books
-
And of course, consciously or not, writers always draw on the real people they’ve met when constructing their characters. What else is there, after all? ↩︎
-
That’s what they do, after all. ↩︎
-
Apparently there was a film of the book made. It’s considered to be so bad that (according to Wikipedia) Woody Allen said if he had his life to live again he’d do everything the same, except he wouldn’t see The Magus. ↩︎
-
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”, as I’m sure you know. ↩︎
On Writing by AL Kennedy (Books 2014, 11)
Unlike Stephen King’s book of the same title, this isn’t exactly “a manual of the craft.” You won’t find much about the writing side of writing here; nothing about crafting sentences, forming paragraphs, developing characters or plots.
It’s less about the craft of writing than about the life of a writer; and it shares with King’s eponym the part-memoir approach. Kennedy spends a lot of time describing how writing has been bad for her health in various ways, and how in turn her pathological fear of flying has made the writing life more difficult, (travelling to North America by ship for a signing tour) for example.
The largest and most entertaining part of it was originally published as blog entries on The Guardian’s site.
It’s very good. And not from the book, but with Doctor Who back (and nearly finished) you should read her meditation on it and on the state of Britain.
The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (books, 2014, 10)
Always good to get a new JK Rowling, of course, whatever name she's using. I sometimes wonder if she's got loads of other things out there, under other as-yet-undisclosed pseudonyms; probably not, though.
Anyway, in the second Cormoran Strike book, we have more of the same sort of thing we had in the first. This time it’s set in the world of publishing, with all sorts of rivalries between more and less successful authors, agents, editors and publishers. “Write what you know”, Jo.
But can such rivalries drive someone to murder? It seems so.
My main, and very minor, complaint about this was that there wasn’t enough of sidekick Robin. in it, I felt.
I don’t know how many of these she’s planning to write, but sooner or later Cormoran has to meet – and presumably solve a crime for, or concerning – his estranged rock-star father. who is a recurring offstage character.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon (Books 2014, 9)
In the interest of trying to catch up, I’m not going to say much about this. You probably know all about this already.
Also, it’s been quite a while since I read it, and although I enjoyed it, it hasn’t really stuck around in my head in a way that leaves me much to say. It’s clever in giving us some idea of what it might be like to live with autism. That might be its greatest strength.
The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell (Books 2014, 8)
I'm now so far behind in posting these that I'm just going to put very brief notes up for most of them.
As a sequel to the excellent London Falling this suffers slightly from what feels a bit like middle-book-of-trilogy syndrome; though I believe Cornell intends this to be an ongoing series, rather than a trilogy.
That said, there is an overarching mystery, which we must hope will be resolved over the course of several books. And at that point, maybe he’ll stop. But the actual story here is perhaps slight compared to the origin stories of the first one, and the horror that Quill and his wife, in particular, experienced.
A mysterious ghostly figure – invisible to all who don’t have The Sight, of course – is killing people in London. There appears to be little to connect them at first, but graffiti at some of the scenes suggests there might be a link to Jack the Ripper. Has his ghost come back and this time gone after rich white men? Or is it something else entirely?
It’s a fun read, despite my reservations above, with some amusing reference to fandom, and the terrible, terrible abuse of a giant of the fantasy genre.
The Rum Diary by Hunter S Thompson (Books 2014, 7)
I’ve read pretty much everything by HST that’s been published in book form, but I hadn’t read this, his sole novel, until now.
He wrote it before he started to get successful as a journalist, as I understand it, so it’s interesting that it’s a story _about_ a journalist, or several. And they’re hard-drinking ones at that. But that kind of goes without saying.
As the novel starts it is 1959 and the first-person narrator is wanderer, unsure of what he wants to do with his life. He is leaving New York for Puerto Rico, to take up a post on the English-language paper there.
