Les Miserables (#79)

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo


What I said then:

Not only is it 1,000 pages long, but it promises misery in its very title. Uh-oh.

What I say now:

By far the greatest thing this 'read everything I own' challenge has done for me is forcing me to sit down and give a chance to those classics which I would never have opened otherwise.

I was dreading Les Miserables. And then I read it, and holy hell, it was absolutely wonderful.

It's almost doing Victor Hugo and his masterpiece a disservice to call it a novel. As you finish it (you'll probably be crying), it feels like so much more than that. It's hard to get across the grandeur, the titanic majesty, the all-encompassing, all-consuming nature of this book and how it's written. If every other novel tells a story, then Les Miserables tells a whole world.

The only thing remotely comparable (in my reading, anyway) is Moby Dick, but where Melville brings an intense focus to a very narrow, limited time and place (the final voyage of the Pequod), Hugo is trying to do the same thing with something as large and ungainly as Paris, over the course of about twenty years. His ambition is so enormous that it's absurd; when he pulls it off, all you can be is flabbergasted.

Where can I even begin? Well, there's the huge cast of characters, all of whom feel vital and alive, despite also fitting neatly into one-dimensional archetypes. It's actually incredible how he does this, taking a stock character with one personality trait and making them seem so human, and so real. I couldn't even tell you how he does it, except to say that perhaps, by examining each of his cliches to such a microscopic level, he finds again the human truth that made it a cliche in the first place.

There's his magical turns of phrase. All of a sudden, in the middle of a long paragraph, there'll suddenly be a sentence that sums up an idea with such clarity and succinctness that it feels like an entirely new thought, minted fresh, that nobody's ever had before, yet which is obviously and utterly true.

And there's the way, across hundreds of pages, an uncountable myriad of plot threads slowly draw together, forming a vast tapestry that feels completely satisfactory. Nothing is left unexplained, no character's fate is left untold, yet it all hangs together as one single story. A momentous, epic, grand, beautiful story.

Now, look, there are undeniably things about Les Miserables which will challenge a modern audience. There's the way the same ten or so people keep bumping into each other, one fantastic coincidence following another. There's the way that Hugo, clearly a wannabe philosopher, treats his story like a clothesline, hanging on it all sorts of colourful digressions. (This actually becomes endearing, mainly because he's so good at it: he takes a timeout for fifty pages while he tells the story of the battle of Waterloo; he gives an exhaustive account of the criminal slang of the time; when his hero, Jean Valjean, enters a convent, he gives a history of the building, then a history of the order of nuns that has made it their home, then discusses that orders place within Catholic doctrine, then talks for a while about why he thinks religion is stupid. At the climax of the novel, at one of the moments of highest excitement, he spends twenty pages giving a history of Paris' sewers, and then ten more using them as an extended metaphor for the darkness in humanity's soul.) But if you are willing and able to forgive these eccentricities, you'll be in for one of the reads of your life. I promise.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
books to go: 77

Crime and Punishment (#80b)

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky


Why I bought it:

After getting over my fear of 19th century Russian authors with Anna Karenina, I thought I'd have another crack at one of the big ones. After doing some highly unscientific research (which mostly consisted of reading blurbs) I decided Dostoevsky was the most likely to be my cup of tea.

What I say now:

Crime and Punishment is a fascinating book. It manages to examine a tawdry, grubby little crime in such minute, exquisite detail that it actually becomes kind of beautiful, even transcendent.

Raskolnikov, a poor (and almost starving) student, manages in his addled state to philosophically justify committing a murder. After briefly (and ineffectually) planning it out, he goes ahead and kills an elderly pawn-shop owner. The actual murder scene is an incredible piece of writing, suspenseful and horror-filled to a degree that any contemporary crime writer would surely be envious of. It also takes place barely one-sixth of the way into the book: the bulk of the novel from then on is taken up by Raskolnikov's attempts to come to terms with what he's done (and continue to justify it in the face of sordid reality), and to stay ahead of the police.

Raskolnikov's wrestling with his conscience, which might in lesser hands be boring ('a man thinks' is hardly the stuff of great drama ... except when it's great, I guess) is given a kind of feverish, manic intensity by the thrill of Dostoevsky's prose. He also makes a genius decision in having Raskolnikov fall ill immediately after the crime: as the character's literal fever rages, his thoughts and feelings are clouded and confused in terms of real-life logic, but make perfect sense on a thematic and philosophical level.

