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June 30, 2009

A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Aside from the fact that I can never remember which way round her double surname goes, Bujold is one of my favourite fantasy/SF writers, particularly for her Miles/Vor series. A Civil Campaign comes a long way into the Miles book, and is one of most openly romantic of the series, being the one in which Miles courts and wins the fair Ekaterina.

I listened to this as an audiobook rather than read it, and because of that it did take me some time to get into it – it was my first audiobook experience and it took me a while to learn how to listen properly. But by about a quarter of the way through, the audio experience was a bonus: I could start it playing and sink into the familiar tones of the very good reader, like sinking into the familiar world itself.

The other limitation was that I hadn’t read the book in which Miles actually meets Ekaterina, and so was missing quite a bit of backstory. At first I was a bit dismayed with how shy and retiring Ekaterina is – I wanted a strong, bold woman for Miles. But as the story progresses, it’s made clear why she is that way, and her strength also shines through.

The subplots, with the bugs and the transexual and the other pairings, are all a lot of fun, and the resolution of the main romance plot, in the council chamber, is a great moment.

As a straight fantasy genre romance, I think the very early (first?) book in the Vor series which is the meeting of Miles’s parents might work better – there is less backstory and complicated relationships to manage for the reader. But as a romance for Miles, with his readers behind all the way – slapping their foreheads at his stupidity for that garden plan and cheering him on when he starts making progress – this is a great read – lots of banter, lots of fun, and some very telling character moments.

 

June 23, 2009

Mr Mee by Andrew Crumey

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What a strange and entertaining book this is. It consists of three intertwined stories, but you only fully find out how they are related at the very end, and in the meantime, all three are funny and clever in their own ways.

First, we meet Mr Mee, an exceedingly innocent old man, so innocent, in fact, that it’s hard to believe he’s not winking at the reader as he po-faced describes the internet porn he is so unknowingly poring over in his quest to track down an obscure work known as Rosier’s Encyclopaedia. The naked women on his new computer screen drives off his housekeeper of many years, and before he knows it (and who could believe that a coincidence of a flat, tyre, a downpour of rain and a visit to a computer store could lead to all this), a young lady has moved into his house and is giving him little pills to help his headaches and practising her life sciences homework on him.

Next, Minard and Ferrand are introduced. Now, these characters are mentioned, in passing, for real in Rousseau’s Confessions (as the third narrative informs us): “he one, tall, smooth-tongued, and sharping, was named Ferrand; the other, short, squat, a sneerer, and punctilious, was a M. Minard…As they thrust themselves into all companies, and wished to intermeddle in everything, Theresa called them the gossips, and by this name they were long known at Montmorency.” Crumey has made up a fictional backstory for the gossips, and they provide the overt, slapstick, odd couple style comedy of the book, as they take on some mysterious copying work which results in a murder and their flight from Paris to Montmorency, where they become the neighbours of newly-renowned Rousseau.

The third narrative is a middle-aged university professor, in the midst of that most trite of literary devices, an infatuation with one of his students (seriously, do a survey – how many male middle-aged literary writers write about middle-aged men having affairs or becoming obsessed with younger women; I know the advice is ‘write what you know’ but come on, it gets dull). However, this one is not going to turn out how you think it might, and in the meantime, we get philosophical musings on Rousseau (very handy for following the other threads if, like me, you know little about the man except that he was French and unpleasant), other French writers, the Encyclopaedia, and the general foolishness of life. Compared to the other strands, this one is the least laugh-out-loud funny, but the most intellectually amusing and ironic.

Each narrative voice is distinct and appealing; the book is well-written, a fascinating blend of real anecdotes and fictional events. Unusually for me, it left me wanting more.

 

June 9, 2009

Summerland by Michael Chabon

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I had such a good start to my reading year, but in the last month or so I’ve had a run of books that I found merely okay without being memorable, that I was completely neutral about (neither category worth reviews), or that I outright disliked (and yet could not stop reading since I was inevitably on holiday and short of reading material) – I just had three in a row in this latter category during my week in Vietnam.

(If you really want to know, they were Girl Meets Ape by Chris Manby, Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster, and The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larsson.)

When you’re becoming disillusioned with reading, it’s time to bring out the secret weapon: books on the backlist of newly discovered favourite writers. So I turned to Michael Chabon and his young adult novel, Summerland.

Ethan is a young boy who has lost his mother and is struggling to find his place on his new home’s baseball team. With his oddball friends, Jennifer T. and Thor, he is recruited into help save the Summerlands, a faerie-type world parallel to our own, and discovers his own strengths and talents.