The story charts the ups and downs of his life over the next few months, along with various other people, mainly involved with the paper. It’s an entertaining enough read, but largely inconsequential as a story. You couldn’t really say that the character has grown or developed much by the end, and while we get some insight into the way the US was interacting with Puerto Rico at the time (unspoilt beaches being sold to developers to build luxury hotel complexes, that kind of thing), I wouldn’t say you get a great sense of Puerto Rico itself.
It’s mainly interesting for showing some early flashes of the writing style that Thompson would develop over the subsequent years into his signature gonzo style. For example:
> They ran the whole gamut from genuine talents and honest men, to degenerates and hopeless losers who could barely write a postcard–loons and fugitives and dangerous drunks
Not up there with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, obviously, but you can see the beginnings of that style.
Pavane by Keith Roberts (Books, 2014, 6)
This is considered to be one of the seminal works of alternative history; often mentioned alongside The Man in the High Castle
Instead of the Axis forces winning the Second World War, as in Dick’s classic, the break point is Queen Elizabeth I being assassinated, which leads to the Spanish invading England (Scotland’s situation is never mentioned) via the Armada, and so the Catholic church becomes the dominant force in the world (at least Europe and the Americas) for centuries.
Most of which is told in a short prologue. The body of the novel (which a I believe is a fix-up, and certainly feels like it) consists of four short stories with some overlapping characters, which tell the tale of how rebellion against the Church comes to England.
I quite enjoyed it, but was put off at the start, because frankly the nuances of the workings of a traction engine running the freight across the country through a frozen winter night, were not all that interesting. In fact, it was downright boring. Would it have been less so if it were about a spaceship, instead of a traction engine? Obviously; anything is more fun with spaceships in it. But that’s not the point.
In fact, the point is largely our old friend “show, don’t tell.” I don’t automatically hold with that myself; there are plenty of examples of good stories working by “telling.” The problem is that if you rely entirely or mainly on telling, it’s easy to lose either or both of the characters and the action. Certainly you can tell us what’s happening; but it’ll have a much stronger impact if you make us feel it.
The second section, for example, starts with a young man bleeding to death in the snow, and then jumps back to his training as a signaller. A much more gripping way to handle things.
The time period appears to be from around the sixties through to the eighties, but the Church’s dead hand has so stifled technological progress that semaphore and steam remain the height of technology.
And there are fairies; old English magic that the Church hasn’t quite managed to wipe out. But they are kind of abandoned after the second (maybe third) story.
Anyway, after that initial hump it was enjoyable enough, but it’s a pleasingly slim book. If it had been the size of a modern novel, I’m not sure it would have held my interest.
The State of Me, by Nasim Marie Jafry (Books 2014, 4)
Well this is an interesting one. Nasim is an old friend. Or it might be more accurate to say she was the big sister of an old friend. She lived two doors down the road when I was growing up. Her younger brothers were both close friends of mine. A few weeks ago I came across some old email, and it made me think of them. I knew that Nasim had had a story or two published, so I googled her. Found her blog, discovered she’d had a novel published, ordered it from Amazon, and here we are.
In doing all this I got back in touch with her and with her brother, Yusuf, who I haven’t see in I don’t know how many years. So it’s all good.
But what about the book, I hear you ask?
Well, it’s not the kind of thing I’d normally choose to read — or not without a serious recommendation from a friend, for example. But it’s really, really good.
It’s a fictionalised autobiography, in that the protagonist goes through the same experience with contracting ME (Myalgic Encephalopathy) that Nasim herself did. And it’s set partly in Balloch, where we grew up.
Far more importantly, though, it’s a really good book. The characters are believable, especially the protagonist, Helen. That might be just as you’d expect, as they’re drawn from life; but I strongly suspect that it’s no easier to write a convincing character based on a real person – even yourself – than to write one who is completely imaginary.1 We are drawn in to her inner life, her loves and her problems, and we are glad to be.
When she is laid low by the hateful condition, we feel her every twinge and ache. When she falls in love we fall right with her. And that’s an important point: this isn’t a misery memoir; it’s by no means all about the illness, or even about Helen’s responses to the illness. ME affects and influences everything in her life, but she still manages to have a life, and Nasim makes it an interesting one, one we’re happy to share for a while.
