September 4th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Ysabel* by Guy Gavriel Kay

My review of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel must be somewhat lacking in context, as I know it is one of hundreds of books in a genre of which I’ve read, in last 15 years, pretty much zilch. It’s the tale of a teenager, disregarded and pushed around by the adult world, who discovers amazing powers within himself and is able to step in and stop a wrong that e no one else could even fathom. You see–popular story-style.

When one is starting to read in new territory, it is wise to start with the best–so that even if the material is not particularly attractive, the talent of the writer and the intricacy of the structure can help suck you in. Which is why Scott wanted me to read something by Kay, one of Canada’s greatest and most vivid storytellers, as well as a global bestseller and pretty much the only writer I have ever encountered whose readings draw such crowds that people arrive a couple hours early to ensure they get seats.

There’s a reason–Kay is damn good. My somewhat snippy summary above does not at all encompass the 12-character, fast-moving, action/adventure/historical novel that is *Ysabel*. The book takes place in the south of France, where 15-year-old Ned has been dragged so that his famous photographer father can shoot images for a new coffeetable book on the area. His had is accompanied by three assistants, so Ned has no real role to play other than sulk and do homework.

On the first day of shooting, Ned wanders into an old cathedral where, in short order, he meets a pretty exchange student from New York and a 2600-hundred-year-old gentleman who climbs out of the floor, threatens them with a knife, and later springs from the roof.

Unlike some fantasy books I could mention (and most of the vampire-related ones), *Ysabel* does not simply use history to organize or weight the plot, or to sound cool and deep. The plot is intrinsically rooted in Greek/Celt relations (such as they were) from millenia ago. It seemed that Kay had done an incredible amount of research, but to be honest, if he muffed stuff, I could never have caught him, and I doubt most readers could have. That’s the advantage of choosing an esoteric point in history of course.

But a sensational one–if Kay is to be trusted, even the unimproved history contains bloody sieges, obscure marriage rites, seafaring adventure and midnight rituals. Not to mention skull worship. The events that Kay makes use of are so serious and strange that sometimes the improvements he does make on them–the story that Ned walks into involves a eons-old love triangle, and an elaborate game of hide-and-seek–can seem trivial. But most of the time, the book makes a powerful case for history being still with us, always, and the worst crimes never being truly forgotten.

So the man in the cathedral must fight another for the hand of the beautiful Ysabel, and Ned and his new pretty friend Kate get wrapped up in it–first a little, then a lot. And the interesting thing is, then Ned’s dad does too. And his dad’s assistants. Ned’s mom, his aunt and uncle round out the cast.

Since the Brothers Grimm, books have featured plucky young heroes whose parents were either dead or dastardly, and who thus had to fight their battles all all all alone. I have long maintained that there is nothing Freudian in this; it is simply easier to right an adventure story about one or two rather than about a family (try it!) It is really nice to see Ned scrambling along alone and then–in honest 15-year-old fashion–having to turn to his folks for certain kinds of support. *Ysabel* is at times very sweet, but almost never sappy.

All the characters were well-drawn, if not particularly nuanced. Most were strong, conflicted, kind, smart, and frightened, although perhaps each in a slightly different order. There was a long backstory related to Ned’s mom and his aunt which is rather overdramatic and does not have a satisfying resolution, but the more quotidian interactions of the family are natural and smooth–everyone’s pretty panicked by the violence and craziness (supernatural wolves keep attacking) but someone’s always hollering after Ned to bring his cellphone and wear a hoodie. The acknowledgements mention that Kay is a dad of young men perhaps slightly older than Ned, which would explain why his insights, while not exactly profound, are so accurate.

Sometimes I get so caught up in my short-story universe that I forget how other forms work. A 400-page fantasy novel is about as far from short-story as you can get; characters read aloud from historical wall plaques in this book, not just once but several times. They also read from guidebooks, websites, and the occasional poem. And it’s weird to get massive chunks of exposition like this, yes, but honestly, it seemed to work well enough. I guess it is a question of pacing–if you are going into 1000s of years of character backstory, countless wars and sieges,  3/4 of a page on a google search seems about right.

It also helps that Kay’s prose is crystal clear. It’s brilliant in the sense of being invisible–the words just exist to bring you the images. *Ysabel* was the most movie-like book I’ve read in a while. Even sitting beside the massive hardcover, I still feel like I watched it more than read it. And the best way to see the clean *serviceableness* (that’s a compliment, actually) of the prose is to open a page at random. Read/see:

“Ned got back in and slid the door shut. Greg looked back at him for a second, then put the car in gear and started forward again.

