked the wrong God-damn sci-fi classic. I was hoping for something as fun and exhilarating as The Stars My Destination, and I didn't get it.

Written in the late sixties but set in 2010, Brunner's world is grossly overpopulated. In the west, Eugenics Boards give licenses to bear children only to those with clean genes. Post-colonial Africa can't feed itself. Nobody knows what China's up to, as it has closed its borders. Psychologically unable to deal with the crowding in the cities, people frequently snap and run amok (becoming 'mukkers'), killing, starting riots, and generally going off the deep end. The plot of the book, such as it is, centres on two room-mates: Norman, an African-American, heads a giant American corporation's plan to basically buy an entire African country; and Donald, who is plucked from his indolent lifestyle and transformed into an assassin and spy, then sent to abduct a third-world geneticist who's made a startling discovery.

I say "the plot of this book, such as it is" because Brunner has a pretty unique approach to narrative: the whole thing is made up of hundreds of miniscule chapters, many of which have no connection (or very little connection) to anything else that's happening elsewhere in the novel. Often the various narratives stop dead so we can be treated to an avalanche of snippets from TV shows, or conversations on the street, or advertisements, or the collected works of an obnoxious social theorist named Chad C. Mulligan, all offered in a context-less blitz on the senses. This is a very deliberate tactic on Brunner's part: as well as allowing him to give a wide-ranging view of his imagined world, its disorientating effect is deliberately supposed to provoke a feeling of 'information overload' in the reader. There exists in the novel a super-computer named Shalmaneser which processes vast quantities of information from all over the world, looking for patterns. The layout of the novel forces us, the reader, to attempt to do the same. I guarantee you won't know who everybody is all the time, but that's okay, you're not really supposed to.

Unfortunately, that made it pretty much the worst possible book for me to read in the midst of the Christmas Retail Insanity I've been living through for the last few weeks. If I'd been a bit more alert and attentive I might have made more connections, understood it better, and liked it more. As I was reading, twisting the strands of the different stories together, I kept hoping that all this information would ultimately cohere into a satisfying novel.

Not much, however, could have made me satisfied with the way that Norman and Donald's twin narratives both petered out with endings that were not remotely satisfying. Norman's tale, in particular, had a 'Seriously?!?!?' ending, that made me feel that slogging through 650 pages (maybe 150 of which featured Chad Fucking Mulligan) to get there. Very briefly: the African nation Beninia that Norman's company wants to both exploit and help (for a pretty cynical book, the corporation's motives are strangely un-arsehole-ish), has a history of non-violence that is remarkable --- despite grinding poverty and multiple warring tribal groups spilling over the borders, there hasn't been a single murder in fifteen years --- and which needs an explanation. And the explanation sucked big time.

While certainly interesting, I could only recommend this one to big sci-fi fans who are willing to find pleasure in the incidental details of an imaginary world. Brunner's setting is really very convincing, well thought through and imaginative. The way he applies that setting to the telling of a story is less convincing.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
books to go: 93

My Year of Regrets

Sorry about the silence on here recently. I don't have any other excuse other than to say that it's December, and I work in retail. If you've gone into a shop of any kind in the last two weeks, you'll know what I'm talking about.

On a happier note, that whole 'Death of the Book' thing that people have been going on about doesn't seem to actually be a thing that's happening. At all. At least, not if the store I work in is any sort of a guide. (Shameless plug: Avenue Bookstore in Albert Park, Melbourne. Come see us sometime.) You can't really give an e-book as a gift, can you? Even if it's only because of Christmas, the ink-and-paper kind of book will still be around for a long, long time.

Anyway, it's December, and I'm fucking exhausted (see picture). Hence, no blogs recently.

Starting today, though, you'll be getting a positive avalanche of year-end round-up type posts. Rather than the usual 'I liked/didn't like X, Y and Z,' I thought I'd begin with something slightly different.

This whole 'reading the stuff I already own' project is hard on two levels: one, there's a bunch of stuff I own that I figured I'd never read, ever (*cough* Proust *cough* Homer *cough* shitloads of others as well *cough*) and ploughing through them all will, at times, be a massive chore. But second, and by my reckoning even harder, is the fact that there are heaps of awesome-looking books being released all the time. And, working in a bookstore, I'm aware of every single bloody one of them. And they're always sitting there, right in the corners of my eyes, taunting me. So this first 2011 summation is not about books I've read, it's about books that have come out that I've really wanted to read, and haven't. These are my 'Regrets of the Year.'

The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips.