In many ways, this book reminded me of one of my favourite YA books, The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O’Shea, published over 20 years ago now. That featured a 10-year-old boy struggling with loss, who, with his sister and led by a spirit guide, travels into the world of Irish myth and legend. Summerland, though very different in style and characters, takes an 11-year-old boy into Norse and Native American myth and legend. There’s also a very strong baseball theme and it’s to Chabon’s credit that even this held my attention despite my complete lack of knowledge of or interest in this sport (I’m Australian, our stick-and-ball sport is cricket).

It had all the elements I enjoy about Chabon’s writing: firstly, his technical proficiency. The man is a literary writer without falling for the fads in literary writing. Someone on a message-board (paraphrasing someone else) put it like this: that people either look for windows into other worlds or mirrors of our own, and the desire at the moment is for the latter.

This unfortunately leads to things like detailed descriptions of a character, for example, raising a window shade: “When he reaches his destination, he thrusts out his right hand, takes hold of the bottom of the shade, and gives it a quick tug, hoping to engage the spring that will send the shade flying upward.” (from Travels in the Scriptorium, p39). Do readers need that long of a description for something we’ve all done or seen done? Really?

Or it leads to authors apparently feeling driven to tell you that a character woke up at 7am and had breakfast at the 7-Eleven, or did their laundry – first underwear and t-shirts, then jeans (The Girl Who Played With Fire was terrible for adding in these kinds of details, I suppose for veracity, but it just made the book bloated and dull to me).

The worst example I have ever seen combined both techniques so that the reader was subject to a couple of paragraphs of sorting the laundry before putting it in the machine and adding powder etc.

But if you’re going to be a mirror of everyday things, you need to reflect them in a way that makes the reader look at them in a different way. Otherwise what’s the point (or do other readers find laundry a lot more fascinating than I do? I don’t read to be reminded of chores). And Michael Chabon manages that, I think, and therefore he is both mirror and window.

Secondly, it has the subtlety and quiet humour that I so appreciate about Chabon’s books. Do we get a great big paragraph about how Ethan’s mum died and now he’s lonely and lost and stuck with the other outcast children? No, we don’t need to be told that when we’re so effectively shown (see, Chabon knows the rules and knows how to use them properly) with gentle brushstrokes.

And lastly, it’s a good story with good characters, the most important thing for any book. I was impressed especially with just how much of a journey mild-mannered Ethan has to go on before he is ready to be a hero.

Refreshed by a favourite writer, I am now steeled for plunging back in to trying out new authors.

 

May 26, 2009

Three Hands for Scorpio by Andre Norton

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Triplet princesses (or more accurately, earl’s daughters) are kidnapped from their securely warded home and then dumped in a scary underground world called the Dismals. Now they must make their way out with the help of a enigmatic boy-wizard, find their way back to their family, and, incidentally, save the world.

I went into this eagerly: three strong female leads and a mysterious young wizard? I wrote one with that exact set-up (coming soon), though of course totally different from this one. I like reading stand-alone fantasy novels (and oh boy are they are hard to find) with good female characters (also hard to find), and this should have been exactly my cup of tea.

But…

The only reason this book slipped past my 50-page rule was because it is by Andre Norton, the “grande dame” of fantasy, and I just kept thinking I’d get pay-off in the end. But I didn’t. It’s my first try at reading one of hers, and will be my last.

Firstly, it’s very old-fashioned, understandably enough, since this was one of the last books Norton wrote, after a career of more than one hundred books, and she was in her 90s by then. But opening with an info-dump of the history of the family and the land? Annoyingly old hat, and illogical besides, since the conceit is that the three girls are writing out their adventures for the queen, who you would think would already know this stuff.

And continually producing some new concept or piece of history or magic type just when it’s needed instead of having some foreshadowing or introducing the item a little earlier so it doesn’t come out of nowhere (eg yargargy, a terribly addictive power-boosting plant, suddenly mentioned for the first time only when they need it)? Gives the impression she was making it up as she went along and didn’t bother revising. It’s not that hard to mention something in passing when you’re going to need it later, especially when the plot is moving as slowly as this one does.

The language is also heavy-going, deliberately archaic, convoluted and formal. This matches the time period very well, of course, but it had the effect of almost pushing my attention away; I either found myself skimming, trying to get past the endless description to the next important event, or reading without taking anything in – when I could force myself to pick it up and get another page done at all. One inside cover blurb claims it’s “aimed primarily at younger readers”…I have to think if I had trouble reading it, a 15-year-old isn’t going to thrive.

