Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome
Endnotes by Jeremy Lewis
177 pages
Published 1889
Read from January 27 to January 30
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Whew. The second half of January has been dismal, as far as reading is concerned. Between Five Weeks in a Balloon, which took a week to finish, and Vonda N. McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun, which I began on January 17 and might not ever finish, my works have been clogged with dull, joyless books that have thrown my reading apparatus entirely out of whack. Even Three Men in a Boat, a thoroughly enjoyable trifle I should have been able to breeze through in a day and a half, tops, took four days to complete. I feel like I've forgotten how to read again, after two years of being very good about it.
I love the dry understatement of later Victorian humor, so most of this book was a delight, but after a while the comic digressions began to feel more wearisome than winsome. Most likely this is a result of my burned-out attitude toward reading after the unparalleled boredom of The Moon and the Sun, and not a reflection on the literary merits of Three Men. The earnest Romantic interludes warbling poetic about the beauties of nature are only to be expected in a Victorian work. The ending feels somewhat abrupt, as if Jerome ran out of steam and crammed the rest of the (fictionalized) river journey into a couple of pages, after all the digressions and anecdotes that had, perhaps, filled up his quota of words. Much of the book until that point had been laugh-out-loud funny, but the ending heightened a sense of unevenness and awkward pacing that left me somewhat unsatisfied.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Saturday, January 17, 2015
2015 read #4: A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle.
A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle
290 pages
Published 1960
Read from January 15 to January 17
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
"[T]he happiness of the unworthy and the happiness of the so-so is as fragile and self-centered and dear as the happiness of the righteous and the worthy; and the happiness of the living is no less short and desperate and forgotten than the joys of the dead." That, in one sentence, sums up what is so beautiful and so delicate and so inimitable about Beagle at his best. And this is Beagle in his finest form, at least to my tastes, surpassing even The Last Unicorn and "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" (reviewed here). There is just a hint of midcentury propriety in Beagle's characterizations of Laura and Mrs. Klapper, otherwise well-realized characters who seem to have no direction in life beyond the love given them (or not) by men. Otherwise this tale is breathtakingly ahead of its time. I can't imagine anglophone fantasy daring to explore such a small, intimate enchantment again until the mid-'80s at the very earliest; my knowledge of literary fiction is more impoverished, but I also have a hard time believing such an achingly human exploration of love, mortality, and existence would be presented by any lit author in the medium of what is, essentially, a ghost story, not until the '90s or thereabouts.
All of which is a mess of adjectives and feeble attempts at capturing a feeling. This book made me glad I've spent the last ten years in New York, so that I could appreciate Beagle's evocations of June and July and August in the green and sweaty and earthy and beautiful city he depicts. Beagle brings a vivid sense of place and the personal, stirring life on every page. The better a book is, the worse equipped I feel to convey what made it so special. This is definitely one of those cases. It is a humble book, and sometimes the artifice of a young and ambitious author Making a Statement can elbow through, but I feel wholly inadequate to say why exactly I loved it so much.
290 pages
Published 1960
Read from January 15 to January 17
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
"[T]he happiness of the unworthy and the happiness of the so-so is as fragile and self-centered and dear as the happiness of the righteous and the worthy; and the happiness of the living is no less short and desperate and forgotten than the joys of the dead." That, in one sentence, sums up what is so beautiful and so delicate and so inimitable about Beagle at his best. And this is Beagle in his finest form, at least to my tastes, surpassing even The Last Unicorn and "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" (reviewed here). There is just a hint of midcentury propriety in Beagle's characterizations of Laura and Mrs. Klapper, otherwise well-realized characters who seem to have no direction in life beyond the love given them (or not) by men. Otherwise this tale is breathtakingly ahead of its time. I can't imagine anglophone fantasy daring to explore such a small, intimate enchantment again until the mid-'80s at the very earliest; my knowledge of literary fiction is more impoverished, but I also have a hard time believing such an achingly human exploration of love, mortality, and existence would be presented by any lit author in the medium of what is, essentially, a ghost story, not until the '90s or thereabouts.