Though it's founded on a moment of horrific violence, Raskolnikov's journey is strangely touching. A large part of his thinking before the murder, and even afterwards, is that, well, some men are great, and are destined for great things. The usual rules of society cannot apply to them. Raskolnikov fervently believes he has greatness inside of him, that he is capable of something magnificent. The murder becomes almost a test of this: if he is truly to lead a remarkable life, then he can't be caught, because that would interfere with his destiny. The realisation that comes late on --- that he is only an ordinary man, that there's no divine spark within --- is acually kind of heart-breaking. We've all had grand dreams, haven't we? And we've all had some moment when we've had to come to terms with the fact that we're not special, we're not incredible ... we're simply ordinary. It's not easy. But Dostoevsky's genius is to take the heartbreak of that realisation and make it beautiful: what could be better than to be a part of humanity? What could be worse than being unique, if being unique means being alone? Raskolnikov is not weakened by his epiphany, but strengthened. And, by reading this novel, so are we.

Oh, and a brief structural note: Crime and Punishment was written in the 1860's (at almost the exact same time as The Moonstone), which is right when modern police forces were just coming into being throughout Europe, and 'crime novels' were first being imagined. The major addition that Crime and Punishment gave to the incipient genre was Dostoevsky's brilliant use of small details in the crime scene, that could be recalled and expanded on later in the novel. By which I mean, there are several things mentioned in passing while the crime is being committed that come back later, either as clues or as important elements of mis-direction, as the police (and Raskolnikov himself) try to piece together what actually happened. This would become a staple of the genre (It's been ages since I read any Agatha Christie, but if memory serves this was a particular favourite trick of hers), but I seriously doubt if it's been done as well as Dostoevsky does it.

In summary, this book is incredible on every level: theme, plot and prose (major props to Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the translators of this edition). You really should read it.

Cheers, JC.


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

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

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

The Three Musketeers (#99)

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.


What I said then:

I have ridiculously fond memories of the early 90's Kiefer Sutherland/Charlie Sheen/Oliver Platt/Chris O'Donnell/Tim Curry film version. I doubt it was faithful though.

What I say now:

Okay, the plot is completely different, but in terms of the tone that colourful Disney film actually kinda nails it. It's bright and silly and fun (Oliver Platt as the venal braggart Porthos is a particular delight), just the same as the novel.

In a nutshell: D'Artagnan, a fiery Gascon, travels to Paris, where he meets and offends the titular Musketeers --- Athos, Porthos and Aramis --- and is challenged by them to three consecutive duels. Before the fighting can begin, some of Cardinal Richelieu's guards show up and try to arrest them: duelling is against the law. Forgetting their differences, the duellists turn on the guards and, victorious, become firm friends. Together they have several madcap adventures, most of them bound up with the competing political schemes of Richelieu and the Duke of Buckingham. They gain and lose money in bizarre ways, seemingly without a care. They pull their swords out at even the merest hint of an insult. And, memorably, they make an implacable enemy in Milady de Winter, a spy/assassin/stone-hearted-demon-bitch-from-hell who is in the Cardinal's employ.

There's not a massive amount to say about this one, because it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect. It's a chaotic riot of derring-do, dark plots, impossible escapes, and bloody demises. Buckles get swashed all over the place. Heck, one chapter even begins with the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night" ... oh, how the translator must have laughed when he got to that one! Hilariously, most of the characters' behaviour swings between the scrupulously lordly and the utterly insane: Buckingham, having fallen in love with the French Queen and been sent away to avoid a scandal, decides that England will wage an entire war on France just so he can see her face one more time ... and nobody bats an eye at his motivation.

The real highlight, though, is Milady de Winter. For most of the novel you think that Richelieu is the villain, but he at least has some sort of moral code to him. As the novel approaches its climax, though, it's Milady who becomes the main antagonist. A sociopath, pure and simple, her cold-blooded evil makes her one of the most entertaining characters you'll ever read. While D'Artagnan, Porthos and Aramis are all a bit one note, Milady and Athos, and their mysterious past, are by far the best thing about the book.