All three girls take turns narrating/writing the account to the queen. Except they sound exactly alike – fair enough, they’re triplets, raised together, they’ll sound alike – but then there’s little point switching back and forth between them, especially, as happens often, within a few paragraphs. It’s distracting and unnecessary. I spent the entire book waiting for the reason for this device – would one die? (obviously not, since all three are writing the account afterwards, so there goes that tension source) Would they become separated? (never for long, though they do all take turns collapsing a lot) Would they end up on different paths by the end? (nope)

The character of the three girls was the most disappointing part. They are not active participants in their own story, but instead spend the entire time being driven and manipulated by forces outside themselves. Even their new powers that manifest themselves do exactly that – manifest without the girls having to work at them, draw them out, or do anything other than be passive receptacles. They rarely know what’s happening, why or how, it just happens through them, not because of them.

The wizard, Zolan, spends the whole time in the Dismals manipulating them, testing them – basically lying to them and screwing them around – and when he explains why, they just accept it passively and go along with it, trusting him when he has given them no reason for it.

He per force must be their guide in the Dismals, but when they finally get out to the above-ground world where he has never been, and you’d think they’d get the chance to lead now they’re in their own environment…no, he’s still the one rushing forward and being the leader. And then their parents show up, and they’re back to being the daughters of the family.

All three are so frustratingly passive and that does not change over the course of the book (despite the bit of defiance at the very end with the ‘we shall choose our own husbands’ bit).

Perhaps I went into this book with too-high expectations given the reputation of Norton; perhaps this is an unusual style of book for her. But I was disappointed by all aspects of it – the writing, the characters, and the plot. Not recommended.

 

May 5, 2009

Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski

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I’ll say right up front that not only did I not finish this book, I barely even started it. It’s an experimental book; the experiment did not work for me because I failed to grasp hold of a narrative and I cannot remain interested in a book without narrative.

The book is told from two intertwined points of views, Sam and Hailey, two teenagers. The idea is that you read eight pages of one – and it doesn’t matter which one you start with – and then flip the book over and read eight pages of the other, and alternate like that through the whole book. Their story is told in fragments and bursts, overlapping each other. I can’t really say what the story was going to be about; not even the blurb can tell you.

In the few pages I read, I could see the author was going to play games with the POVs: for example, Sam, in typical teenage boy fashion, thinks Hailey is impressed by him; after eight pages, flip to Hailey and find out that she, in typical teenage girl fashion, thinks he’s a loser. I like that, but it wasn’t enough.

For me, it was very difficult to tell what was going on in the twenty or so pages I tried to read. As I said, it’s fragmented, poetic: my tendency is to start skimming until I can find something I can attribute meaning to, and then go back to re-read the earlier bits with the new knowledge, but skimming makes it even less likely I’ll understand it, and then there’s no way to hook in at all.

If I didn’t have so many other books to read, then maybe I could have approached this with more patience. I do like to see innovation in literature; however, this one didn’t work for me. Maybe it will work for you.

 

April 28, 2009

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

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This YA book is a classic coming of age tale, except the central character, Nobody Owens, is coming of age in a graveyard. Rescued by the inhabitants when his family is brutally murdered by a mysterious figure known as Jack, Nobody is raised by the ghosts and a guardian vampire, making friends and having adventures. The Jacks never stop looking for him, and he, as he grows up, wants answers about what happened to his family and why.

The Graveyard Book is Gaiman’s usual good work: by turns funny, dark, and poignant (growing up means losing things and people we love), well-written, and well plotted. For example, the adventures Nobody has when he is a child turn into his weapons against the Jacks when he is a teen – they are both entertaining interludes in the book and also set-up for later action, in perfect genre form. The characters are sparsely drawn and solid, with Nobody as the observer-actor in the middle.

If you like Gaiman, you’ll like this. If you haven’t tried him, what are you waiting for. Great for children, good for adults.

 

April 21, 2009

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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This classic story was made available through iPulpFiction and the AppEngines ebook reader for iPhone and iPhone Touch. All-round gentleman of the frontier John Carter mysteriously awakens on Mars and goes through plenty of heroic adventures while rescuing a beautiful princess from the clutches of her warrior enemies.

While it’s early science fiction, it doesn’t have too much in common with what we think of as hard science fiction now. Short, action-packed, and violent, it’s instead an example of pulp fiction known as ‘planetary romance’.