All of which is a mess of adjectives and feeble attempts at capturing a feeling. This book made me glad I've spent the last ten years in New York, so that I could appreciate Beagle's evocations of June and July and August in the green and sweaty and earthy and beautiful city he depicts. Beagle brings a vivid sense of place and the personal, stirring life on every page. The better a book is, the worse equipped I feel to convey what made it so special. This is definitely one of those cases. It is a humble book, and sometimes the artifice of a young and ambitious author Making a Statement can elbow through, but I feel wholly inadequate to say why exactly I loved it so much.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
2015 read #3: Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne.
Five Weeks in a Balloon; or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen by Jules Verne
Translated by "William Lackland"
345 pages
Published 1863; unauthorized translation published 1869
Read from January 9 to January 15
Rating: ★½ out of 5
Jules Verne was one of my first loves as a reader. I cut my teeth on abridged versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, and quickly graduated to the full versions of those classics as well as From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Mysterious Island. One of the very first pieces of creative writing I ever produced was a fan-fiction "sidequel" of sorts to 20,000 Leagues, which I wrote when I was 8 or 9. In my tween and teen years I grew into a Wells partisan -- The War of the Worlds was the first unabridged "adult" novel I ever read, and I vastly preferred the vivid and exciting The First Men in the Moon to Verne's more aloof selenographic explorations -- but Center of the Earth had plesiosaurs, damn it, and Captain Nemo remains one of science fiction's most enduring and fascinating antiheroes.
By some form of cultural osmosis, a vague idea of Five Weeks in a Balloon seems to permeate many people's ideas of the rest of Verne's bibliography. My brother, when I first read Around the World in Eighty Days, said something to the effect of "Didn't they [the characters] go the whole way in a balloon?" (Or maybe he thought it was something that had actually happened. Randy sometimes had trouble telling fiction apart from history in those days.) Yet I've never read Balloon. It is perhaps the most recognizable omission from my Verne reading list (how much of the general public today, after all, has heard of Robur the Conqueror, the Verne book I'm most excited to read?). I felt more obligation than anticipation about reading it now. I checked it out way back in November and kept putting it off until now. At the very worst, I figured this would be a virulently racist but quaintly entertaining old-timey adventure. It is indeed virulently, horribly racist (in keeping with basically all popular fiction of the period), but I was wrong about the entertaining part. Five Weeks in a Balloon is, in a word, boring.
There is one evocative, Romantic scene, in which the Victoria glides gracefully over a "green, almost transparent sea" of grass: "The anchors plunged into this lake of flowers, and traced a furrow that closed behind them, like the wake of a ship." That image is powerful, lovely, and perhaps the only mark in the book's favor. The characters are dull, barely defined types that would recur in Verne's later work: Joe, the goofy, acrobatic, devoted servant, is a discount store version of Passepartout, whom (in memory, at least) is more vividly realized and individual; Dr. Ferguson is a stock competent captain type grafted onto the "genius scientist" role; Dick Kennedy is the merest outline of the Great White Sportsman type. I kept expecting the book to gain momentum once the voyage proper began, a hope which kept me reading long after I should have abandoned it, but aside from the sea of grass scene, which lasts scarcely a page, reading remained an unrewarding trudge through horrible Victorian conceits and race theory. Genre parody though it may be, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer Abroad is a vastly more satisfying balloon adventure across Africa.
Perhaps the fault lies with the translator, a pseudonymous and wholly unauthorized pirate distributor none too careful about expressing Verne's exact meaning, and certainly heedless of placing pages in the correct order. In this reprint of the 1869 "William Lackland" edition, the first page of chapter thirteen is missing entirely, substituted with the first page of chapter thirty, which in turn is absent in its proper place, replaced by a random page from chapter forty-three. There's no telling how many careless word mixups there are throughout the text; I certainly doubt the eastern coast of Africa was ever buffered by "mango" swamps.