“They passed through that closed-in arid canyon in silence, came out of shadow into springtime fields and vineyards and sunlight again. Moments later they saw the Roman arch and a tower on the left side of the road…”

The ending is very very exciting–involving the characters racing up a mountain at dusk towards the site of an ancient murder of 200 000 souls, a crime still present for Ned because of his nascent gift for a kind of second sight. Reeling from the proxy pain, Ned struggles to save a life and (what, I’m not wrecking anything, it’s that kind of book) succeeds. The bittersweet way his victory plays out is touching and my eyes actually watered a bit (it’s been a tough week, though; Kay can’t take entire credit for that).

There is some weirdness going on with the male-female relations in this book, I can’t not mention that. The Ned-Kate relationship is actually pretty natural, quirky and chaste, but quite believeable. There are a couple of really inappropriate sexual jokes from one of the adult characters though. These came early in the book and then went away, so I took it as Kay’s soon-abandoned attempt to be edgy, but the theme comes back right at the end. Way to take the edge off a nice moment, Mr. Author.

More innocuously, there is a way-too-long scene of men-are-idiots-women-are-smart banter that made me insane. I hate those sorts of “women rule the world by telling men where their socks are” jokes: you got so much respect for women, find your own damn socks. And while you’re at it, evaluate on a woman-by-woman basis, instead of a blanket statement. But this is my own personal bugaboo more than anything; the scene is not all that long.

I have not at all really delved into the intricacies of the plot because, well, it’s really intricate. And Kay explains it really well, but I don’t think I could. This book is a fast fast read–you don’t feel at all hard-done-by (there are too many hyphens in this post) reading 400 pages, though it’s a bit much to lug around the hardcover.

Oh, and another cool thing? The main characters are all from Montreal, so while in France, everyone’s speaking French. Neat-o.

Ok, that’s it.

August 12th, 2010

Me on the web

Every time an issue of TNQ comes out, they ask all the writers what they are reading and then post the answers online–fascinating stuff for the literary voyeur, or those just looking for suggestions, and fun for a literary exhibitionist like me to participate in.

And my blog post about the villains (again) is up on the Maisonneuve blog, if you missed it the first time around.

August 7th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *The Book of Awesome*

I got The Book of Awesome as a gift, but I was already aware of it because Fred pointed it out as very similar to our penta-annual (that’s the word, right?) listing of 1000 Things We Like. I was happy to read the book to help fill the time until Fall 2012, when we do the third thousand!

Neil Pasricha’s book is based on his blog, which is very close to our concept except a) it’s all one guy, not a collective liking team (as far as I can tell), and b) he writes little blurbs about how the good thing works or, often, the bad thing that is avoided/thwarted by the good thing.

This is a happy-making project and it works: I smiled a lot remembering simple pleasures like the unsafe playground equipment of my youth, the chip crumbs in the bottom of the bag, and the cool side of the pillow. I was also fascinated by pleasures I’ve yet to experience: guess who’s going to be staying up for a while trying to catch someone laughing in their sleep?) Pasricha has a frat-boy prose style you don’t read very often (at least, I don’t), and it’s charming although repetitive and I don’t *really* think he had to manipulate each entry to end with the word AWESOME (yes, in caps!)

In truth, I probably went at this book wrong–I think it’s some sort of coffee-table or occasional book, something you are supposed to dip into, scan, flip around in. I did try to do this, sorta: I kept it by my bedside and tried to read one awesome thing before I went to sleep each night. This was actually an excellent idea, a really good way to go to sleep cheerful, though perhaps a little terrified of all the things that can be done with fast-food. But I am not a dip-in reader, and I would sometimes crack out and read 15 or 20 awesome things in a row, and get to a giggly hyper place not at all condusive to sleep. Finally I just gave up and started reading it on the bus, my ideal reading environment. Which led to it being my second-ever bus book conversation (the other was Special Topics in Calamity Physics).

So I wound up reading it pretty much straight through, and getting a little obsessive about stylistic quirks that probably should have been ignored. Like, Pasricha clearly has a persona of a goofy suburban everydude who likes to eat and commutes to an office job in a car. This comes out in his voice, and the things he chooses to write about: cars and food and childhood and…there’s a lot about food (which made me happy; I like food too and am actually eating curry while I type this). But someone (an editor?) seems to have made a rule that the book be for everyone, and that Pasricha not use too many examples from his personal life.