Not really knowing anything about Dumas at all before I read this, one point of interest for me was to learn that Three Musketeers is a historical novel: Dumas was writing more than 200 years after the time when his story is set. Not knowing any better, I'd always just figured he was a 17th century novelist writing about his contemporary times. In fact one of the main sources of humour comes from the prim 19th century narrator bemoaning the loose morals of the Musketeers' times, while simultaneously relating their adventures with near-indecent relish.

Seeing as it's exactly what you expect, if you think you'll enjoy The Three Musketeers, you probably will. I sure did.

(As an aside, just a few days ago I saw the trailer for the forthcoming mega-budget Three Musketeers 3D, and god it looks awful. If you want to make an effects-laden science fiction film, why would you choose Three Musketeers as your source material? It just makes no friggin' sense at all. Although, when I put that question to a friend of mine, his answer was "Because people have already heard of it," which is probably pretty close to the truth. 'Brand recognition' and all that. Ugh, Hollywood.)

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
books to go: 98 

Marie Antoinette (#100)

Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser

What I said then:

Chunky bio of the doomed French princess.

What I say now:

I've had this sucker on my shelf since before the Sofia Coppola/Kirsten Dunst movie came out all the way back in 2006. Maybe if I'd liked the movie more it wouldn't have waited so long to get an airing, but regardless: after watching Cadel kick arse in Le Tour I decided to pull out a book on French history as a teeny tribute to him (seriously, they ride bikes up mountains ... it's pretty incredible if you stop to think about it).

What did I know about Marie Antoinette before I read this book? Well, the same two things I figure everybody knows about her: she said "Let them eat cake," and she ended up being guillotined during the revolution. Other than that, she was a complete blank to me ... which I guess constitutes its own implied criticism of the afore-mentioned movie (this is all I remember: jarring musical choices; converse shoes; and thinking that Jason Schwartzman should never act in period films because he's got one of those voices that can't be anything but modern). Of those two glimmers of knowledge, the first turns out to be utter fabrication (apparently the same 'cake' anecdote was being said about an unpopular Spanish queen more than a century before Marie Antoinette's time) and the second didn't happen at all the way I'd assumed.

Marie Antoinette initially led a sheltered, carefree life as the youngest daughter of the Austrian Empress. In the high-stakes game of alliance-by-marriage that the European royal families were playing, she was --- as the thirteenth child --- too junior to ever have been considered particularly noteworthy and so she was utterly neglected, particularly with regards to her education. But then several of her older sisters passed away and the task of marrying France's Dauphin (the heir to the French throne) fell to her. Belatedly they began to teach her to read and write before, at the age of fourteen, she was sent away from her family to a foreign country to be its princess, and ultimately its queen.

Rather than reading and writing, what she really needed (and never got) was an education in how the French court at Versailles actually worked. It was completely different from the Austrian system that she'd grown up in, and Fraser seems to posit that the majority of Marie Antoinette's problems stem from the utter inability of Versailles to understand her, and of her to understand Versailles. Nicknamed 'The Austrian Woman,' she was never able to overcome her outsider status.

One of the major issues was her (relatively) staunch Christian morality: having no acknowledged lovers --- the way everybody else did --- left the press of the time free to imagine her guilty of the most bizarre and unlikely couplings, rumours they spewed out with such venom for so long that she ended up despised. It's a sad irony to think that she was ultimately condemned by all the world as a despicable harlot for the precise reason that she wasn't one.

(As a side note, however horrifying the standard of the press is these days --- and if you're not horrified then you haven't been paying attention --- they've got nothing on the libellistes of Marie Antoinette's day. Essentially, she became the star of a cascade of pornographic pamphlets that linked her, in the most imaginative and energetic terms possible, to anyone and everyone she ever came in contact with. There are still a few levels lower that Murdoch and his cronies can sink.)

Of more importance to Marie Antoinette herself, however, was the lack of a sex life between she and her husband, Louis XVI. The whole point of princesses (and especially queens) was to have lots of male babies to keep the whole shebang running into subsequent generations. Louis XVI seems to have been a shy, awkward kind of a guy, and his ambivalence wasn't helped by the fact that Versailles was considered a public domain. If he wanted to visit his wife's bed (they didn't share quarters), he'd invariably have to pass an entire commentary team in the hallways. Because Louis was French and the King, and Marie Antoinette was Austrian and only the Queen, the blame for their childlessness fell to her. She wasn't tempting enough, or she wasn't fertile enough, or she wasn't doing it right. Even after she had given birth to her own young Dauphin, fulfilling her primary duty as a royal woman, accusations about the child's true parentage haunted her.

