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

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (#110)

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What I said then: 

A glimpse of the horror of Russia’s gulags.

What I say now:

Well, my Russian kick is officially over: this is the last Russian book I own. And I've sure ended it on a downer.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had first hand experience of the gulag system. He had been fighting for the Russian army in 1945 when he criticised the way Stalin was conducting the war in a letter to his brother. Arrested for treason, he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in Siberia. When those eight years were up, he was not released; instead he was given a life sentence on a new charge. It was only after Stalin's reign ended and Kruschev took control of Russia that he was finally freed.

This experience is obvious in his writing: every moment and every minute detail in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich rings with truth. It is a very simple book, which merely details one day, from waking to sleeping, of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov's term inside a forced labour camp.

There is no story, as such. Nothing really happens that could be considered dramatic. The power of One Day comes from its accumulation of arresting, hideous detail. Every prisoner, at every moment, is on the lookout for a chance to scrounge or steal anything that they can. Every movement is watched by guards, every bit of food or firewood or tobacco is haggled over and contested, and all of it takes place in cold that would, to most people, be unendurable. Allegiances can switch in an instant: a toadie can be hated at one moment, but if he's part of your work team, then he's as close as a brother the next.

One of the most striking sequences of the book has Shukhov's team racing back to the camp from their worksite, the guards running as just as desperately as the prisoners, to try and beat another group from another worksite to the gate: whichever group gets there first will be counted through the gate and get to the mess quicker. In the race through the snow, suddenly the guards and the prisoners are allies, everyone racing to beat the other work team. And yet as soon as they're through the gates, the hostility resumes. Your head reels just thinking about how adaptable those guys needed to be to judge where they stood at every moment, when a single false step would lead to ten days confined in unheated cells, with no work to keep them warm ... which in that climate, was very nearly a death sentence.

But look, there's really not much to say about this book. Its value is less that of a novel, and more that of an important historical document, for without it, the day-to-day reality of the gulags would be less well known. It's not a book to enjoy, but it is a book to appreciate.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien
books to go: 109

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

Cheating just a smidge ...

Okay, I totally cheated the other day. I bought a book. It wasn't a gift for somebody else or anything, it was for me.

I feel dirty.

But, like any lapsed addict (I'm keeping Brendan Fevola company in a Venn Diagram somewhere), I've got a reeeeeeeally good excuse, I swear I do.

There's this author named David Mitchell, who wrote a book called Cloud Atlas that I read and loved a couple of years ago. I've got another book of his called Ghostwritten sitting on my shelves, waiting to be read; it's one of the 111 books I've got left. Anyway, his most recent book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, sounds really interesting to me: it's set in Japan during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when Japan was closed off to all foreigners. A Dutch clerk at a little trading post (the only contact Japan has with the outside world) falls in love with a Japanese girl, and I'm guessing that complications ensue.

Since it came out I've just kind of assumed that I'd buy it in a couple of years, after my read-everything-I-own challenge is done. 

There's also the added benefit that it's a really beautiful book. Okay, I'm even sounding effete to my own ears here, but let's take it as a given that I'm the kind of person who gives a rat's arse about stuff like that. Because I do.

This picture doesn't really do it justice, but the three-tone palette of cream, black and a vivid cyan kinda thing ... it just works.

But recently, Thousand Autumns has come out in a new, smaller format. And they've changed the cover. And the new cover fucking blows.

  

It's like someone in the art department at the publisher had the bright idea that because, hey, there's a guy and a girl in it, they were going to go after the elusive middle-aged-woman demographic (I'm probably being unfair to middle-aged women) by giving it a totally nondescript, 'romance-y' cover.

Now it looks like a Memoirs of a Geisha knockoff, or something. Or like a fucking Paullina Simons book.

(Again, I feel like this photo isn't doing justice to the new version's ugliness. That grey is darker in real life and so much more ... grey. And UGLY!)

Anyway, that's my excuse. Once we got the new version in, we were going to send back all of our copies of the original, and I nabbed one before they got returned.

So now The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is sitting under my bed, where it will gather dust for another couple of years and make me feel extremely guilty every time I remember it's there.

Meanwhile, Anna Karenina is coming along. I'm roughly three-quarters of the way through it, and not hating it anywhere near as much as I feared I would. In fact, it's kind of great in a way. But more of that soon.

Also, once I finish the Tolstoy, I get to buy a book, but I already know what I'm gonna get, so I won't mess with you by asking for recommendations (hint: it's a big, dumb, epic fantasy sequel ... and I can't wait!).

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
books to go: 111