So all the entries are written in the second person (“You’re lovin it lots!”) and the gender of pronouns often flips back and forth within a paragraph, which made the author seem not inclusive but MPD. And even though he was clearly mocking those who relish finding the last of a particular item in their size at a clothing store and much more sincere in his love of the Man Couch (apparently, a couch in mall stores where women can leave their pouty partners while they shop), he keeps on trying to be all things to all people. There’s even an entry on getting into clean sheets with freshly shaved legs–yes, that is actually an amazing sensation, but how would *he* know?

The best of these entries are actually the most personal. There’s a really really really sweet one about halftime orange slices when you are a kid playing soccer, which isn’t about orange slices at all but about his awesome mom. I’m pretty sure it would be worth the purchase price to just photocopy this entry and give it to your mom for Mother’s Day. And an entry towards the end about a friend who had passed away sort of anchored the book and made clearer its purpose.

Of course, it goes without saying there are no intellectual pleasures on this list, not even ones like, “When a frustrated crossword doer mutters a clue out loud and you happen to know the answer.” This is about more basic, visceral stuff than that–when you get the nacho with the most toppings, when the batteries in the remote control work a little longer than they should, when someone gives you a really solid hug. Those things deserve to be celebrated, and the inclusiveness of this list does show how similar we all are in the end. And that made me feel pretty AWESOME!

July 22nd, 2010

More on villains

Just a little while ago, I published an article on villains, about how badly written villains are plot twists and not characters, and well-written ones have humanity and motivations, even if they are loathesome.I have just come across a really great example of the kind of precisely worked, humanly rendered, utterly obnoxious fictional jerk I so admire–too bad I hadn’t read this book when I was writing the article.

The protagonist of Russell Smith’s Girl Crazy is 32-year-old Justin Harrison. He teaches Business English and Online Writing at a suburban vocation school, while taking an interest in neither the material nor his students nor his colleagues, hating his boss, ogling the departmental secretary, and doing as little work as possible. He spends his evenings playing violent video games and having tepid conversations with his ex-girlfriend, whom he seems never to have liked. He has few friends, though he stretches the count by including school acquaintances from 10 years ago who occasionally send him mass-mail invitations to parties. And when he sees a girl crying by the side of the road, his first thoughts are of sleeping with her.

In short, Justin is an utter asshole, who spends the entire book feeling entitled to a lifestyle that he has made no effort to achieve, and being snarky to those he believes aren’t on-side with his pathetic cause, which is pretty much everyone. Luckily, those Justin hurts are pretty much as awful as he is, and for most of the book he is too deluded and inefficient to do terribly much damage to anyone. What’s terrifying at the end is that maybe he’s gotten it together, efficiency-wise without gaining any actual insight–maybe the damage is coming.

And what’s amazing is that *Girl Crazy* is really engaging–I genuinely wanted to know what would happen to Justin at every turn, and was fascinated by the inner workings of his mind. I am very much aware that there are folks in the world–in my world–very similar to this guy. His self-interest and self-regard are utterly resonant with lesser jerks I have known. I liked the book because of Smith’s sharp prose, his funny/mean jokes, the narrative drive, but also because I’d always wanted to know what guys like this are thinking. And now, a little, I feel I do.

Justin feels it’s ok to stare at attractive women as long and obviously as he likes because they’ll never consent to sleep with him, so he deserves to take what he can get, as much of it as possible, whenever he can. Justin is dying to teach literature to his students, though they are training in trades and don’t want to learn it, and the department doesn’t want to offer it. When someone finally asks, “What do you care…about how much English lit our students know about?” Justin thought about this. It was not such an easy question. “I don’t,” he said finally. “I would just find it more interesting.”

I recognize this sort of self-absorbed pathos though I can’t hang out with guys like Justin because my breasts are too small to merit interest and I’d probably try to kill him with a butter knife after twenty minutes, anyway. But it’s great to read Smith’s dead-on evocation of a loser with a theory about everything, and watch how he tries to project himself into the big leagues and the life of a sexy girl.