Arthur Phillips is the main character of his own novel, and the first part of the book details his youth, travelling the country with his itinerant, conman father and Shakespeare-obsessed sister. When his father, in jail for life, bequeaths the adult Arthur Phillips a complete 'lost' Shakespeare play called, funnily enough, The Tragedy of Arthur, he has no idea if it's genuine, or if it's his dad's last great sting. Sharing a similar structure to Nabokov's Pale Fire, the main text of the novel is the fictional Arthur Phillips' introduction to the also-fictional Shakespeare play, which is then reproduced in its full five-act glory at the end of the book.

Having the balls to write an entire play in Shakespearian language is one thing, pulling it off to such an extent that critics are raving is quite another. And, now that somebody's thought of it, who doesn't want to read a Shakespeare-type play dealing with Arthurian legend? A number of my colleagues have been going mental about this Tragedy of Arthur, and I really want to join in.

The Submission by Amy Waldman.

After the destruction of the World Trade Center, a competition is held for architects to design the memorial. To ensure the contest's fairness, it's conducted 'blind' --- nobody knows who designed which entry. The jury, which includes survivors and relatives of victims, finally come to a decision, open the envelope containing the winner's name ... and discover that they've chosen a design by an American Muslim. Cue political and emotional fallout.

There hasn't been an enormous amount of serious fiction dealing with the events of 9/11, and what there has been (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and Falling Man by Don DeLillo are the two that immediately come to mind), I haven't read. This rather simple concept strikes me as an elegant way of tackling the issues that arose in the aftermath of the attacks. In particular, it raises the question of 'Where Islam stands in relation to the West?' in a more nuanced way than is usual, and it explores the notion that an inclusive multi-culturalism is necessary for the success of pluralist democracies, and more necessary now than ever.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu.

Trying to summarise this insanely-confusing-sounding book without having actually read it is probably the ultimate in foolish attempts at summation. Here goes anyway: our main character, Charles Yu, is a time-travel repairman who lives in his time machine so that time doesn't have to actually move forward. His dad invented time travel, then went missing. While trying to find the one day in the future where he and his father get to meet, Charles winds up stuck in a loop where he's both reading and writing a book called 'How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.' After that, I've no idea what the hell happens.

That's as much as I've been able to piece together from blurbs, reviews, and talking to a regular at the store who's read it and loved it. With this and Tragedy of Arthur (and Crash), I obviously have a thing for meta-fiction in which the author uses himself as the main character. I do love sci-fi, but a lot of what's coming out these days seems stuck in a bit of a rut, and this one caught my eye because it felt new and different and, bravest of all, fun.

The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites.

The only non-fiction on this list, The Toaster Project details Thwaites' attempt to build a toaster from scratch. That sounds reasonably simple, doesn't it? But what if I tell you that the simplest electric toaster he can find has 407 distinct parts? And that when he says 'from scratch,' he really means it? As in, he begins by visiting mines in Wales and digging metals out of the ground. There ain't no 'heading to the hardware store' here, he learns to smelt (I'm not even sure what smelting is), and he makes his own plastic ... pretty badly, if the picture on the cover is anything to go by.

Post industrial revolution, the vast majority of us are so disconnected from the fruits of our labour that the concept of making something with our bare hands is ridiculous. Right now I'm typing on a keyboard, looking at a monitor, and posting on the internet, but I have no clue how any of those things work, or what processes are needed to call them into existence. Thwaites' quest might be a little silly (what good quest isn't?), but I suspect that what this book has to say about the products we use so unthinkingly, and where they come from, might just be fascinating. 

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.

The other four books on this little list are by authors I've never read before. This one's a bit different. Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex is one of the great books of this shiny new millenium, a beautiful novel that links the life story of a transgendered person with the history of the twentieth century, and uses the juxtaposition to shine new light on both. It's really stunning, and if you haven't read it, you damn well should.

So as soon as I heard that Eugenides had a new book coming, The Marriage Plot jumped to the top of my 'read that when I get a chance' pile. Everybody at the store was just as excited as me. We badgered the publisher's rep to get us advance copies. We chose it as the monthly read for our in-store bookclub. We were pumped.

Then it arrived, and people started reading it, and word trickled back to me. 'It's ... okay,' was the verdict. 'But it's no Middlesex.' And then I started reading the reviews. If I had to sum up the literary world's reaction to The Marriage Plot in one word, it would be 'disappointing.' My regret with this one is more to do with timing: I should have struck when the iron was hot, reading it when my expectation was peaking. Now it's no longer at the head of the queue of must-reads, and it'll probably be years, rather than months, before I bother. To feel this letdown by a book I haven't even read yet is probably stupid, but there it is.

So those are my top five regrets from 2011. When I get around to reading them, who knows whether I'll like them or not ... but until then I can still convince myself that they're five instant classics of indescribable beauty. (Not like Proust or Homer. That shit will never last ...)

Anybody got any recommendations for more good 2011 reads? Taunt me by sharing them in the comments. Please describe what's great about them in excruciating detail. I love it.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
books to go: 94

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

A Dance with Dragons (#101b)

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin.