Yet at the same time she manages to educate us about ME, through Helen’s own learning about it. It is still a little-understood condition, with underfunded research and mistaken guidelines from NICE.
All in all, it’s a fine debut, and I look forward to reading more from Nasim.
Secret Diaries
Sad to hear of the death of Sue Townsend. I didn’t keep up with the Adrian Mole books after the first couple, but I was always happy to see her byline in the paper or hear her on the radio. And I did enjoy those early books and the TV series.
Interesting to learn from this Guardian piece that the first one was published at around the same time as The Smiths’ first gig. Adrian would probably have approved.
The First Three Books of the Year
The first three books of 2014 were:
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Gaiman’s fantasy inspired by his own childhood experiences is fun. It is short, however, and strangely unmemorable after just a couple of months.
It by Stephen King
I read some King when I was younger, but hadn’t in several years apart from On Writing, until a couple of years ago when my beloved gave me 11.22.63, his time-travel fantasy about going back to save JFK. I throughly enjoyed that, and was reminded that he had a vast back-catalogue that I could catch up on.
A significant portion of that catalogue is contained in the single volume of It. It is a monolith, a vast behemoth of a book, at around 1300 pages.
It’s good, though, and I shouldn’t fixate on its size. King uses the space to let his characters breathe and grow. They have the strange limitation as adults that they have almost totally forgotten their childhoods, as a direct result of their encounter with the titular creature. Though not, as you might suppose, because they were traumatised. Rather it seems to be a feature of interacting with the supernatural entity that haunts the town of Derry, Maine, in the primary guise of a scary clown, that, if you face it and live (few do) you forget the encounter.
I had met Derry before: in 11.22.63 the protagonist spends some time in this strange town, and the effect in the book was so jarring – it felt obvious that here was a place with a history – that I looked it up. Turns out he’s used the fictional town as the setting for several stories (and presumably couldn’t resist routing his time-traveller through it).
Anyway, getting back to the book at hand: I spent weeks embroiled in King’s small-town America, its characters and its horrors. And I thoroughly enjoyed it, but am in no hurry to go back there soon.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Wow. Just wow. This is an awesome book. Atkinson manages to tell the same woman’s life story again and again and keep it interesting and gripping every time (well, there’s a slight longueur during a German period in one iteration, but the undercurrent of terror – she is living in the Führer’s holiday home – keeps it from being a problem).
As you probably know, it’s the tale of a woman who was born in 1910 and died – at various times, and in various ways. We are told the story of her life as she repeats it, again and again – or through multiple parallel timestreams. As the iterations go on, she starts to have some awareness of her past lives. She doesn’t understand what they are at first, of course, especially as a child. At first she’ll just have a sense of dread as she nears an event that killed her before. Later they are clearer memories of the future.
It is utterly fascinating and a joy. And not SF, though if I had read it soon enough I’d have nominated it for the BSFA Award.
I read Kate Atkinson’s first, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, years ago, and likened it to Iain Banks’s The Crow Road (hard to to think of higher praise). I read one other, but wasn’t so impressed, and rather lost track of her, apart from watching the TV adaptations of her detective stories. I think maybe I need to go back and catch up on her work.
Another Lost Month, and Unpublished Posts
OK, so not content with the last post celebrating the fact that I missed a whole month, I then went on and missed February, too. These months just go by so fast.
Anyway, a couple of things. I noticed that I have a few posts sitting in draft form but that are more-or-less complete, so you may shortly see some slightly-non-timely things.
And I’m thinking I might have another go at blogging about the books I read. I appear not to have done that regularly since 2009 (these years go by so fast…) I might not give every book its own post, but put a few into a summary. As I’ve only read three so far this year (one of them was Stephen King’s 1300-page behemoth It, so I don’t feel too bad about the count) I’ll start with those.
This might just encourage me to post regularly, if not frequently.