I am sure no one cares what I think is wrong with fiction today, but for what it’s worth, I think a lot of writers go wrong conflating “protagonist” and “hero.” Of course, there is much great literature to be written about people who overcome adversity, learn from their mistakes, reach out to their loved ones, help the unfortunate, and achieve greatness without ever comprimising their values–but do *all* books have to be about them? I suppose we are the heroes of our own lives, but by any other standard I’d see Justin Harrison as a villain. Reading *Girl Crazy* let me live his life with interest for a week. I even queasily identified with him in places, and that, I think, is a great literary accomplishment for Smith–and certainly a tougher challenge than getting a reader to feel a commonality with the heroes we all feel ourselves to be.

July 16th, 2010

Things to do on a “writing day” that are not writing

Despite the fact that none of the activities listed below are actually writing, they all offerred comfort or encouragement to the heat-besieged writer, and I have no regrets whatsoever about anything that happened yesterday. (I also got a little writing in between all the other stuff.)

–go to the gym where, because of the air-conditioning, you actually sweat less than elsewhere
–pick raspberries
–eat the raspberries immediately. Do not even bring a bowl to put them in–eat’em right off the bush.
–read and read and read Russell Smith’s Girl Crazy. I am only at the halfway point, so I can’t fully tell you whether it is a brilliant novel or not, but I know that I am mad every time I reach my TTC stop and can’t read anymore for a while, so that’s a good sign.
–have lunch at Ackee Tree, where the staff is incredibly nice and everything seems to come with coleslaw.
–go sit on the lawn downtown that no one ever sits on (they sit on benches and stare out at it, as if it were the sea). I will leave out the exact location of the lawn to protect the identity of my partner in crime, but that is one nice lawn–all long and lush, with no worn bits (because no one ever sits on it or even walks on it) and certainly no cigarette butts or dog poo.
–give blood! I am still trying to figure out where to donate money, but at least there’s really only one place to give blood. I asked and the supply is currenly not bad, but they always need more, especially B- and O-, if you happen to have those. (Side story: as part of the usual intake assessment, the nurse asked to examine my inner arms to check for track marks. I had none of those, but I did have a cookie crumb embedded in the sweat of the crook my elbow–sex-ay!)
–watch Nicole Holofcener’s amazing film Please Give starring Catherine Keener and a really talented woman named Rebecca!! (Hall). I am not famous for my interest in complicated, serious, grown-up movies, but I did get blown away by Lovely and Amazing, also by Holofcener and also staring Keener, way back in 2001. I’m actually going to try to review this at some point, so I’ll shut up now.
–scuttle about the city in the heat, and enjoy watching folks in suits and ties eating ice-cream, skateboarders, children pitching fits, tour groups, street charity solitictations, and the nice people from a hair products company, whom I ran into both at Queen and Spadina and later at Yonge and College (I get around) and who gave me a mini bottle of conditioner both times.
–when you get home from all this, pour astringent on a white cotton pad, and then run it over your makeup-free face. If you are disgusting and immature like me, you will be fascinated to see the brownish colour of Toronto smog that has accumulated in your pores. I do this every night in summer! (Is this TMI? I never know.)

What a nice city I live in!

July 1st, 2010

Literary Pilgrimage

I think I might have written about visiting the house that inspired Anne of Green Gables in December, but that was all snow-covered and non-functional for the winter (though still splendid). In summertime, you can tour the house, which was actually originally just the house of some people LM Montgomery knew, that she transformed in her imagination to be the Cuthbert farm. But the descendents of that family donated the house to be an Anne sanctuary, and it has been redone as LM imagined it. And whoever did the decor did a pretty good job of making it coincide with how I pictured it during my approximately 20 readings of the original book. I thought Anne’s bedroom particularly accurate.

Anne's room at Green Gables.

But other spots were less so, and those I just admired but then dismissed. Seeing the house was really cool and interesting from a historical perspective, but as literature, the book remains separate for me. What happens between a reader and the page builds a world, and I found I really couldn’t add anything from some other world (even if it is the “real” one) into the one LM and I created as I read (and reread). I had a lovely time and would be curious to make other literary pilgrimages, but I think curiosity is the total of my feelings on these. Which is an interesting discovery, really.

I might feel differently if the book were nonfiction…if I read any nonfiction.

June 23rd, 2010

Book clubbery

I know book clubs have a bad rap. The reason usual touted–that the clubsters like a certain sort of book and read in a certain way–doesn’t make tonnes of sense to me. Surely every reader has his or her quirks, and every banding together of readers is quirky in its own way. I have heard of men-only, women-only, and parents-only bookclub, bookclubs where only books about food or travel or by authors in translation or Canadians are read, bookclubs organized around preparation for a trip or understanding a polical movement, and bookclubs arranged so that old friends can keep in touch.