What I said a few days ago:

Uh-oh, this is the second time in a row that I've used my 'I get to get a book!' to buy the new entry in an epic fantasy series. My geek is showing. But it's nothing to be ashamed of: Martin is a master of narrative and, with the HBO show winning raves and garnering him new fans, the whole world's beginning to realise it.

What I say now:

Okay, this is the fifth book in a series, so I figure it'll be more useful to Martin newbies to kind of review the series as a whole.

Put bluntly, George R.R. Martin kicks arse, and I am completely addicted to his books. I'm not a downloader, so I haven't had a chance to check out the pretty well-reviewed (and popular)  HBO series that is being adapted from his works, but I'll be buying it on DVD at the first possible moment. I am somebody who's more fantasy-inclined than most, but this guy stands above his genre to a ridiculous degree. He's like the Don Bradman of fantasy writing.

What is it about his books that gets me all hot and bothered like this? He is, simply, one of the best pure story-tellers I've ever come across. He has a genius for narrative that is unmatched in the entirety of my reading.

The series is mostly set in the fictional continent of Westeros, where seven former kingdoms have, through centuries of warfare, been joined into one large, uneasy realm. The land is rife with bitter factionalism and Machiavellian politicking. Very, very, very unusually for fantasy novels, those fantasy elements that are present are much less important than the complicated interactions between the human characters. Even his tiny characters, insignificant though they might seem, have their own motivations, desires, and plans.

Martin writes from many different characters' viewpoints, alternating with every chapter, which allows him to view every event from both sides (I say 'both sides' as if there's only two, but it's normally more complicated than that!). In the third book, he suddenly takes us into the viewpoint of a character who, to that point, we've found utterly repugnant, and humanises him. It's a brilliant way of making his central point: nobody in Westeros is wholly good or wholly bad, everybody is some kind of shade of grey. Again, how unusual is that for a fantasy novel, the genre that simplifies character more than any other (except maybe romance): the naive protagonist destined to defeat evil, the dark lord who wants to crush the whole world beneath his yoke, the pristine princess whose love is pure. None of these characters appear in Martin's work, and if they did, they'd be eaten alive.

Buy A Game of Thrones, the first in the series, and read it ... and then thank me.

On A Dance with Dragons specifically, I'm a little less enthusiastic. Where the first three books in the series are pretty nearly perfect in my view, four and five have been slightly less satisfying. So many characters, subplots and viewpoints have been introduced that events have slowed down a bit, making us wait a long time for any gratification. In A Dance with Dragons there are two specific plot-threads where we spend a lot of time, but never reach any satisfactory resolution. Martin has proven himself so adept at balancing his story that I remain hopeful that the series, when completed, will work as a whole but I can't deny that right now I found the most recent entry a slight disappointment; we did a lot of travelling, but very little arriving. Still, when your main issue with a thousand page book is that it was too short, the author must be doing a hell of a lot right.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
books to go: 100

Last and First Men (#102)

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon

What I said then: 

A sci-fi classic, this one covering the entire future evolution of humanity.

What I say now:

Re-defines 'Epic.'

In a nutshell: having a more nuanced vision of the nature of time, future versions of humanity have discovered the ability to communicate telepathically with other advanced species from the past. One member of the 18th race of men, the Last Men, has invaded the mind of a writer in the late 1920's (one of us, the First Men), and he/she/it dictates this book, which covers the entire future of humanity. Or, as the Last Man puts it in his/her/its foreword: "The actual writer thinks he is merely contriving a work of fiction. Though he seeks to tell a plausible story, he neither believes it himself, nor expects others to believe it. Yet the story is true. A being whom you would call a future man has seized the docile but scarcely adequate brain of your contemporary, and is trying to direct its familiar processes for an alien purpose. Thus a future epoch makes contact with your age. Listen patiently; for we who are the Last Men earnestly desire to communicate with you, who are members of the First Human Species. We can help you, and we need your help."

From that beginning, the book takes us through the rise and fall of we First Men, then traces across the next two billion years the various rises and falls of humankind. It has a larger scope than any book I've ever known. We build magnificent societies, then destroy them. We get sick, then become well. We blow each other up, and seek shelter together. We war, and we make peace. Eventually we become smart enough to realise our limitations, then use our new knowledge of biology and DNA (Stapledon refers to it as 'germ-plasm') to try and build more perfect successors. We create new humanities to be our descendants, then they turn on us. We are invaded by Martians, but defeat them. When the Earth is about to be consumed, we travel to Venus and, needing a new home, we commit genocide on the Venusians. The Fourth Men are brains in boxes. The Seventh Men can fly. The Ninth Men leave Venus for Neptune. The Eighteenth Men diagnose a disease that is spreading from star to star, and realise that every sun within reach of them will shortly implode: there is no escape, they will be the Last.