Translated by "William Lackland"
345 pages
Published 1863; unauthorized translation published 1869
Read from January 9 to January 15
Rating: ★½ out of 5
Jules Verne was one of my first loves as a reader. I cut my teeth on abridged versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, and quickly graduated to the full versions of those classics as well as From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Mysterious Island. One of the very first pieces of creative writing I ever produced was a fan-fiction "sidequel" of sorts to 20,000 Leagues, which I wrote when I was 8 or 9. In my tween and teen years I grew into a Wells partisan -- The War of the Worlds was the first unabridged "adult" novel I ever read, and I vastly preferred the vivid and exciting The First Men in the Moon to Verne's more aloof selenographic explorations -- but Center of the Earth had plesiosaurs, damn it, and Captain Nemo remains one of science fiction's most enduring and fascinating antiheroes.
By some form of cultural osmosis, a vague idea of Five Weeks in a Balloon seems to permeate many people's ideas of the rest of Verne's bibliography. My brother, when I first read Around the World in Eighty Days, said something to the effect of "Didn't they [the characters] go the whole way in a balloon?" (Or maybe he thought it was something that had actually happened. Randy sometimes had trouble telling fiction apart from history in those days.) Yet I've never read Balloon. It is perhaps the most recognizable omission from my Verne reading list (how much of the general public today, after all, has heard of Robur the Conqueror, the Verne book I'm most excited to read?). I felt more obligation than anticipation about reading it now. I checked it out way back in November and kept putting it off until now. At the very worst, I figured this would be a virulently racist but quaintly entertaining old-timey adventure. It is indeed virulently, horribly racist (in keeping with basically all popular fiction of the period), but I was wrong about the entertaining part. Five Weeks in a Balloon is, in a word, boring.
There is one evocative, Romantic scene, in which the Victoria glides gracefully over a "green, almost transparent sea" of grass: "The anchors plunged into this lake of flowers, and traced a furrow that closed behind them, like the wake of a ship." That image is powerful, lovely, and perhaps the only mark in the book's favor. The characters are dull, barely defined types that would recur in Verne's later work: Joe, the goofy, acrobatic, devoted servant, is a discount store version of Passepartout, whom (in memory, at least) is more vividly realized and individual; Dr. Ferguson is a stock competent captain type grafted onto the "genius scientist" role; Dick Kennedy is the merest outline of the Great White Sportsman type. I kept expecting the book to gain momentum once the voyage proper began, a hope which kept me reading long after I should have abandoned it, but aside from the sea of grass scene, which lasts scarcely a page, reading remained an unrewarding trudge through horrible Victorian conceits and race theory. Genre parody though it may be, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer Abroad is a vastly more satisfying balloon adventure across Africa.
Perhaps the fault lies with the translator, a pseudonymous and wholly unauthorized pirate distributor none too careful about expressing Verne's exact meaning, and certainly heedless of placing pages in the correct order. In this reprint of the 1869 "William Lackland" edition, the first page of chapter thirteen is missing entirely, substituted with the first page of chapter thirty, which in turn is absent in its proper place, replaced by a random page from chapter forty-three. There's no telling how many careless word mixups there are throughout the text; I certainly doubt the eastern coast of Africa was ever buffered by "mango" swamps.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
2015 read #2: All Clear by Connie Willis.
All Clear by Connie Willis
642 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 4 to January 8
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Spoilers ahead, be warned.