Meanwhile, here’s a picture of Arthur’s Seat to keep things visual.
The Summer of Rereading, 3: More Culture
I stayed with the Culture books, skipping over the non-Culture SF ones, Against a Dark Background and Feersum Endjinn. That brought me to Excession, in many ways Banksie’s Culture masterwork. Certainly it’s the first in which the ships take such central, starring roles, which makes it the defining one for me.
I remembered much more of this (I’ve definitely read it more than once before), but there were still bits that were only fuzzy at best. It is galaxy-spanning, “widescreen baroque” space opera at its best.
I hadn’t finished it by the time we went on holiday, so I had to take it with me with only a hundred or so pages to go. That was mildly annoying, but it didn’t take us over our weight limit.
The next Culture novel to be published is Inversions, but I didn’t quite feel like reading it, because I was keen to get to Look to Windward. I feel as if I’ve been wanting to reread that almost since I first read it. So I took it with me, and with only a brief interruption to finish The Magus in the appropriate country, as I’ve already discussed, I stormed into it.
And, err, it was a bit disappointing, actually.
Here’s the thing about not remembering books though: I remembered almost nothing about this. I thought I remembered it, but really I only had the setup (the business of waiting for the light from the stars destroyed in the Culture-Idiran War to arrive) and one brief scene near the end. This had the great positive that it was almost like reading a new Culture novel.
The trouble with it is that the plot is quite thin, and mostly happening off stage. And a lot of the events that happen in between are only really there to show off some of the fantasicness of living on a Culture orbital. In a sense it tries to do exactly what Banksie himself said you can’t really do, which is to set a story in a utopia. This is why the Culture novels general focus on someone working for Special Circumstances or at least Contact; they happen at the edges of the utopia, or just outside its fringes, where things are a lot more dangerous.
There is an ongoing threat to at least one of the main characters, but it doesn’t really engage us all that much. We don’t, perhaps, care all that much about what happens to them.
That said, there are still some great moments. But I wonder whether my expectations, set by my memory of really enjoying it, were too high. It’s often best to approach artistic works with lowered expectations.
The Summer of Rereading, 2: A Culture of Marvel and Miracles
After Iain Banks died I decided it was long past time for a big reread of all his books. Most of the older ones were in the attic, though, so it was a while before I got started.
The books in the attic aren’t terribly well ordered, since they’re just in boxes, and have been moved in and out of them over the years. Also it’s very dusty up there. Not that that affects the order or accessibility of the books; I just say it to try to evoke some sympathy. Poor, poor, pitiful me, sneezing in old clothes while looking through lots and lots of lovely books.
I digress. Sometimes I think its what I do best, actually. One of the non-Banksie things I found was the box containing my copies of MarvelMiracleman, which I hadn’t read for a long, long while. To my shock, an issue was missing. Luckily it was an early one (4, I think), and I also found my Warriors, where it was originally published, so I had all the material. I still prefer it in black & white with the bigger pages, incidentally.
On a theme that will become common, I was surprised at how much I didn’t remember. The whole “Olympus” thing, for example. I thought that was just a passing page or two at the end, but it’s actually woven through the second half of the work. To be honest, I didn’t remember much after the part that was in Warrior apart from Johnny Bates’s carnage in London.
Anyway, it’s still pretty good, but not as good as I remembered. It doesn’t hold up the way Watchmen still does, in my opinion. Also Thatcher appears in it briefly, which is just weird.
To return to my digression, I found various things in the attic that I haven’t read in a long time, so there will doubtless be more rereading ahead. Which is kind of a shame, because as always there are so many new (and old but unread) books to read.
But back to Banksie. I thought of just starting at the beginning and working through them all in order of publication. But I found I didn’t really feel like reading The Wasp Factory at the time, while I did feel like reading some of the SF. So I started with the Culture novels. I thoroughly enjoyed all that I’ve got through so far, and had the mostly-pleasant (but slightly worrying) sense of not being totally familiar with them.