The central conceit of the book is a brilliant one, but the use Stapledon makes of it is flawed in many ways. The whole thing is written in an incredibly dry, academic tone that makes it a book to be waded through, rather than enjoyed. I had to read just about every sentence twice to make sure I understood it, often I had to reach for a dictionary, and sometimes I just let myself be confused and moved on. It's impenetrable. There are no characters, no stories. Very occasionally, when the fate of humanity did rest on one or two people, Stapledon takes the trouble to tell you why. But that happens only rarely: most of the time he restricts himself to describing the great waves of thought, or science, or war, or disease that build us up or tear us down. There's not much that offers an easy way in to the book.

The other issue I had was begun in that quote I wrote out above: 'We need your help,' the Last Man writes, and I thought (not, I reckon, unreasonably) that as we moved through humanity's history, this plea would come to bear on the tale in some way. I expected, in short, that somehow Stapledon would find a way to twist this dry history lesson into a story. Perhaps in reading this book we could take some action which would, all those billions of years hence, affect what was happening to the Eighteenth Men? I was kept reading by the implication that it would all be to a purpose, in the end ... but it wasn't, which disappointed me.

Often Stapledon ascribes a certain trait to a race of men which chimes perfectly with the psychology of our times. You'd read about something someone does in ten million years time, and it would read perfectly true. At other times, he couldn't be more wrong: the book was published in 1930, and Stapledon's version of his immediate future is almost the exact opposite of what was about to happen. Though you have to mine for it, the pleasure of the book is in sorting the realistic things from the fanciful, and in realising how little there often is between them.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Mr. Darwin's Shooter by Roger McDonald
books to go: 102

The Children of Húrin (#109)

The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien

What I said then:

This smells like a cynical cash-in, but I bought it, so it obviously worked on me.

What I say now:

This might be a heretical notion to a lot of my fellow geeks, but I think Middle-Earth needs hobbits to really work.

The Children of Húrin is a story from far back in the 'history' of Middle-Earth, pre-dating The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by thousands of years in Tolkien's chronology of his imagined world. It tells of one anecdote in the long wars waged by elves and men against Morgoth (an evil fucker who wants to take over the world and enslave everybody and just be generally evil and cover all the lands in darkness and stuff). Húrin, a mortal man, gets captured in battle and is brought before Morgoth, but defies him to his face, so Morgoth curses Húrin's kin.

His son Túrin and daughter Niënor, separated from their earliest childhoods, become pawns in Morgoth's revenge, living their entire lives under the weight of his curse and eventually being destroyed by it, despite their best efforts to defy him. One of Morgoth's lieutenants, a flightless dragon called Glaurung, causes Niënor to forget who she is; when Túrin chances on her wandering in a forest, he rescues her. They fall in love, marry and conceive a child, at which point the dragon releases Niënor from her spell. Túrin kills the dragon, Niënor kills herself in horror at her unwitting incest, then Túrin does the same. It's not exactly a barrel of laughs.

The problem is that Tolkien's elves and 'high' men are characters unidentifiable with us everyday mortals. They are removed from any recognisable human psychology or understandable motivations. The codes of chivalry and honour that they live by make all their actions read as though they are pawns being moved by the author however he requires, rather than full-blooded characters groping towards decisions in their own right.

Which is why the hobbits of The Lord of the Rings are so central to that book's success: being much more down-to-earth folks than the high-faluting, cultured people they meet, the hobbits act as guides and commentators to the audience. They prick the pomposity of what's going on around them. Unfortunately, The Children of Húrin's pomposity remains unpricked. I found it impossible to feel any connection to what was going on, because all of the characters were so emotionally removed from me.

This is an expansion of a chapter in The Silmarillion and it actually, in my opinion, works better in the shorter form. The Silmarillion is a curious book: rather than being the story of Middle-Earth, it's more like a book written about the history of Middle-Earth, like it's an academic reconstruction of ancient texts or something. The nearest I can come to describing it is that it's like, rather than being a Middle-Earth version of The Iliad or The Odyssey, it's the fictional equivalent of a dry, dull book about greek myths. The Silmarillion is unquestionably a weird reading experience, but I think it's more successful than The Children of Húrin, because the expanded version of the story, so lacking in emotionality, shouldn't be presented as narrative fiction.

It doesn't help that Christopher Tolkien, in editing The Children of Húrin together, has 'helpfully' provided a long introduction to sketch out where we're at in Middle-Earth's history at the beginning of the book. This twenty pages is essentially an interminable list of made-up names, and is boring as hell. I was in a bad mood before the story of The Children of Húrin even kicked in.

And now the geeks of the world will descend and tear me to pieces, I'm sure. Sometimes duty calls ...

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter
books to go: 108