Friday, April 24, 2015

2015 read #21: The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett.

The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
214 pages
Published 1955
Read from April 22 to April 24
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

This book follows the likes of C. M. Kornbluth's "The Cosmic Expense Account" (reviewed here) in dumbfounding me by how goddamn good science fiction from the 1950s could be. My first exposure to Brackett (aside from, of course, The Empire Strikes Back, the first draft of which she penned), The Long Tomorrow anticipates the gentle dexterity and surety of character that distinguishes Le Guin at her best. If we put Tomorrow head-to-head with the most obvious parallel in Le Guin's work -- a post-apocalyptic novel grounded in anthropology, in which a young man out of place traces a hazardous journey west from the Ohio Valley to find a rumored remnant of the lost civilization -- Brackett, amazingly, beats Le Guin, and handily. To be fair, even Le Guin admitted that City of Illusions was one of her weaker works; I would never claim that Tomorrow could best "Solitude" (reviewed here). But the anthropological slant of Brackett's world, and the deeply felt humanity of her central characters, make comparisons to Le Guin hard to resist -- even as they elevate Tomorrow (and Brackett) to a level where comparisons are scarcely necessary.

Tomorrow steals up on thorny questions of faith and fundamentalism, the destiny bound up in how we're raised to think and see the world, developing them so expertly within the conflicts and the character arcs that they startle with their elegance and power in the denouement. In many ways the outline of the plot is predictable -- you know going in almost exactly what each turn in Len's journey of dissolution, acceptance, and redemption will be -- yet I can't help but admire Brackett's artistry in how she brings those turns about, always veering from the expected course and (to hopelessly muddle the metaphor) turning the screws on Len just that extra bit more before (again with the metaphor) opening a window once the door has been shut. The result is genuine tension. You know the main character isn't going to die midway through a sci-fi novel from 1955, but there were moments when I wasn't at all sure about that. I genuinely cared about Len, and his evolution from starry-eyed New Mennonite boy to brawling port town tough to embittered and cynical man standing (seemingly) against the world is startlingly believable and true to his character, and gives Tomorrow a sense of scale far more epic than its pagecount -- not to mention how it suggests shades of Blood Meridian.

I'm being conservative on my (arbitrary) rating, held back by that aforementioned sense of predictability as well as the usual social trappings that plague any book from this time (the helplessness of women, the drunken destructive rage of the one character of color). Nonetheless, this is a superb classic that merits a revival.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

2015 read #20: Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson.*

Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson*
128 pages
Published 1944; expurgated edition published 1972
Read April 22
Rating: ★★ out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Practically as soon as I finished Sweetwater, I've been trying to track down this book. Like Sweetwater, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and The Black Pearl, Rabbit Hill is one of the few actual children's books I remember from my childhood; unlike those three, I actually read Rabbit Hill in full, included for some unknown reason in a volume of Reader's Digest condensed books, rather than encountering only a sample chapter in my older brother's English textbooks. But in a further distinction from Sweetwater, NIMH, and Pearl, I couldn't recall the name of Rabbit Hill all these years later. I had known the book I sought had something to do with rabbits; I'd been convinced it was either The Wind in the Willows or Watership Down until I took the time to read the pair of them. I also remembered something about the rabbit family pulling out a last remaining bottle of dandelion wine, which isn't a helpful detail (the wine turned out to be elderberry, anyway). I was out of leads and had given up ever finding the book again, until the header image for a random io9 link caught my eye and I immediately recognized it: That's it! That's the one!

Rereading it now, I can see why I liked it so well -- Lawson makes efficient use of archetypes (the fretful mother prone to fainting away, the stern but gentlemanly father, the bedraggled and crusty old bachelor, the springy and cheerful lad everyone loves) to make his hillside world feel bigger and more lived-in than the number of pages would suggest, an impression amplified by his excellent illustrations, which Jonathan Lethem calls "entrancing" in that BoingBoing interview linked to by io9. Really, it's those line drawings that make Rabbit Hill a classic, however marginal a classic it may be. The plot is as thin as the animals' larders after the hard winter, skipping from one episode to the next, never shy with a moralizing nudge. The Wiki article adds a dimension I never would have picked up on my own: "The book was written at the end of WWII when racial integration and providing aid to the war torn countries of Europe were on everyone's minds. When reading the story with those in mind, the moral intent becomes clear."

The Wiki article also informed me that "Printings of the book beginning in the 1970s and continuing today have edited the character Sulphronia, the new occupants' cook. This was done because she was originally depicted as an African American stereotype." Even with that expurgation, Rabbit Hill is suffused with casual sexism and dated social relationships, which helped mitigate its modest charms. I don't think this is a book I would pass down to my own child.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

2015 read #19: Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan.

Voyage of the Basilisk: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan
348 pages
Published 2015
Read from April 15 to April 21
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Another entry in Brennan's competent (but not revolutionary) series of speculative natural history adventures. The formula -- our heroine, Isabella Camherst, the future Lady Trent, frets at home before launching on an expedition to study dragons, has globe-trotting adventures, meets (thinly disguised) cultures without the Victorian burden of racial chauvinism, unwittingly gets mixed up in her nation's diplomatic efforts, and saves the day with some rash (and dragon-related) act of heroism -- is still winsome, but growing stale after a third volume. As a card-carrying liberal and degree-carrying anthropologist, I haven't tired of the fantasy of various cultures meeting each other as diplomatic equals rather than exterminating each other with pathogens and prejudice, but Basilisk is weaker than the previous two volumes on a structural level.