Consider Phlebas: I still find it striking that here in the first Culture novel, if you don’t have any prompting about the Culture, it’s not totally obvious that they’re the good guys. Horza is so well-written, so sympathetic as a viewpoint character, that it’s hard not to support his anti-Culture beliefs. That those beliefs are not really examined (in the time period of the novel, at least) is probably a realistic picture of how most of us go through most of our lives.
The Player of Games: I had remembered this as one I hadn’t liked so much, with its gloomy, spoiled protagonist. Gurgeh is both of those things, but he is also manipulated quite thoroughly by Special Circumstances1, and in the end his life is improved because of it. Which wasn’t their intention (probably); or not their main one, at least. But it does tell us that no matter how good your life is in the Culture, it can still get better. Damn.
Use of Weapons: There’s a game you can play when you’re reading most Culture novels: it is, “What Are Special Circumstances Trying to Achieve This Time?” This is the book with the largest number of distinct chances to play, as we work backwards through Zakalwe’s timeline. A series of grim fragments of conflicts on different worlds, with Zakalwe always there as some kind of general or military advisor. We see him at the end of his engagement each time, and usually at the end of his tether if not the end of a rope.
And the forward-running chapters also have an unresolved special circumstance. But we don’t really care about it, or any of the others. We care about Zakalwe. And about Sma, and the wonderfully-named drone, Skaffen-Amtiskaw; but mainly about Zakalwe. Which is impressive work by Banksie, considering.
But more later.
The Summer of Rereading 1: The Magus, by John Fowles
A summer of rereading, that's what this one has been for me. Let me tell you about it.
Note: contains spoilers
Early on – maybe it was still spring – when we booked our holiday to Greece, I decided it was time to reread The Magus. I read it something like thirty years ago, when I was at university. I remember enjoying it, but being annoyed by the ending.
So I was expecting that annoyance to still be there. On occasions between then and this rereading, I have looked at the last couple of pages. I did so again before starting it this time; it was no clearer for doing so. Fowles himself recognised problems with the ending. In his foreword to the revised edition, he acknowledges that the novel has flaws, not least that it is a novel of adolescence, both his and that of his protagonist. (I found Nicholas to be annoyingly adolescent and spoilt, especially at the start, on this reading.) He goes on to say:
The other change is in the ending. Though its general intent has never seemed to me as obscure as some readers have evidently found it -- perhaps because they have not given due weight to the two lines from the Pervigilium Veneris that close the book -- I accept that I might have declared a preferred aftermath less ambiguously… and have now done so.
(Ellipsis the author’s, incidentally.) The thing is, he hasn’t done so. Not really. Not if you want to know whether or not Nicholas and Alison get back together, which seems to have been what his correspondents regarding the original edition were concerned about.
But that’s not what bothered me, either then or now. I don’t mind an ambiguous ending. And I actually kind of like the way you can think of it as a freeze-frame, like the ending of a film (Bonnie and Clyde ends like that, if I remember correctly – though in a more dramatic event).1
No, what annoys me is that we never really learn what Conchis and the others were up to. They called their project “The Godgame” (it was also Fowles’s proposed title for the novel at one point); but what was the point of it? What were they trying to achieve?
Ultimately I suppose that can be answered in part by Fowles’s argument regarding people asking about the “meaning” of the novel:
If The Magus has any "real significance", it is no more than that of the Rorschach Test in psychology. Its meaning is whatever reaction it provokes in the reader[.]
So the Godgame’s meaning or purpose may be simply the reaction it provokes in Nicholas; but that still leaves us wondering, as I said above, why did Conchis do it? Was it just the whim of a rich man? He did it because he could? And yet mere whim feels weak alongside all the discussion of freedom and what it means.
In the end the mild sense of frustration remains, because we never find that out.