All this takes place against a backdrop of breathtaking financial irresponsibility. Fraser makes clear that the ship of the French state was going to be wrecked regardless: too much was spent on too little, for too long. Marie Antoinette's extravagancies on furniture, clothes and makeup sound incredible, but when Fraser ranks them alongside the expenditures of other nobles, it's clear that the entire aristocracy was equally at fault. I'd have liked some more information on the brewing revolution --- Fraser all but ignores it until the washerwomen of Paris are beating on the door --- but that's a minor quibble.

Once the Revolution did come, I'd always presumed that an angry mob had stormed the palace, seized Marie Antoinette and dispensed summary justice then and there. It was actually a much more complicated, much more drawn out process which, in its own way, was probably even more horrible than being torn apart by a crowd would have been. Over the course of more than two years imprisonment, she was slowly separated from everyone and everything that she valued: her friends, her husband, and lastly her children. She was given a trial, but it was a sham, the outcome pre-determined by political expediency. The cold cruelty of her accusers was breathtaking.

On the whole, probably a bit too much of the book was taken up in describing pre-Revolution Versailles politics (all the Comtesses and Princesses and Duchesses started to blend into each other after a while) that turn out to be utterly inconsequential, but it's a good read, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the period. Now I just need a Napoleon biography to follow on from this one (he's just entering the picture when Marie Antoinette gets the chop), anybody know a good one?

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
books to go: 99 (Ooh, I got a little thrill of pleasure typing that. I'm down into double digits!)

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

The Wise Man's Fear (#111b)

The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

What I said a couple of weeks ago:

It's a big dumb epic fantasy sequel ... and I can't wait!

What I say now:

It's bigger than I ever expected (200 pages longer than Anna Karenina!). And, unfortunately, dumber than I expected.

Legendary magician/lutist/killer/wastrel Kvothe has faked his own death and is now the proprietor of a sleepy pub (with a murderous fairy for an apprentice). After being tracked down by a scribe, Kvothe is convinced to tell the story of his life, which he promises to do over the course of three days. Rothfuss' first book, The Name of the Wind, was day one, in which Kvothe covered his childhood, the murder of his parents by mysterious supernatural beings, his entrance to a University of magic, and his all-round precociousness. The Wise Man's Fear is day two of the story.

I don't ask a heck of a lot from a popular novel like this: all I really want is something with a strong plot that's easy to read, something that goes down smooth. I chose this after Anna Karenina to give my brain a break.

For a guy working in a popular genre like fantasy, Rothfuss can write a hell of a sentence. His prose is elegant, clear and far more imaginative than 99% of his fantasy-writing peers. He draws you in beautifully ... which makes his occasional lapses into first-year-creative-writing-student gauche-ness stand out a mile. I'm willing to forgive a bit of experimentation, but why oh why does that major new character speak with no capital letters in her dialogue? it's utterly pointless. and after a while, really annoying. maybe it's because she's a fairy ... but wait, kvothe's apprentice is a fairy, and his dialogue has capitals. so there's no reason, then? right-o.

And why does Kvothe suddenly get hazy on his details for about fifty pages? Okay, he clearly has the best memory in the world, but whatever, I'm willing to go with that ... then we hit a section that's so vague as to be painful to read, and given the perfect clarity of everything else, it's like I was suddenly reading a very different, and much lesser, book.

But hell, given that the book's 993 pages long, those are relatively minor quibbles. My major quibble is that the vast majority of those 993 pages didn't seem to need to be there! The first 300 pages or so simply re-do a whole bunch of stuff that was included in the first book, to the point that I was getting deja vu. It was all mildly different variations on the exact same themes. The last thing a page-turner should be is dull, and while I was flying through it, I did find myself getting irritated at the sameness of Kvothe's adventures.

Then, when he did leave the University to head off into the wide world, all the troubles he found had very little connection to each other, and didn't join together to create a story. Rothfuss is a talented enough writer that he could keep me interested in whatever given piece of plot was going on at the time, but at the end of the book all the pieces of the plot didn't add up to anything. The book essentially goes like this: "I did that, then I did that, then I did that, then I did that. The end." All of the 'thats' are perfectly fine in and of themselves, but they bear little to no relation to each other. I was left flat and emotionally un-engaged, because nothing ever really seemed to matter, or to affect anything else.