For a modern reader (ie me), there’s plenty of flaws. The ’science’ is laughable and has more in common with fantasy tropes than actual science, the character development is minimal – he tends to gloss over such things as the development of friendships – and character portrayals are unsubtle, and plot holes are dealt with as he notices them (for example, oh, we can fly faster than our enemies who are in the exact same type of craft as us because, um, oh yes, we modified them earlier to get better performance…).

Also, the action-based plot had the effect of distancing me – along with the tendency to give away what’s going to happen in the text or in the chapter titles – so I felt little suspense or concern for the characters. Which would be normal for action-based plots.

On the plus side, so much happens in this book that a modern re-telling, taking time to flesh out characters and explore motivations, would take three to seven volumes, so the somewhat superficial attitude is really a relief. A quick and easy pulp fiction read.

Burroughs wrote several sequels in the same style, and was, of course, also the creator of Tarzan.

 

April 7, 2009

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

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“Our opponent is a [very powerful entity],” I said. “We have a protractor.”

Since it’s some 200 pages before you find out exactly what the opponent is, I won’t spoil it by quoting the line in full, but it’s a funny line, as is the follow-up.

The book opens in what amounts to a monastery (concent, rather than convent – one of many lovely word-plays in this book) that keeps mathematicians and physicists isolated from the secular world, rather than religious folk.

The concents have a shaky relationship with the outside world, something hinted at in the timeline at the start, which unerringly follows great new discoveries with sackings of the concents and massacres of the avouts (equivalent to monk). The avouts still have permission to use these discoveries, and there’s a hint that the oldest of them have gone even further with their research into that old saying about sufficiently advanced science being indistinguishable from magic…or multi-verse theory, anyway.

Erasmas is a young avout, and we are introduced to the concent, its layout, functions and politics, through his observer eyes. In between all this description (and there’s a lot of it, and it’s hypocritical of me to say I didn’t mind it given how much I dislike info-dumps normally, but I am justified by how interesting and different the world being described is – make no mistake, this is not a alternate history of Earth), the plotline slowly peeks out: Erasmas’s teacher Orolo is up to something, and is thrown out of the concent in quick order.

His devoted students, Erasmas among them, in turn seek the same heresy that got him thrown out…meanwhile avouts are being summoned out into the secular world where they are normally, except at set times, excluded. This is a sure sign that something world-shaking is going on out there. When Erasmas’s turn finally comes, he breaks orders to seek Orolo, and the story rolls on from there.

Don’t be put off by the thickness of Anathem; it’s, as is typical with Stephenson, both a cerebral tour de force and an adventure novel, especially in the second half.

If you choose to pay attention to the long socratic dialogues, you will end up with a recapitulation of the history of scientific philosophic thought. You can, however, skim through these discussions and still easily follow the core adventure yarn as our cerebral heroes work out how to take on their enemy with a protractor.

Stephenson is not an easy read; Anathem is dense and wordy, but it’s rewarding and memorable.

 

March 31, 2009

The Good Mayor by Andrew Nicoll

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The Good Mayor is the story of the mayor of a town called Dot (other towns of this unnamed northern European country include Dash and Umlaut, and the river is Ampersand; I will get to the determinedly quirky nature of this book later), and his love for his married secretary. Which is about it, plotwise, though with a cast of supporting characters to keep things rolling along.

It’s fantasy only in the sense that there’s a witch or two (stregas from a long line of stregas), ghosts who form a pivotal plot point, a strange twist involving a dog, and a 1200 year old martyred saint as narrator. It’s maybe an attempt at magic realism a la One Hundred Years of Solitude; either way it didn’t work for me.

In fact if I hadn’t been on holiday and short of reading material, this book would not have passed my 50-page rule for a couple of reasons, the first of which was the relation of how the narrating saint was martyred – by being gang-raped to death by invading Huns – but don’t worry, wink wink, she was so ugly that no man would touch her except those bestialty-loving Huns, and therefore she was so horny she loved every second of it, wink wink. Must be that famous feminist lack of sense of humour, but I have trouble enjoying entertainment based around a) gang rape and b) the physical/sexual attractiveness or otherwise of women…which is something I am going to return to in a moment too.

The other reason I would have given up after the first chapter or two is the unrelenting reach for quaintness, the town names being just one example, another being the number of times the major is titled Good Mayor Krovic – we got it from the title, and it’d be nice to be shown how he is so much better than other mayors rather than simply told – given one example of his mayorship is him manipulating his people and another is him losing his temper when he’s supposed to remain impartial.

