2014 read #10: Songs of Earth & Power by Greg Bear.

Songs of Earth & Power by Greg Bear
697 pages
Published 1994 ("substantially rewritten" one-volume edition; comprises The Infinity Concerto, originally published 1984, and The Serpent Mage, originally published 1986)
Read from January 8 to January 30
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Once upon a time, Greg Bear numbered among my favorite authors. I first discovered him in 1998, when Dinosaur Summer came out and irresistibly caught my eye. (I mean, look at this frigging cover. To this day that's still one of my favorites.) I loved Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, and once I got used to the idea that Dinosaur Summer didn't follow Doyle's established "canon" exactly, I thought an updated and expanded Lost World was the most brilliant and absorbing piece of literature since Raptor Red. It was a time when slapping a dinosaur on the cover pretty much guaranteed that I would whine and wheedle until my father bought me the book, and then reread it obsessively, ignoring how crappy the contents might be. And it was so deep, man, with the main character's father being a neglectful alcoholic and the boy slowly becoming a man! Once I latched onto Bear, though, I no longer needed dinosaurs to sustain my interest in him. As soon as I was on my own, with money to spend, I picked up and burned through The Way series, and adored Moving Mars. By the time it was 2006, however, and I'd gotten to Queen of Angels -- one of those precious "experimental prose" novels that are such a chore to read; this one's gimmick was omission of all commas -- my love had cooled. My copy of Songs of Earth & Power, obtained at some point in the early 2000s, languished in boxes and damp basements all these years, kept in my possession with all the strength of "Eh, I used to like him, maybe I'll read that one day, I dunno."

Over the last year or two, I've entered a new phase, where any book set in some kind of folklore-derived "Faery" is bound to interest me. I'm pickier now than I was in my dinosaur novel mania, and I can afford to be -- there are bafflingly few dinosaur novels out there, whereas Faery and its outgrowths are perennially popular. Pawing through the basement a few months back, organizing my unread backlog, I found Songs. A cover blurb from Analog claims, "A vision of Faery that may owe a bit to a wish to do it right." That was enough for me; I added Song to my immediate to-read queue, which inevitably sat there the rest of the year.

Bear is not a poetic writer. His descriptions are mechanical, stuck in clunky sci-fi mode, as with this pretty much random sample:

Michael awoke and saw a silvery band crossing the pre-dawn sky. He rubbed his eyes and looked up again. A mother-of-pearl ribbon of light stretched from  horizon to horizon at an angle of about thirty degrees. It had moon-like mottlings, and in fact could have been a severely elongated moon.

Which makes it all the more awkward that Michael, our hero figure, pretends to poetry. Whenever Bear has Michael write something, it is graceless and insipid. Even in the late '90s, when I started reading "How to Write Sci-Fi" guidebooks, there were admonishments not to trot out the worn-out cliche of music-as-magic or poetry-as-magic. I haven't read much music-as-magic fiction myself, so the basic concept still felt fresh to me, but by the time (spoiler?) Mozart and Mahler get rescued from Faery and crank out a world-bridging ditty straight off the lace cuffs, it begins to get a little silly. And while I liked Michael as a protagonist, his emotional entanglements felt flat and unconvincing, neutered by Bear's prose and one-dimensional characterization of the various love interests.

I did like aspects of this book; the sequence with Lin Piao Tai, a "spryggla" condemned to wield magic over only things that are yellow, was fun and imaginative, though like all of Michael's conflicts, it resolved easily and obviously. Songs isn't a bad book per se, but it felt pretty damn average.