Back when I first read it, there was no immediately obvious way to find discussions of it. No doubt there were some in academic journals and theses, but finding those would have been difficult. Now, of course, such discussions are easy to find. And the most interesting one I found recently was by Jo Walton on Tor.com: Twists of the Godgame: John Fowles’s The Magus. As Walton says, the ending “twists at just the wrong moment and sends it away from metaphysics into triviality and romance.”
She goes on to compare it to Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life”, which I haven’t read. But the argument that “Fowles doesn’t know what he’s doing, that the underlying reality that is never explained doesn’t make sense” rings true for me. And so when she says that “what Chiang’s ‘The Story of Your Life’ does is what Fowles may have wanted to do”, I’m inclined to suspect that she’ll be proved right when I come to read the Chiang.
I still loved the book, though: you can enjoy the journey even if you’re not entirely happy with the destination. Walton’s conclusion gives a hilarious suggestion for how it could have been improved, though:
It’s beautifully written. The characters are so real I’d recognise them if I saw them at the bus-stop. And there’s nothing wrong with it that couldn’t be fixed by having them go off in an alien space ship at the end.
Now that would have been an ending.
Cultural Times
On Wednesday I went to The State of the Culture, a symposium on Iain M Banks's "Culture" novels, at Brunel University. Paul Kincaid's writeup suggests that his experience was very similar to mine. Including the journey. I thought it was a long hike from Hackney, but he came all the way from Folkestone. And I managed to find the main reception, where they gave me a map showing the way to the Antonin Artaud building. I was later than Paul, though.
I was surprised that it was so sparsely attended. There were only about thirty people there, including all the ones who were presenting papers. Given Banksie’s popularity, I thought it would be packed. A few years back when he was guest at the BSFA’s monthly London meeting, they had to have it in a lecture hall at Imperial College, instead of the usual room over or under a pub. I suppose that either the academic nature of it put people off, or just that it wasn’t very well publicised. Shame, really.
My assessment of the event generally is much the same as Paul’s so you can just read his comments. But of the papers that were presented, the one that I was most disappointed by was the one that I would probably have found most interesting, if I had been able to hear it. Martyn Colebrook’s “Playing Games with Gods: The Player of Games”, which compared the Banks work with John Fowles’s The Magus. By coincidence I’ve read both of those in the last couple of months (and more on them later), so it would have been interesting to hear what Dr Colebrook had to say. But unfortunately he was just speaking too quietly for the human ear, which is what I’m equipped with (I was at the back of the room, having arrived late).
I’ve sought his paper online, but it doesn’t seem to be around yet. Maybe sometime.
The most used word of the day, apart from “Culture”, was “transgressive”. Indeed, the same Dr Colebrook has edited a collection of essays called The Transgressive Iain Banks.
Forgot the Cry of Gulls
It's now a week -- more, by the time I finish and post this -- since we heard about the death of Iain Banks. Everyone has written about this. From Ken McLeod's reminder in The Guardian that he was an SF writer first and foremost, through personal tributes by some of my friends to Stuart Kelly's "final interview" in The Guardian (and not forgetting Kirsty Wark's "final interview", which should be around on iPlayer for a while).
Now it’s my turn. I didn’t know him personally at all, despite having friends who did. Of course I would echo all the comments to the effect that he was a friendly and entertaining speaker, having seen him at several conventions and readings.
But it’s the books, man, the books.
I’m not totally sure when I first heard of The Wasp Factory, but I’d be willing to bet it was from my friend Andrew. I think I remember him mentioning it, but maybe I had heard of it already. Either way, sometime around 86 or 87, I’d say, I started reading his books. I know that the first three at least were already out (and in paperback). Maybe Consider Phlebas, too. And I loved them, especially The Bridge and Espedair Street. It was clear – even before he started publishing explicit science fiction with the added initial – that he was one of us. The Bridge’s fantasy sequences, and those of Walking on Glass, can be read as the products of damaged minds; but they’re better if you read them as at being about what’s really happening to their protagonists.
The first three SF novels are fine and dandy, but it wasn’t them that really changed me. Changed me, that is, into a buyer of hardback books – and an on-release buyer of Banksie. But it was at a science-fiction convention that it happened. And all it took was a friend’s recommendation, and a single line.