The new characters (with the exception of Suhail) are scarcely sketched in even by pulp adventure standards; the de facto antagonists, stand-ins for the Ming Dynasty, aren't given any kind of human face, remaining anonymous guards and bureaucrats. Instead, much of the book is a loosely connected travel narrative, in which Lady Trent faces problems of logistics, dengue fever, shipwreck, native customs, and a rather abrupt decision to reenact the sandworm-riding scenes of Dune with a sea serpent. This last decision precipitates her onto the forbidden island where she gets another clue in the mystery of the vanished Draconian race (which, honestly, doesn't hold much interest for me, as they're still a generic vanished fantasy race at this point), stumbles upon the Yelang (a.k.a. Ming) soldiers hiding out on the forbidden island, steals their dragonbone airship, and eventually rides a sea serpent into battle. It's all good fun, old fashioned adventure tidily swept clean of unpleasant racism and historical ugliness, but also kind of silly.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

2015 read #18: The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane
374 pages
Published 2012
Read from March 30 to April 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

There was an unconformity (in the geological sense) between this book and me, or between what the author intended to write and what I hoped and expected to read. I was beguiled by Macfarlane's The Wild Places, so easily and thoroughly charmed by his style and perspective that I prematurely forecast that Macfarlane would "quickly become one of my favorite authors." The mismatch may well be on my end -- circumstances have forced me to read this book in snatches of stolen time, rarely more than fifteen or twenty pages in a go, and with prose this consciously elliptical (there's even a glossary elucidating the more niche terminology Macfarlane employs), and a thematic through-line this all-encompassing and attenuated, it's likely my attention was too scattershot and flighty to appreciate what Macfarlane was going for here.

The blame is not wholly mine, however: some rests with the publishers, or whomever composed the jacket flap copy: "In this exquisitely written book, an immediate bestseller in England, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes that crisscross the British landscape and its waters, connecting them to the continents beyond." I tend to avoid jacket flap copy, and that first sentence is admittedly all I read. But I could be excused for expecting a book about, well, Robert Macfarlane setting off on ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths crisscrossing Britain, a text exactly in line with my recent interest (inspired by The Wild Places as well as the books of Roger Deakin) in British rights of way and tramping culture. Macfarlane does set off on one such tramp early in the book, along the Icknield Way, but the actual thematic through-line is a quasi-biography of a certain poet, Edward Thomas, as well as a thesis on how memory, personality, and identity relate to environments and the experience of walking -- in his paraphrase of Thomas' lines of thought,
...self -- not as something rooted in place and growing steadily over time, but as a shifting set of properties variously supplemented and depleted by our passage through the world. Landscape and nature are not simply there to be gazed at; no, they press hard upon and into our bodies and minds, complexly affect our moods, our sensibilities. They riddle us in two ways -- both perplexing and perforating us.
It's all interesting enough when Macfarlane warms to these themes, but I don't think I forgave him for deviating from the path I'd expected to follow, and even his most evocative nature-writing felt lost on me.

Whether it was my own sense of disconnect, or whether this was indeed a lesser effort than The Wild Places, I didn't feel Macfarlane's prose was at the same level he produced for his debut work. His similes, while still bracingly original, often felt more strained than natural, and at times I couldn't quite suss out his meaning, especially when he left the ground for displays of philosophical scintillation. And this is a minor point, but I felt there's something disingenuous about a writer going off to Sichuan because he "couldn't think of anything I'd rather do" in one chapter, then in the next sneering about "trust funds." I'm sure it's great to be able to globe-trot on a whim while writing your next book, but having access to that kind of lucre should, as a rule, make it harder for you to offer "Trust fund kids, am I right?" comments.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

2015 read #17: Going Postal by Terry Pratchett.

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
377 pages
Published 2004
Read from March 23 to April 2
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I suspect I don't have the proper sense of humor to appreciate Pratchett. In this volume, he expands his idiom from tickling laffs out of fantasy cliches to tackling overt social commentary on contemporary foibles, but the gags (aside from some mild wordplay that wrung a few smiles from my stony exterior) felt stale and warmed-over, almost but not quite as banal as "What is the deal with airplane food?" Surprisingly, at some point I found myself actually invested in our absurd conman antihero and his postal dilemma, my sympathies no doubt stimulated by my own anti-privatization, pro-social worldview, as well as the sort of prophetic-in-hindsight storyline recalling all too painfully the 2008 crash and its inescapable aftermath -- yet another illustration at how freaking obvious (and, shock of shocks, perhaps even avoidable) the implications of late stage capitalism were, even before the collapse. However it happened, I was more interested in Moist's plans and escapades than in the humor of the situation.

I can see why Pratchett is regarded so fondly by so many -- several of my friends adore him -- but I think I should have gotten into him at a younger age in order to appreciate him fully.