Such ‘quirks’ in the writing came across as contrived to me, so it fell flat and into tweeness rather than genuine quirkiness, and also made it a frustrating read. Like following the point of view of a seagull for half a page before being told it can’t hear speech so no point wasting time following it and let’s cut to the cat…well, we already wasted time following it. Or following the progress of a letter through the mail system, only to be told later that this event was not “of great interest or adventure…” well, why is it in the book then, if not for trying to be clever? I hate this literary style with a passion.

The other major flaw for me was the love story – and since this is the thrust of the book, it’s a pretty big flaw. You’d think the mayor’s civil servant status and the secretary’s married status would be the big blocker, but it’s not. These two people are kept apart through their own stupidity. If the author has to spend a page or so justifying a character’s decision as due to human nature, it’s because the decision makes no damn sense and needs over-explanation (in the hands of a better writer, the decision would actually have come across as perfectly true to human nature). “Even” the much-derided romance genre can manage better than that.

Also, the sheer focus on the physical attributes of the secretary, Agathe, was exhausting. Kudos to the author for making her plump, but a slap on the wrist for giving me no reason to believe anyone was in love with for any other reason than her lovely face and body, or any reason to think the love is going to last past the second she loses her looks. More specifically, I have no idea why the mayor fell in love with Agathe aside from that she was pretty, nice and nearby.

The writing is decent, if in that literary style I find more pretty than functional (and again, see Michael Chabon for pretty AND functional AND events of great interest and adventure). But the dialogue is flat and dull and circular, and it kept distractingly slipping into UK slang, a little off for what felt like a Baltic town. And I’ve already said I did not find the character motivations convincing; like the quirkiness, it rang false.

It’s not all bad. I think this would be a great book club book because there’s so much to discuss: the fat lawyer’s cynical opinion of the townsfolk, for example, which is accepted as correct by the final events without them ever having a chance to prove him wrong; the narrator’s comment that Agathe is ‘incapable of being unkind’ when she is quite plainly unkind to many of the other characters (she may be incapable of the intention to be unkind but that’s debatable too); whether the mayor is actually good; and, good lord, whether the message of the book really is that the best way to love is like a dog (as long as you find the right person who won’t abuse that love).

I hate to be so harsh to a first-time author and attendee at the Perth Writers Festival, but I really was so disappointed by this book. I hope he does better with his next book.

 

March 10, 2009

The Dark Volume by G.W. Dahlquist

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This sequel to The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, which I so loved, picks up immediately after the close of Glass Books and follows the same alternating chapter structure. Miss Temple wakes from a fever to find herself seemingly deserted by Chang and Doctor Svenson and the villagers sheltering her rather urgently wanting her gone. Mysterious deaths abound as she makes her way back to London, struggling with the changes that reading a glass book have wrought on her.

We switch to Chang and then to Svenson, moving back in time to see why each of them in turn felt obliged to leave and developing the new plot which involves a second tier of conspirators who are moving into the power vacuum left by the destruction of the original cabal.

There a couple of problems with this sequel which make it somewhat less enjoyable than Glass Books. Firstly, the ending of that first book left our three heroes stranded far away from the centre of the action. Therefore the first part of the book has to be devoted to getting them back to where the conspiracy is taking place. Dahlquist does his best to raise mysteries to keep the reader involved, and to a certain extent that works – except the back cover blurb gives it all away (tip: do not read the back cover blurb for this book). Also, it never does become entirely clear what exactly has happened in the smaller details. I can guess, but unlike the first book, guesses are never properly confirmed.

Because of the time spent moving the characters into position, there is less time to introduce the new swathe of villains. One of the pleasures of Glass Books is that it never moves slowly but because all three heroes encounter the villains individually, they are introduced three times over: the reader has the space to see where alliances and motivations lie. However, with The Dark Volume, villains are switching sides and plans before you’ve even had time to work out whose side they’re currently on or what they were intending to do. It’s much, much harder to keep the intricate backstabbings straight.

And lastly, the Process and its related elements have moved from being enticingly mysterious to annoyingly vague. Turns out indigo clay, which is used to make the blue glass, can do just about anything, from brainwashing and mind control to powering airships, and lord knows what the Process actually does…I’m coming at the book from a fantasy perspective, so it doesn’t bother me too much. Someone reading with a SF perspective would probably be put off by the imprecision.

All this is not to say I didn’t very much enjoy seeing these characters in action again, and watching their relationships evolve. In fact, the main disappointment to me was that they spend even less time together in this one than they did in Glass Books. Once again I’m hoping for a sequel, because if it’s left where The Dark Volume ended, our heroes are in a bad, bad place indeed.

 

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