In the end, of course, the thousand or so pages of time travelers just barely missing each other, of plot running in circles, of waiting and stalling and worrying and waiting some more throughout both of these books -- in the end, this all has thematic relevance. Disappointingly, that theme is just a bloated, much less charming repeat of To Say Nothing of the Dog's denouement: the conceit that time travelers are a way for the space-time continuum to fix itself, as it were, to make sure certain small actions registered in a chaotic system, rather than a hazard to the proper course of history, which the travelers spend so much time worrying about. To be fair, there probably isn't all that much else to say, thematically speaking, in a "realistic" depiction of time travel, but after this ground was covered so elegantly in To Say Nothing, I feel like I read through a whole lot of fake cliffhangers and "We totally just altered the events of history and the Nazis will win for sure... oh, wait, no, sorry, we didn't really change a thing" stingers and ever so much historical padding to reach conclusions already spelled out in the previous (and far superior) Oxford time travel adventure.
Well... all that historical padding shouldn't be in the negative column with the fakeout cliffhangers and the constant (and needless) bellyaching about changing the continuum when really everything was fine. The historical padding might be a tad generous, but it's the most engaging and fascinating part of both Blackout and All Clear. Willis has gotten me interested in reading books about World War II -- no small achievement, considering I'd long thought it the most prettied-up, morally sanitized, and Hollywood-ready of all twentieth century conflicts (perhaps because it was the last war in which America, despite some slip-ups, could unequivocally claim to be the good guys). I came this close to picking up a history of the Dunkirk evacuations earlier tonight, before the library closed. If there are any good books on the British homefront war or the French resistance, I want them.
Blackout and All Clear form an ambitious diptych that, unfortunately, became an obvious case of the story getting away from the author. It would be too glib to say "This would be an excellent novel at half the length," but my feelings are somewhere in that neighborhood.
642 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 4 to January 8
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Spoilers ahead, be warned.
In the end, of course, the thousand or so pages of time travelers just barely missing each other, of plot running in circles, of waiting and stalling and worrying and waiting some more throughout both of these books -- in the end, this all has thematic relevance. Disappointingly, that theme is just a bloated, much less charming repeat of To Say Nothing of the Dog's denouement: the conceit that time travelers are a way for the space-time continuum to fix itself, as it were, to make sure certain small actions registered in a chaotic system, rather than a hazard to the proper course of history, which the travelers spend so much time worrying about. To be fair, there probably isn't all that much else to say, thematically speaking, in a "realistic" depiction of time travel, but after this ground was covered so elegantly in To Say Nothing, I feel like I read through a whole lot of fake cliffhangers and "We totally just altered the events of history and the Nazis will win for sure... oh, wait, no, sorry, we didn't really change a thing" stingers and ever so much historical padding to reach conclusions already spelled out in the previous (and far superior) Oxford time travel adventure.
Well... all that historical padding shouldn't be in the negative column with the fakeout cliffhangers and the constant (and needless) bellyaching about changing the continuum when really everything was fine. The historical padding might be a tad generous, but it's the most engaging and fascinating part of both Blackout and All Clear. Willis has gotten me interested in reading books about World War II -- no small achievement, considering I'd long thought it the most prettied-up, morally sanitized, and Hollywood-ready of all twentieth century conflicts (perhaps because it was the last war in which America, despite some slip-ups, could unequivocally claim to be the good guys). I came this close to picking up a history of the Dunkirk evacuations earlier tonight, before the library closed. If there are any good books on the British homefront war or the French resistance, I want them.
Blackout and All Clear form an ambitious diptych that, unfortunately, became an obvious case of the story getting away from the author. It would be too glib to say "This would be an excellent novel at half the length," but my feelings are somewhere in that neighborhood.
Sunday, January 4, 2015
2015 read #1: Blackout by Connie Willis.
Blackout by Connie Willis
492 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 1 to January 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Spoilers ahead, be warned.
Doomsday Book, the first of Willis' Oxford time travel novels I read, was an ambitious book with a wonky mishmash of tone: part comedy of manners, with academic bureaucracy and misunderstandings and overbearing mothers, and part melodrama, with two (count 'em) pandemics, a correspondingly high body count, and a Jesus allegory. To Say Nothing of the Dog, the best of the series so far, resolved the tonal dissonance by concentrating on the comedy aspect, resulting in one of the funniest sci-fi books I've encountered. Blackout, the first volume of what was supposed to be a single novel before it evidently got out of Willis' control, veers some distance in the other direction -- not quite all the way to melodrama, thankfully, but the emphasis is on stranded-in-the-past time travel adventure; humorous touches are plentiful, but aren't as central and plot-significant as they were in the first two books.