Of course, a cynical parry would be that such themes could lead to cutsyness, which would of course lead to making it more about the club than the book. Which is a danger with anything, I suppose, from a lit class to a bookstore section. But I like to think that most clubsters want–and maybe I’m biased because it’s what I want–good literary conversation.

I get lots of opportunities to talk books; I know tonnes of well-read people and almost everyone I ask, “So what are you reading?” has an interesting answer. The problem with those interesting answers is that often, they can’t go farther, because I haven’t read that book or sometimes even heard about it. My friend will talk eagerly (and usually, knowing my friends, articulately) about what s/he is reading, and all I’ll be able to respond with is, “I think I read a review of that” or “Another friend of mine liked that one, too.” I get lots of good recommendations this way, but it’s hardly a discussion.

What I want in a bookclub is a group of smart, articulate friends who have all read the *same* book, so we can engage both with the text and with each other, and hopefully come out of it knowing something more than just our own opinions. I also like the push to read outside of my usual choices–I do get lots of good recommendations, but unless there’s a pressing group engagement, I’ll often let the weirder (to me) stuff fall by the wayside.

I think that push to read widely, read quickly, or read at all, can be one big downside of a bookclub if that’s the major reason people join. I had a sad experience in a bookclub of what appeared to be non-readers. They were smart, funny, well-spoken, well-employed people who saw reading books as a sign of intellectual heavyweight status and wanted to achieve it. However, many of them didn’t actually enjoy reading, and were acutely embarrassed by this, so meetings turned into shame-filled stories about crazy work projects and moves across town. The last two books I read for the club, I was the only one to do so (I still like those people, but I am still a *teensy* bit annoyed that they shot down my choise as “too light” and then forced me to read Reading Lolita in Tehran when, as it turned out, no one else did. I don’t really regret it–Nafisi’s discussions of literature are lovely and insightful–but still…)

Anyway, my point (I do have one!) is that I am in a new book club and it is lovely and filled with nice people who read books for fun, even when there is no club around to make them, and brought lots of good food to our first meeting, last Saturday. The founder of the club is my friend Scott who was in my most successful bookclub in the past, which ended due to depression (a number of unfortunate book picks in a row made us too dispirited to continue–although I still recommend Disgrace by JM Coetzee [just brace yourself]).

This new club is the “250 pages or less” bookclub, so it’s a bit less pressure and also poses an interesting challenge to find books to meet the limit. So I get exposed to some new stuff, in addition to the interesting conversation, friendly people and steamed dumplings. Heartily recommend 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xialu Guo, if you are looking for something short and fascinating.

Anyway, bookclubs–not for everyone, but lots of fun if that is what you are into, and I am, so yay! Off to read John Steinbeck’s The Pearl.

June 18th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *And Another Thing* by Eoin Colfer

Finally, after nearly a year of rereading the other 5 books in the series, plus Douglas Adams’s post-humously published collection, *The Salmon of Doubt*, I finally sat down to read the sixth book in my beloved Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, And Another Thing written by Eoin Colfer after Adams’s death at the request of Adams’s widow.

Let’s be honest and say that I could not be completely objective with this book. I loved the original 5 despite their myriad flaws because of their author’s deft touch and weird mind. Writing is personal, and it disturbed me profoundly that someone was going to try to write in someone else’s style–seems like wearing someone else’s underpants to me.

Colfer does come, at times, tantalizingly close–some of the gags and non-sequiteurs and, truly, a lightness with language are refreshing to see: “I’ve seen a few things in my day and in my night too” “Ford’s fingers tapped the air impatiently, eager to wrap themselves around a tankard handle.” Someone killed by a laser is “frittered by the beams” and a cheese-worshipping cult fears “Edamnation.” Haha, to all of it.

Though I enjoy that stuff, and read hopefully and attentively throughout, I knew what the problem was going to be as soon as I saw the book, and I am surprised someone else (aka the editor) didn’t have the same immediate reaction: it’s enormous. 340 page, in a 6×10 format. I have the first four books in an omnibus format close to 6×10, and none of them weighs in at much more than 150 pages (albeit a bit smaller font). In that, I think Adams knew what he was doing–these are books of Pythonesque jokes and silliness, nothing you want to see endless extended. While the HHG characters are much stronger than most mainstream genre parody comic novels, they are still not *all* that well-fleshed and one tends to get sick of them and their prat-falling ways after oh, about 150 pages. I was surprised to read in *The Salmon of Doubt* that Adams agonized endlessly about these creations, because they feel so fresh and also so slight–something he and friend might have come up with on a long car-trip and written down on the pitstop at Denny’s.