All in all, it was (for the most part) a pleasant enough time-killer, but absolutely nothing more. I'd forgotten most of it before I'd even finished. Oh well.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ... continuing my recent Russian obsession. And it's blessedly short!
books to go: 110

Anna Karenina (#111)

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

What I said then:

I’ve steered pretty clear of the weighty Russian masters, but I thought I should give at least one of them a go. Wish me luck.

What I say now:

When I was at Uni, I was briefly forced to study the short stories of Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov, and I absolutely hated them. Ever since then I've had a major phobia about the 19th Century Russians. If I didn't like the short stories, what chance I'd dig the 800 page novels? It's probably unfair to tar them all --- Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, etc. --- with the same brush, but hey, life ain't meant to be fair.

Nevertheless, I'm a pretentious enough jackass that when a damaged copy of Anna Karenina arrived at the store, I decided it'd look nice on my shelf and brought it home. Fast forward two years, add a dash of foolish-personal-challenge, and suddenly I was actually going to have to read it, something that I can truthfully say I would never have done otherwise.

And lo and behold, it was ... not terrible. I'd love to say that it was wonderful, and elements of it certainly were, but there was also a lot of fluff. Essentially, Anna is a beautiful, vivacious woman married to a much older, utterly loveless man. When she meets the handsome, charming Count Vronsky, she falls in love with him. Society is enjoyably scandalised, shit hits fans all over the place, teeth are gnashed and hearts broken. It's like a whole season of Days Of Our Aristocratic Russian Lives, without the eye-patched villains and insomnia victims.

At the same time, a second, (very) loosely related story involves an aristocrat farmer(!) named Levin trying to snare himself a wife and hopefully figure out the best way of living his life, and how to be happy within it.

My relationship to this book is an odd one: I feel like I should have hated it, because there was so much about it that annoyed me. Almost without exception, the characters are vacuous morons, and I despise the bloody lot of them. Things which have assumed enormous importance are dropped in an instant, when the character decides that it's not that important after all (Levin is a master of this). Very little ever even happens; for the most part, people mope about in sitting rooms having minor crises of the psyche. The whole thing kicks off with Anna and Vronsky having one of those 'locked-eyes-and-immediately-fell-for-each-other' moments that shits me in fiction because, frankly, I see it as the writer taking the easy way out (and it never happens in real life, does it?).

These are things that, given my preference for books with strong plots, should have had me raging.

But no, Tolstoy's writing is good enough that a character spending fifty pages pondering the state of Russian agriculture can be as gripping as any thriller. Okay, maybe not any thriller, but you get the point. Anna's disgrace, and the effect it has on her relationship with Vronsky, and how they try and fail to counter their increasing disillusionment, is recounted with a dispassionate, perfectly accurate eye. Levin's struggles for meaning in his closed little world, and his increasing desperation as he cannot find it, are, at times, incredibly moving.

Two sequences, one on either side of the story, stand out, both of them involving death: Levin and his wife nurse his brother as he passes away; Anna grows frantic at Vronsky's increasing coldness, and her disjointed, harried thoughts eventually lead her to a train station where (spoiler alert!) she throws herself under the 4.27 to Hurstbridge. In both passages, the thought processes the two characters undergo as they grapple with death, and with the fact that no-one living can ever understand it, are pieces of writing of immense beauty and skill.

Also, in places it's actually pretty funny. It's clear that Tolstoy himself is not a fan of the hoity-toity milieu in which most of the novel takes place, and there's a lovely snide tone to a lot of his writing. I can't get sarcasm into a text message, but he can get it across two languages and one hundred and forty years.

I didn't love Anna Karenina, I only loved elements of it. However, this novel has done me a great service: it's forever banished my fear of the Russians. I'm coming for you, Crime and Punishment!

Just not any time soon ...

Cheers, JC.

about to read: The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (the big dumb epic fantasy sequel I threatened you with in my last post ... and a damaged copy showed up at work last week, so I didn't even have to buy it)

books to go: still 111

He's Making a List ...