As an adventure story, however, Blackout has some significant problems, especially in pacing and a tendency toward "fakeout" cliffhangers. I neglected to note exactly when it became obvious that our three central heroes were going to be stuck in the London Blitz, but it was definitely no later than page 200. Yet each of our three heroes spends the next 250 or so pages waiting with increasing anxiety for their "drops" to open, making excuses for why they haven't opened, rationalizing the failure of retrieval teams to appear, setting out in search of other time travelers in order to use their drops, just missing each other in the confusion of train delays and bombed out rail lines, exposing Blackout's DNA as a missed-connections comedy without drawing any laughs from the confusion. Historical detail and Willis' "compulsively readable" prose maintain the story's momentum even as the plot stalls for those 250 pages, but I was nearing the limits of my engagement by the time our heroes finally found each other and, presumably, moved the plot forward to its next stage. That, however, is exactly the point at which Blackout ends. The rest of the story will be taken up in the 640-or-so pages of All Clear, the concluding volume.
Just as annoying as the stalled plot is Willis' fondness for ending chapters on cliffhangers that turn out to be not cliffhangers at all. While Mike, one of the time travelers, is stuck in a war hospital, driving himself batty with worry that his actions have changed history, someone bursts into the room, screaming that the Germans are invading and coming up the Thames; several chapters later, when we return to Mike's p.o.v., it turns out the other guy is a shellshock patient who screams of invasion whenever the air raid sirens go off. Toward the end, when the three heroes have found each other but fear their actions have changed who ends up dying in the Blitz, they find dozens of bodies outside a bombed store that should have had only three casualties; as the next chapter opens, it turns out the bodies were mannequins all along. Early on in the book, an entirely new character is introduced (possibly a different time traveler, or maybe even Mike under a new, assumed name later in the war), inflating decoy tanks in a field before D-Day, and finds himself staring down the horns of a bull; some chapters later, when we return to this scene, it resolves without injury, and the guy never appears in the book again, presumably to play a role in All Clear. The scene as a whole is pointless, except to introduce this new character who may or may not be someone we already know, and to show off Willis' research of the homefront effort in England. Dividing it into two chapters for the sake of a cheap cliffhanger is inexcusable.
In the same family as the fakeout cliffhanger is the "p.o.v. character has a vital clue that she or he will not share with the reader." It's a cheap ploy to build up mystery and suspense. It happens at least twice in Blackout: once right at the beginning, with Colin (the boy from Doomsday Book, now 17 and nursing a crush on one of our time travelers) rushing around, trying to get sent somewhen, anywhen back in time for "urgent" reasons; and once toward the end, when Polly (a time traveler with a literal deadline -- she can't survive all the way to V-E Day, because she visited V-E Day before and something something mechanics of time travel) decides she's figured out why the drops aren't opening and why the three of them are stuck in the Blitz, yet won't tell anyone, not even the reader. Colin's urgent mission turned out to be a plan to age himself via differential time travel so that he could be more age-appropriate for his crush; I guess All Clear will reveal whether Polly's insight is equally anticlimactic.
Despite all that, I'll do the stereotypical book-reviewer bit and say Blackout was hard to put down. Willis' prose is excellent, in an unobtrusive way; I care about the characters; I'm interested in where the story is going. I just hope it starts to go somewhere in the next book.
492 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 1 to January 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Spoilers ahead, be warned.