So while I can’t disagree with critics who say that Colfer nails Adams larkiness very well, I am pretty adamant that what his misses is Adams’s judiciousness with the use of lark. There are a number of “guide notes” in all the books in the series–short passages explaining the esoteric alien concepts that Adams (and Colfer) created to flesh out the galaxy. These notes are supposed to be quoted from the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide, so they have that famous wit and irreverency. However, Adams’ notes are pretty rare, a light and goofy sprinkling, whereas Colfer’s come up every couple pages or, on a few occasions, twice on the same page. One of them, quite late and at the height of the action, actually announced that it was short so as not to interrupt flow, and I almost stamped my little foot–this book is precious short on flow.

Another flow issue is that every character has a plotline or at least a point of view, and there are a lot of characters. For our usual contingent, Trillian wants to recapture her daughter’s love but finds herself meeting the man of her dreams, Arthur is reunited with his true love but in digitized form, Zaphod gets involved with the gods of Aesir, Random loses a husband and plots to gain control of the galaxy and destroy her mother’s happiness (Random’s events are the most, er, random of anyone’s), and Ford…well, Ford doesn’t actually have much going on in this book, but we see a bunch of scenes from his POV anyway. He’s as funny as ever, and somewhat nicer than ever before (this is Colfer’s first book for adults and he seems a bit fonder of people learning their lessons and seeing the power of good than Adams ever was).

In addition to our old friends, we gain some new ones: Wowbagger the Immortal, who had a very few lines in a previous book (I think it was *Life, the Universe, and Everything*, but I refuse on principle to look it up–the principle being that I know no one cares); a Vogon father and son team that are (still!) bent on exterminating the humans, Thor and many of his godly and demi-godly friends (Adams devotees will note that while Thor has never before shown up in a HHG book, he was in one of the Dirk Gently novels); a faux-Irish flimflam man, and…I think that’s everyone. But who knows!

My point is that there was way too much going on in this book. I read it in less than a week and I don’t think I am a sloppy reader, but I would often put the book down for half a day and be simply unable to work out what was going on when I picked it back up. Adams’ books, in addition to being shorter, were far more focussed than AAT–often several of even the major 4 characters were left out, or largely so. In addition to being confusing, Colfer’s rapid cutting back and forth made it difficult to even care what happened to anyone. I admit, this has long been a problem with the series–after umpteen jokes, it’s hard to care who falls in love or into an abyss–but it is even harder when you can’t remember anyone’s names.

I actually don’t know a lot about Eoin Colfer other than that he is a successful kid and YA novelist, but I suspect him of watching a lot of TV and perhaps writing for it. Many of his scenes were utterly impenetrable to me until I pictured them on a soundstage–and then they were funny. There was a lot of bickering and people popping in and out behind walls and radioing each other from afar, and pretending to do one thing while doing another–I wasn’t around for Laugh-in, but I am pretty sure I have the reference right.

And in that sense, I think the new book is true to the series’ roots as a radio show–disjointed, episodic, gag-oriented and inconsistent. I laughed, I admit it, but ten minutes later I usually couldn’t remember at what.

The flap notes state that AAT is going to bring HHG to a new generation of readers–presumably that means the new generation is expected to *start* with the 6th book, since it is shiny and new, and then be drawn into the back-catalogue. I admit, I am old and not of the hyperlink generation, but I can’t imagine how this is going to work. The book makes vague reference to many of the events in the preceding books, but not so that a neophyte could actually understand them. But the past is rarely abandoned, so you can’t just read AAT as a stand-alone novel–you are constantly being reminded of what came before, even if no explanation follows up. Even I couldn’t follow it all, and I’ve read all the books in the past year! Of course, maybe I’m not so smart as I think I am!

What this review basically boils down to is that I really liked Douglas Adams and I wish he weren’t dead. He was *not* an A+ writer, and many of the issues Colfer is encountering he inherited from the master (not least of which is how to write a sequel to a novel which ended with all major characters being killed). Colfer does an ok job with a tough gig, but if there is a 7th book (as was strongly hinted), I’m afraid I’m just going to have to bow out of the party. Time to let that new generation take over.