It must have been 1992, so the convention would have been Illumination, the Eastercon in Blackpool. Though it could have been Novacon that year. Either way, I had seen the new one by Banksie in the book room, but decided to wait for the paperback, as was my wont in those days. Hardbacks seemed incredibly expensive, at maybe fifteen or sixteen pounds.
Luckily I prevaricated to my friend Steve. He said, “You should buy it, Martin.” I resisted still. He said, “Just read the first line and you’ll buy it.”
I did. It was, “It was the day my grandmother exploded.” I bought The Crow Road instantly, and have bought every subsequent Banksie in hardback on release. Except for Raw Spirit, which came out just before Christmas (and surprised me by appearing in WH Smith’s when I hadn’t even heard it existed). I didn’t buy it right away, but received it a few days later as a perfectly-targeted Secret Santa present from a work colleague.
So I just want to thank those friends, and thank Iain’s memory for a great, great body of work. I can’t express how sad I am that we won’t hear from him again.
Oh, and calling him “Banksie”? That has always been the way in the SF community, and he used it himself. Always with the “ie”; that guy with “y” ending is just some blow-in. I’m sure it comes from having been “Banks, I” at school; just as Daniel Weir of Espedair Street got his nickname “Weird” from being “Weir, D”.
The Third-Person Sanctimonious
With The Great Gatsby fever in full swing (to mix a metaphor), I've been thinking about the book a lot today. I tweeted yesterday that I had never really got what all the fuss was about.
Want to see the _Great Gatsby_ movie, yet despite re-reading the book last summer, I fail to see what people think is so good about it. #fb— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) May 19, 2013
I find it hard to explain what I find problematic about it. I wouldn't say it's bad, just that it's not as good as nearly everyone says it is. I see it as largely being about rich people having parties, and a couple of tragic deaths. And while I don't think that you have to like -- or even identify with -- all the characters for fiction to work, in this case none of them has any redeeming feature, as far as I can tell.
There’s a recent article in the Guardian by Sarah Churchwell about how wonderful it all is. It’s a well-written piece, but I find it just as hard to get to grips with, to understand the point of, as the novel itself.
So I did a search for “Gatsby overrated”, and found this piece by Kathryn Schulz which absolutely nails it.
One point she makes perhaps helps to explain why I find the characters so objectionable:
Like many American moralists, Fitzgerald was more offended by pleasure than by vice, and he had a tendency to confound them. In The Great Gatsby, polo and golf are more morally suspect than murder.
And:
On the page, Fitzgerald’s moralizing instinct comes off as cold; the chill that settles around The Great Gatsby is an absence of empathy.
My favourite part is her parenthetical assertion that:
In a literary hostage exchange, I would trade a thousand Fitzgeralds for one Edward St. Aubyn, 10,000 for an Austen or Dickens.
Though I had to look up Edward St. Aubyn.
But her main argument concerns the shallowness of the characterisations, the emphasis on symbolism over emotion:
Of the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn, he admitted, “I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy.”What was Fitzgerald doing instead of figuring out such things about his characters? Precision-engineering his plot, chiefly, and putting in overtime at the symbol factory.
For me, though, as I think on it some more, the problem with it all (and in contradiction to the last quote above) is the thinness of the plot. The prose is famously poetic in places, and that’s fine; but the real weakness is that there’s almost no story there.
And that famous last line1? Poetic though it is, when you parse it, it means absolutely nothing at all.
A Drop of the Hard Stuff
...potential readers are still coming to the genre. Books aren't the entry drug any more. Books are the hard stuff, the crystal meth of genre.
Moxyland, by Lauren Beukes
Lauren Beukes has just won the Clarke Award with her Zoo City. Congratulations to her, and all.
I just finished reading her Moxyland, which I was given at last year’s Eastercon, and… I’m not so impressed.