One of the curiousities of this ridiculous challenge I've set for myself is that I (almost) never read new books. Going back through everything I've read this year I wasn't surprised to discover that I haven't cracked open a single book that was published in 2010. So my 'Best Books of 2010' list has a very personal flavour: these aren't books from 2010, they're books from my 2010. I hope that's okay ...

My best books of 2010 are:

10. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Fast, brutal, funny and thought-provoking ... all that good science fiction should be.

A lot of 'classic sci-fi' turns out to be kind of crap, because, well, those guys were churning out stuff to make a buck and had, for the most part, turned to sci-fi because they weren't capable of writing anything else. Not Bester. He can write. Gully Foyle, his protagonist, is bitter, obsessed, thoroughly unlikable and utterly magnetic. He starts out seeking revenge on those who left him stranded in space to die, and ends up a fully-fledged revolutionary fighting to overthrow the whole damn system. It's awesome.

9. Columbine by Dave Cullen

I went through a phase between the ages of about ten and thirteen when I read a lot of (pretty sensationalised) true crime books. Man, they don't make 'em like they used to. Cullen's book was ten years in the writing and astutely examines the Columbine high school shooting from every conceivable angle: from the tales of the victims and survivors to the ensuing media frenzy, to a painstaking reconstruction of the events themselves. All of this journalistic work circles around a horrifying vortex: the portrait he paints of the killers themselves, and their motivations. With access to huge amounts of documentation they left behind (notebooks, videos, etc.) that have hitherto been seen only by police, Cullen is able to offer some explanation for an event that, until I read this book, seemed utterly inexplicable. Not pleasant reading, but pretty amazing nonetheless.

8. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

 Two sisters live with their feeble old uncle in a decaying mansion just outside a small town. Something terrible happened in the past and the girls, left entirely to their own devices, have constructed an elaborate make-believe mythology to rule over their every waking moment. The younger sister, Merricat, buries charms and totems around the property to ward off change, but when their cousin Charles arrives wanting to get into their safe, her delicate world crumbles in sublimely spooky fashion. An itty-bitty masterpiece, I have to thank my friend Hannah for putting me on to it.

7. The System of the World by Neal Stephenson

This is the third and final volume in Stephenson's 2500-page Baroque Cycle, and he saved the best for last. It's fiction on a staggering scale. Basically, the novels together (roughly) cover the years from 1650 to 1720 in Europe. Stephenson weaves together the earliest beginnings of modern scientific thought (Isaac Newton is a pivotal character), the beginnings of modern politics (religious views --- Catholic or Protestant? --- were slowly solidifying into political views --- Whig or Tory?), and the beginnings of modern finance (the great change when lumps of precious metals turned into standardised coins, which led to paper money, which led to stocks and bonds) ... in a nutshell, the template for our modern lives was being written in those times. And Stephenson jumbles all that amazing history together with a rip-snorting adventure story. With pirates. It's extraordinary.

6. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

In my Year 12 Literature class we studied Dickens' David Copperfield, and I hated it, and never finished it. So I was dreading reading Great Expectations ... it ended up on my shelves as one of those 'I really should read that one day ...' books, that I never thought I actually would read, and which could stay on my shelves and make me look smart until judgement day. Until I was foolish enough to take on this stupid challenge ... and I'm so glad I did. Because Great Expectations is wonderful. Dickens writes with such warmth, such wit, such sympathy. Pip, a young man who imagines himself above his station, is suddenly removed from that station and brought up as a 'gentleman'. What follows explores all the faultlines in traditional notions of class with a curious mixture of savagery and tact, that no writer of today could ever hope to ape. Some classics are over-rated. Not this one.

5. The Corner by David Simon and Ed Burns


I've already sung the praises of this book on my blog. Check out my review here.

4. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth


Hee hee, I've already waxed lyrical about this one as well. Next years 'Best of' Blog will be so easy to write ... nothing but links!

3. Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

Anyone interested in stories should, at some point, read the original Brothers Grimm fairytales. They're dark, funny, archetypal, and hint at a centuries-old tradition of oral story-telling that is the skeleton of every (western) fiction ever written (I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on non-western story-telling traditions). What the Grimms are missing, however, is complex characterisations ... there's only so much nuance you can get into the stepmother, the woodcutter and the wicked witch. Lanagan, an Australian author, re-tells a Grimm fairytale but populates it with credible, complicated, real people. It's a startling imaginative feat, and what she's ended up with is rare and beautiful: an entire novel that glows with the tender simplicity of a fable. It's a dark book, about how to live with the knowledge that darkness exists, and that your children will one day know it too. A wondrous book. More of these, please, Australian publishers!

2. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

And here's the book Dickens would have written if not for those pesky social mores that meant he couldn't really tell it like it was. Crimson Petal is a Victorian novel in everything but sensibility: it's sprawling, it covers a range of social classes, some of its characters have humourously onomatopoeic names ... but it's honest. Early on, Faber recounts in exquisite, unflinching, horrifying detail just what Sugar, his prostitute heroine, has to do to keep herself from getting pregnant, and you know you're in for something out of the ordinary. It's difficult to define what's great about this book: the research into the reality of day-to-day Victorian lives is one thing, but it's the way it's presented that makes the book spectacular. Faber's writing treads the fine line of pastiche with consumate skill, and is never less than enthralling. I couldn't put the damn thing down, and Faber is close to making the very short list of writers of whom I will, before I die, read everything they've ever written. It's that good.

1. The Complete Short Stories by J.G. Ballard

The first spot on my 'writers-who-I'm-going-to-read-everything-of-before-I-die' list belongs to J.G. Ballard. He is my favourite author in the world, and reading this enormous collection (1200 pages long, spanning more than 35 years) is as near as little ol' agnostic me will ever come to reading a religious text. So many brilliant ideas! The man's imagination was frightening. At their best (Billenium, The Drowned Giant, The Ultimate City) these stories have as much to tell us about the world as any art I've ever come across. I can't think of any higher praise than that.

I should stress that Ballard is not for everyone, though. Start with his novel Crash ... if you like that tale of people who get sexual release from deliberately crashing their cars, then maybe he's for you.

And that was my year. Oh, the worst books I read? I hated Devices and Desires by K.J. Parker, it was everything that was bad about contemporary fantasy: turgidly written and ludicrously plotted. And, heresy of heresies, I read The Picture of Dorian Gray and simply cannot understand why it is so beloved. It's not witty, its characters are dull dull dull, and it criminally squanders a great concept. Please, if you're a fan, enlighten me: why?

Merry Christmas! JC


currently reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
books to go: 116

The Corner (#120)

The Corner by David Simon and Ed Burns

What I said then:

"A year in the life of a Baltimore drug corner, as witnessed by the guys who went on to make The Wire."

What I say now: 

Okay, before I even start, let me just say openly that if you haven't seen The Wire then: A) You've missed out on the best TV show ever made, and B) You're probably going to feel a little excluded by most of this review. So go watch it (it's only about sixty hours of television) and meet me in the next paragraph.

Before they were television producers, David Simon was a journalist at the Baltimore Sun, and Ed Burns was, first, a homicide detective, and later a teacher at an inner-city public high school. Simon wrote an earlier non-fiction book called Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets in which he spent a year with the Baltimore PD's homicide unit. The Corner is, in a way, a companion piece to the earlier work. In it, Simon and Burns spend a year on a drug corner (or, as they put it, an open-air drug market) at Monroe and Fayette streets in inner-city Baltimore, sharing the lives of some of the residents.

There's Fat Curt, an aging tout whose hands and feet are swollen due to medical complications of his drug addiction, and Ella Thompson, a woman who channels a very private pain into incessant community work and volunteering. And there's a family: Fran Boyd, a drug fiend and mother of two, her ex-partner Gary McCullough, striving to retain some semblance of dignity as his addiction strips him of everything else, and DeAndre, their teenage son, clumsily becoming a man amid the wreckage of his parents' lives. These are the core cast, but the book reaches its tentacles much deeper than just five people. Friends, brothers and sisters, parents and children, neighbours, fellow fiends (the author's term) - all have their story told, with equal weight given to everybody's struggle.

And that's the best thing about the book: it gives voice to those usually left voiceless and forgotten, reminding us that even people who can fit under a nice easy pejorative label - 'drug addicts' and 'drug dealers' in this case - are still people, deserving of as much time and attention as anybody else. It's pretty uncomfortable reading in a lot of ways (an Australian version might be 'a year in a detention centre' ...), but it's definitely worthwhile. 