May 18th, 2010

Road Trips

I wrote this chapbook and Caryl Peters gave it the lovely cover.

My copies of “Road Trips” have arrived and they are so gorgeous. You can see the cover at right, and that does convey a lot of it, but it’s the paper, too, and the end papers (oh my goodness, those endpapers). And the interior illustrations! I have never had a book with images in it before! I tried and tried to take a picture of myself with the book (my great idea was to lie on the floor with the book on my chest and hold the camera up above me–not a win) but I think you are just going to have to take my word for it (or order one for yourself).

This is totally not going to become a blog with contant pictures in every post–I have just had a lot of really attractive pictures to post lately. Swears.

Something about the content, maybe: the two stories in this book are called “From an Eastern University” and “The Least of Love.” Both are road trip stories (natch), concerning people who know each other well (roommates in one, a couple in the other) trapped in a car together–really, that scenario is bound to be a story one way or another (except my road trip this weekend, which promises to be serene and full of witty conversations and delicious breakfast foods).

A lot about seeing this material in print make me happy. Both stories contain characters I’ve been working with for a long time (if you’ve read Once, you’ll recognize at least a few people), and I really do like travel/motion stories. And well…yeah, I’m happy about this little book!

March 23rd, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Mostly Harmless* by Douglas Adams

I have been working on reading all the Hitchhikers’ Guide books for a few months now, trying to give the new one a fair shake when I finally read it (it’s in the post right now). And then Mark proposed the Retro Reading Challenge, so I fudged my reading challenge into his.

I’m supposed to have read the book only once, and it’s possible I did, and at least 15 years ago, which seems about right. So this is my RRC review, then:

This book is hella disjointed. The first three books in the series were too–very very very episodic, and none-too-committed to causality–whatever good gag Adams could think up to put next, that’s what happened next, coherence, plot or character development, linear time be damned. The plot never really did come together in any of the books, but the characters, showing their stripes in reaction to whatever lunacy the universe/Adams threw at them, actually did resolve in reasonably consistent, fairly likeable, not especially deep folks. At least, I found them likeable.

Then, in the fourth book in the series, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, apparently someone told the author he needed more emotional resonance or some such, and so two of the four central characters (Zaphod and Trillian) get ditched entirely, Earth gets reinstated (it was destroyed in the first book) and Arthur, the bumbling everydweeb from earth who has spent the last three books stumbling around in terror (as well he should), gets to go home, sleep in his own bed, and fall in love with a pretty girl. Ford Prefect, Arthur’s sarcastic savior from the planet Betelgeuse gets to stick around, but mainly for drunken confusion.

I never really understood the parts of *Fish* that Ford was in, but Arthur’s love story with Fenchurch is just lovely, if only from a wish fulfillment perspective–there’s all manner of impossible concidence and heart-stopping joy and this really great love scene while flying… It does not, of course, make any sense with what came before–no one has experience a genuine emotion besides fear and hunger in the entire series up until now. What’s more, no on has said a dirty word, had sex or wanted to–you could safely give the first three books to children if you so desired (they wouldn’t understand, but they wouldn’t be Corrupted, either). So making the characters say “sh*t” and experience erotic desire in book #4–well, that’s changing the rules a bit.

Thus, we are preprared for book #5, wherein 1) earth is gone again, for reasons never made clear, 2) Fenchurch is gone (for good, it seems) due to an accident that is never explained. It’s basically as if book #4 didn’t happen. Trillian, the pretty earth girl who travelled around with president of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox and “told him what she thought of him” (sex, or even Trillian’s attractiveness: never mentioned) is back, though, Zaphod does not make a reappearance after book 3 (unless you count the nothing-to-do-with-anything-and-not-even-very-funny short story, Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, which is stuck in the back of my omnibus of the first four books.

Anyway, sorry–long lead-in. Trillian’s back, although this is actually not really her but an alternative-universe version of Trillian that readers have not meant before. Before she met Zaphod and went into space, she was plain old Tricia McMillan (I think that’s clever) and she was an astrophysicist–now she’s so consumed with regret she’s left the profession, is working in television, and has very little enthusiasm for life. It’s surprisingly affecting. No, really, read:

“There was something roughly the size ofa large camper van parked about a hundred feet above her lawn.

“It was really there. Hanging there. Almost silent.

“Something moved deep inside her.