Strange Horizons has a good dual review of it. I kind of enjoyed it, especially towards the end. But in many ways I found it annoying, and I’ve been trying to work out exactly why that is.
Part of it is the characters, I think. I don’t mind unsympathetic — even unpleasant — characters. But I think the main problem with these ones is that it’s hard to tell their voices apart, and since the story is told from multiple first-person viewpoints, that’s a problem.
But I think the biggest point of disconnection for me was technological: there is one particular item that made my disbelief-suspension system collapse in despair.
Because I can easily believe in a near future where your phone takes the place of both credit cards and cash, where it is the heart and soul of your identity, and to be disconnected would make you an unperson. But even supposing that phones could be engineered to give their owners a taser-like shock at the command of any police officer (what if your battery is low?); even supposing that a society would not rise up in protest at the madness of a government requiring its citizens to possess such a thing; and even supposing that it all worked: I can’t believe that nobody would carry them in thick rubber pockets.
So in the end, in a novel containing much about political activism, it’s the political acquiescence of its imagined society that crashed me out of the story too often.
Still, it was her first novel, and shows much promise, so I expect that Zoo City will be a worthy winner.
Summer Reading 2010
I've got out of the habit of writing about everything I read, but I've had such a good run of books over the summer that I want to at least make some notes on them all.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
I tweeted as follows, while I was reading this:
I don't go in for having a 'favourite' book, but if I did, right now, it would be Neal Stephenson's _Anathem_. It made my brain sparkle.
Martin McCallion
devilgate
And making my brain sparkle is exactly the effect reading this had on me. I absolutely loved every minute of it (except, perhaps, the long detour over the pole). And the unusual thing about is this: it made me think, “Come on, get the action out of the way, and get back to the talking and philosophy.”
I won’t go in to any detail. There are plenty of places you can read more about it. A wonderful, wonderful book.
The Time-Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
As is this one. There has been a lot written about this, too. I, of course, approached it with genre in mind, and was amused from the start by the review-quotes on the cover; notably The Observer’s assertion that it is “startlingly original”.
It’s about someone who randomly travels in time along their own timeline. I kept thinking, “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”. I kept thinking, “I know where I came from, but what about all you zombies?” (which quote I misremembered; it is actually “…but where did all you zombies come from?")
I even thought, “Spoilers,” and “Hello Sweetie.”, but a quick check of the publication date informs me that it actually pre-dates new Doctor Who, so maybe Moffat was influenced by this.
Anyway, all those touchpoints are largely irrelevant, as this is not a work of science fiction at all (it makes no attempt to explain the time-travel mechanism, though does assign it some genetic connection). It is, rather, a love story with slightly unusual constraints. And very well told, though I’m a tad unhappy with the ending.
The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod
As I am with the ending of this one. It’s a fine story, though, set in a future Edinburgh where global warming has been partially turned back by technology, and there are space elevators and fully-conscious robots and other AIs. It’s a crime story, with the main character being a cop.
Edinburgh’s SF writers seem to be trying to get a bit of Iain Rankine’s territory these days.
The Clan Corporate by Charles Stross
Charlie being the other of those I’m alluding to there. Here, though, we’re back in his “Merchant Princes series. I’ve reviewed the first and second volumes before.
I said before that it was hard to believe how successful Miriam Beckstein is, given the radical changes that have happened to her. In this one she is much more circumscribed, by her odd family.
Relatively little happens here, really, but a lot is set in place for the following volumes. The main thing is that her worlds are starting to collide.
Pandaemonium by Christopher Brookmyre
Worlds colliding here, too.
I haven’t read a Brookmyre since his first, Quite Ugly One Morning, which I remember thoroughly enjoying. Not enough, though, to read any intervening ones.
This one is very different. It has soldiers, scientists, priests, demons, and schoolkids. It’s great fun.
There is a wildly-glaring plot hole at the end. My son read the book after me, and it was the first thing he said to me about it when he’d finished. We both hope it’s deliberate, meaning that Brookmyre has a sequel planned.