The Wire is just about the toughest, grittiest television you'll ever watch. But here's the thing: as I was reading The Corner, I kept thinking 'Wow, they softened The Wire a lot from Baltimore's day-to-day reality.' As bad as The Wire makes parts of Baltimore look, it's kid-stuff compared to the portrait they paint in this book. The show throws its audience a couple of bones that the book can't: the character of Bubbles, for example, or the organised nature of the Barksdale and Stanfield crews, or the fact that those crews aren't made up almost entirely of drug fiends themselves.

But Simon and Burns don't just give us a devastating portrait of that one corner (one corner out of, they guess, between 100 and 120 drug markets in the city of Baltimore at the time, a city of about 700,000 people). They also examine the historical forces that have created the corners, giving a brief history of the post-war American underclass that is horrific in its cold logic. At no point, really, could anybody have done any different. Politicians and police and dealers alike, everybody's hands are neatly tied by circumstance, and they have been for the last fifty or so years. It's a sobering thought, and a sobering book.

In a recently-written epilogue, the authors recount an incident that occured a few years after the book's release: "A young councilman, sensing an opportunity, held up a copy of The Corner for television cameras at the corner of Monroe and Fayette and declared that, if elected, he would take back the drug corners and make the city safe again. He would fight the drug war they way it needed to be fought. It was pointed out to the ambitious councilman that the book he was holding was, in fact, an argument against drug prohibition, that it depicted an increasingly draconian legal system's inability to mitigate against human frailty and despair, against economic neglect and institutional racism, against a failed education system and the marginalization of America's urban population. The councilman conceded that he had not actually read the book, but that he was nonetheless the man for the job and indeed, he was twice elected mayor of Baltimore. He is now the governor of Maryland." 

Wire fans will recognise more than a hint of Carcetti in there. And so the same old ideas that have never worked get spun out again, and nothing ever changes. I know I've been going on a loving-and-recommending-everything kick recently, but this book is amazing as well. Sorry.

JC


about to read: Weeds in the Garden of Words by Kate Burridge
books to go: 119

A Fraction of the Whole (#122)

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz


What I said then:

One of those books that was huge when it first appeared, but seems to have sunk without trace since. That doesn’t bode well.

What I say now:

This book's greatest strength is its hilarious tone. Told in two alternating first-person voices, the narrators are a father/son pair of cynical, sarcastic, misanthropic bastards. And they're fucking funny. Even more than that, Toltz's style of humour is something I haven't come across before. I actually think it might be a specifically Australian thing: he combines snideness (snidity?) with bluntness in a way that feels distinctly Aussie to me. Sample quote: "Let's not mince words: the interior of the Sydney casino looks as if Vegas had an illegitimate child with Liberace's underpants, and that child fell down a staircase and hit its head on the edge of a spade." There were any number of laugh-out-loud moments scattered throughout the book, wholly original turns of phrase that had people edging away from me on the tram as I cackled away.

Unfortunately, the book's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. While a hell of a lot happens to the unfortunate Martin and Jasper Dean, they narrate the lot with such ironic detachment that it's impossible to be moved by any of it. They're too clever for their own good ... or, for the good of the book, at least.

The book is 700 pages long and jam-packed with incident: young loves lost and won, comas, bushfires, wives blown up with grenades, renegade uncles becoming latter-day-Ned-Kelly-esque folk-hero criminals, a friend marrying a thinly-veiled James Packer imitation, and I've barely scratched the surface. But no matter what happens, it has no emotional hold on me as a reader because it has no emotional hold on the characters themselves. They're too busy analysing events, and commenting on them, and thinking up a wonderfully bizarre metaphor to describe them, to ever let themselves be touched by them. And if the characters don't appear to care, why the hell should I?

Ultimately, I felt like this book was all icing, no cake. Which was a shame, because it had some of the most kick-arse icing I've ever come across. Oh well ...

(side note --- why do we use 'jam-packed' to describe something that's packed tight? I mean, I guess jam is packed pretty tight, but so are a lot of things. Why not Honey-packed? Vegemite-packed? Nutella-packed? Girlfriend-wanting-to-take-seven-pairs-of-shoes-on-a-weekend-trip-packed? Or, this being the 21st Century and all, how about vacuum-packed? Why the fuck is jam the universal measure of close-packing? Anybody?)

Cheers, JC


about to read: Burmese Days by George Orwell
books to go: 121