“Her arms dropped slowly down to her side. She didn’t notice the scalding coffee slopping over her foot. She was hardly breathing as slowly, inch by inch, foot by food, the craft came downwards. Its lights were playing softly over the ground as if probing and feeling it. They played over her.

“It seemed beyond all hope that she should be given her chance again. Had he found her? Had he come back?”

He hasn’t, but something else happens and for a while it seems like a female character has a plotline for the first time in HHG history…but then it fades out.

Ford has a very similar plotline to the one he had in 4–namely, hijinx–but it makes a good deal more sense and actually concerns the Hitch Hiker’s Guide and so, indirectly, the other characters and some of the things that have come before in the series. But mainly he’s just there for the hijinx. And it’s awfully fun:

“Ford hurled himself at the door of the editor-in-chief’s office, tucked himself into a tight ball as the frame splintered and gave way, rolled rapidly across the floor to where the drinks trolly laden with some of the Galazy’s most potent and expensive beverages habitually stood, seized hold of the trolley and, using it to give himself cover, trundled it and himself across the main exposed part of the office floor to where the valuable and extremely rude statue of Led and theh Octobpus stood, and took shelter behind it.”

Bwa!

And Arthur, loveable Arthur who no reader would bother reading 5 books about if they did not adore? Well, he has…a series of (mis)adventures, now on all on his own, apparently searching for enlightenment and a place to call home. The adventures are funny, but they all resolve like jokes, with punchlines. And Arthur’s story in particular is heavily freighted by this idea of alternate universes, which here makes no sense whatsoever. In Adams’s highly imaginative (but perhaps not deeply imagined) universe, Earth is located in a plural sector (ZZ), thus making it unstable in the 5th dimension–depending on where you are on that axis, sometimes Earth is present, sometimes not.

For good or ill, the above explanation does make sense to me. But how does one go about moving in the 5th dimension? Arthur keeps arriving on a planet with Earth’s coordinates, realizing it is nothing like Earth and setting off for…the exact same physical coordinates again? How does that happen?

What bugs me about this is, Adams could totatally could have answered these questions; he just got lazy and/or bored with the thought process. If there’s one thing that reading 5 books of his in rapid succession has taught me, it’s that brother was a genius, yo. He totally understood the science (and philosophy) on which he based his constructions. But he had a short attention span.

Finally Arthur gets a gig making sandwiches on a primitive planet (they’d never seen sandwiches before) and Ford gets free of his scary adventure at the HHG, and Tricia McMillan gets forgotten about. Reappears, Trillian! With a daughter in tow, fathered by Arthur although without sexual participation (ah, the series returns to form) or even knowledge.

The part with Arthur and his daughter, Random (that’s her name) is really treacly, and thus in fact Random, because trying spark paternal love in this morass of puns, sight gags and interdimensional physics is a non-starter.

So, pretty much is the resolution of the novel. The gag around which the whole ending, which–to Adams’s credit–was set up two books ago is, in my humble opinion, pretty dumb. The lunacy that surrounds it, involving Tricia, Trillian, Random, Ford, and some neat repercussions from book 1–is cooler, but when it finally ends, the bang is a whimper.

The ending, it’s been noted in various places, is also really dark, and an attempt to be the be-all end-all of endings: no more books in this series, was it seemed the author’s message. Except he later regretted that, and it seems, mentioned that regret to his wife, who contact Eoin Colfer….

This seems like a negative review but it’s not–I still love this book! In response to Mark’s challenge, I should say the love that I held for it in 1994 was blind love. Back then, my tolerance for ambiguity allowed me to not understand any of the science and still enjoy the kooky tales and gags. And in 2010, I had lost patience with kook for kook’s sake, but some of the gags are pretty good, I like the characters and I get (some of) the science.

It’s a book with enough going on that two readings probably aren’t really enough, but the several pages of analysis above are probably too much. This book was written for, and with, pleasure, and should likely not be overthought–too late for that. I love it anyway, and Colfer’s book is going to have a tough act to follow (especially if he’s going to come up with an astrophysical logic for reinstating the earth).

I actually have The Salmon of Doubt on my shelf right now, the only DA book (that I know of) that I haven’t read. I am sort of uncomfortable with it, as the book consists of stuff recovered from the author’s hard-drive, which he never (necessarily) meant to publish, but I do love his writing, probably too much to neglect anything. And perhaps there are clues in there that will help me judge *And Another Thing* when I finally get around to reading it.

I meant to make this review really thorough, but I think it is just really long…

RR