Doomsday Book, the first of Willis' Oxford time travel novels I read, was an ambitious book with a wonky mishmash of tone: part comedy of manners, with academic bureaucracy and misunderstandings and overbearing mothers, and part melodrama, with two (count 'em) pandemics, a correspondingly high body count, and a Jesus allegory. To Say Nothing of the Dog, the best of the series so far, resolved the tonal dissonance by concentrating on the comedy aspect, resulting in one of the funniest sci-fi books I've encountered. Blackout, the first volume of what was supposed to be a single novel before it evidently got out of Willis' control, veers some distance in the other direction -- not quite all the way to melodrama, thankfully, but the emphasis is on stranded-in-the-past time travel adventure; humorous touches are plentiful, but aren't as central and plot-significant as they were in the first two books.
As an adventure story, however, Blackout has some significant problems, especially in pacing and a tendency toward "fakeout" cliffhangers. I neglected to note exactly when it became obvious that our three central heroes were going to be stuck in the London Blitz, but it was definitely no later than page 200. Yet each of our three heroes spends the next 250 or so pages waiting with increasing anxiety for their "drops" to open, making excuses for why they haven't opened, rationalizing the failure of retrieval teams to appear, setting out in search of other time travelers in order to use their drops, just missing each other in the confusion of train delays and bombed out rail lines, exposing Blackout's DNA as a missed-connections comedy without drawing any laughs from the confusion. Historical detail and Willis' "compulsively readable" prose maintain the story's momentum even as the plot stalls for those 250 pages, but I was nearing the limits of my engagement by the time our heroes finally found each other and, presumably, moved the plot forward to its next stage. That, however, is exactly the point at which Blackout ends. The rest of the story will be taken up in the 640-or-so pages of All Clear, the concluding volume.
Just as annoying as the stalled plot is Willis' fondness for ending chapters on cliffhangers that turn out to be not cliffhangers at all. While Mike, one of the time travelers, is stuck in a war hospital, driving himself batty with worry that his actions have changed history, someone bursts into the room, screaming that the Germans are invading and coming up the Thames; several chapters later, when we return to Mike's p.o.v., it turns out the other guy is a shellshock patient who screams of invasion whenever the air raid sirens go off. Toward the end, when the three heroes have found each other but fear their actions have changed who ends up dying in the Blitz, they find dozens of bodies outside a bombed store that should have had only three casualties; as the next chapter opens, it turns out the bodies were mannequins all along. Early on in the book, an entirely new character is introduced (possibly a different time traveler, or maybe even Mike under a new, assumed name later in the war), inflating decoy tanks in a field before D-Day, and finds himself staring down the horns of a bull; some chapters later, when we return to this scene, it resolves without injury, and the guy never appears in the book again, presumably to play a role in All Clear. The scene as a whole is pointless, except to introduce this new character who may or may not be someone we already know, and to show off Willis' research of the homefront effort in England. Dividing it into two chapters for the sake of a cheap cliffhanger is inexcusable.
In the same family as the fakeout cliffhanger is the "p.o.v. character has a vital clue that she or he will not share with the reader." It's a cheap ploy to build up mystery and suspense. It happens at least twice in Blackout: once right at the beginning, with Colin (the boy from Doomsday Book, now 17 and nursing a crush on one of our time travelers) rushing around, trying to get sent somewhen, anywhen back in time for "urgent" reasons; and once toward the end, when Polly (a time traveler with a literal deadline -- she can't survive all the way to V-E Day, because she visited V-E Day before and something something mechanics of time travel) decides she's figured out why the drops aren't opening and why the three of them are stuck in the Blitz, yet won't tell anyone, not even the reader. Colin's urgent mission turned out to be a plan to age himself via differential time travel so that he could be more age-appropriate for his crush; I guess All Clear will reveal whether Polly's insight is equally anticlimactic.
Despite all that, I'll do the stereotypical book-reviewer bit and say Blackout was hard to put down. Willis' prose is excellent, in an unobtrusive way; I care about the characters; I'm interested in where the story is going. I just hope it starts to go somewhere in the next book.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)