Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord
189 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 20 to January 29
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Spoilers ahead!
The first half or so of this book is excellent. I love the narration, related by an unseen, often humorous, occasionally defensive storyteller, and the story itself (inspired by a Senegalese folk tale) has charm and heart to spare. But once the indigo-skinned djombi arrives to reclaim his powers of chaos from the wise and dutiful Paama, I felt that the tale went from sweet to a tad bit trite. Paama relearns the meaning of duty from all the afflictions and small graces of humanity that Chance shows her, returning to her gluttonous and self-absorbed husband to take care of him in his final days -- a definition of duty that I, for one, as a survivor of abuse and neglect, find rather distasteful. And Chance, for his part, relearns the value of human beings from his whirlwind tour with Paama, starting the path toward his titular redemption with an anticlimactic revelation that amounts to, "Oh, this one human being is all right, I forgot humans could be all right sometimes." It's all too pat and easy.
Lord's narrator chides people like me at the end. "Paama will be too tepid and mild a heroine for some, they will criticize her for caring for her estranged husband in his last days." Fair enough. Clearly this book and I won't see eye to eye about that, and purposefully so. All the same, I found Redemption in Indigo a warm and enjoyable little read.
Monday, January 29, 2018
Friday, January 19, 2018
2018 read #2: Summer of Blood by Dan Jones.
Summer of Blood: England's First Revolution by Dan Jones
217 pages
Published 2009
Read from January 15 to January 19
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
There is a strain of pop history writing that veers toward the facile: indulging in novelistic scenes of what "must have" been going through its protagonists' heads during pivotal moments, without providing any real insight into their characters or motivations that couldn't be gleaned from a wikipedia article, worded in prose with all the art and subtlety of a USA Today article, granulated with recurring stock phrases like "orgy of destruction" and "blistering fury," like so much cheap sugar sprinkled on a prepackaged confection. I remember liking Dan Jones' later, more exhaustive volume, The Plantagenets (though the four-star rating I gave it seems at odds with the rousing adjectives "serviceable" and "competent"), so Summer of Blood was a surprising disappointment. It is nothing more nor less than a bland, forgettable, and sadly shallow recounting of a pivotal moment of British and working peoples' history, one that (inadvertently or not) twists an underclass uprising against systematic wealth inequality into a quaint Middle Ages Tea Party in order to fit an easy, accessible narrative.
One aspect of Summer of Blood that, in retrospect, could have been presaged by a reading of Plantagenets is Jones' creeping ideological slant. In that review I mentioned Jones' "traditional" historical focus, which emphasizes kings and masculine power while brushing aside "queens and female agency in general." Summer of Blood approaches the Peasants' Rebellion of 1381, a major uprising against wealth inequality, the landed classes, and the legal system that allowed the two to flourish, as a proto-libertarian revolt against nebulous phrases like "government intrusion" -- an askew angle Jones, in a preface to the American edition published in 2016, makes particularly queasy by linking it with the spirit of racist faux-populism that gave us Trump that same year: "Even today, there are many Americans who would cheer the English rebels' aims of rolling back government from their everyday lives, shunning oppressive taxation...." Spare me!
Jones' glib "liberty from big government" narration is particularly malaprop when contrasted with the contemporary sources he quotes: Essex villagers were "delighted," in the words of John Gower, "that the day had come when they could help each other in the face of so urgent a necessity" against the landowning aristocrats. That sounds a whole lot like pure socialism to me -- but reducing a complex set of historical world-views to fit my own ideology would put me in the same category as Jones.
It isn't just in the wording that this proto-libertarian slant shows itself. One of the primary aims of the Peasants' Revolt was to dismantle a system of legal serfdom, debt servitude, and debtors' prisons recently enacted as a weapon against the poorer classes. Time and again, the villagers went straight to the prisons whenever they entered a new town and released the captives there; time and again they sought out and burned legal records and memoranda of debt. Jones manages to get these facts right, then concocts from them a "conservative" motivation: "These were the highest badges of a legal system that in rebel eyes preferred contracts and statutes to trusted community tradition, and the rebels plundered the trove with glee." I'm pretty sure that the rebels were not making coordinated attempts to release prisoners and destroy debt records in order to preserve "tradition." I, for one, suspect the medieval underclasses had more ideological sophistication than Jones credits them with in this book.
I don't claim to know Dan Jones' ideological background. Perhaps the supposed ideological bias I scent is the fault of the newspaper-ready clichés Jones uses to get the gist across. "Freedom" has been corrupted by so many libertarian, right-populist, and neoliberal connotations that using it as a glib, anachronistic shorthand for a rebellion's demands might create a false sense of bias in the concerned reader. Regardless, even if it's merely an artifact of making the text more accessible, the lack of nuance in what should be a fascinating history is inexcusable. Any sense of what might have motivated the rebels of 1381 gets lost, along with their way of seeing the world and their social hierarchy, in the easy, ready-made modern clichés of "freedom."
217 pages
Published 2009
Read from January 15 to January 19
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
There is a strain of pop history writing that veers toward the facile: indulging in novelistic scenes of what "must have" been going through its protagonists' heads during pivotal moments, without providing any real insight into their characters or motivations that couldn't be gleaned from a wikipedia article, worded in prose with all the art and subtlety of a USA Today article, granulated with recurring stock phrases like "orgy of destruction" and "blistering fury," like so much cheap sugar sprinkled on a prepackaged confection. I remember liking Dan Jones' later, more exhaustive volume, The Plantagenets (though the four-star rating I gave it seems at odds with the rousing adjectives "serviceable" and "competent"), so Summer of Blood was a surprising disappointment. It is nothing more nor less than a bland, forgettable, and sadly shallow recounting of a pivotal moment of British and working peoples' history, one that (inadvertently or not) twists an underclass uprising against systematic wealth inequality into a quaint Middle Ages Tea Party in order to fit an easy, accessible narrative.
One aspect of Summer of Blood that, in retrospect, could have been presaged by a reading of Plantagenets is Jones' creeping ideological slant. In that review I mentioned Jones' "traditional" historical focus, which emphasizes kings and masculine power while brushing aside "queens and female agency in general." Summer of Blood approaches the Peasants' Rebellion of 1381, a major uprising against wealth inequality, the landed classes, and the legal system that allowed the two to flourish, as a proto-libertarian revolt against nebulous phrases like "government intrusion" -- an askew angle Jones, in a preface to the American edition published in 2016, makes particularly queasy by linking it with the spirit of racist faux-populism that gave us Trump that same year: "Even today, there are many Americans who would cheer the English rebels' aims of rolling back government from their everyday lives, shunning oppressive taxation...." Spare me!
Jones' glib "liberty from big government" narration is particularly malaprop when contrasted with the contemporary sources he quotes: Essex villagers were "delighted," in the words of John Gower, "that the day had come when they could help each other in the face of so urgent a necessity" against the landowning aristocrats. That sounds a whole lot like pure socialism to me -- but reducing a complex set of historical world-views to fit my own ideology would put me in the same category as Jones.
It isn't just in the wording that this proto-libertarian slant shows itself. One of the primary aims of the Peasants' Revolt was to dismantle a system of legal serfdom, debt servitude, and debtors' prisons recently enacted as a weapon against the poorer classes. Time and again, the villagers went straight to the prisons whenever they entered a new town and released the captives there; time and again they sought out and burned legal records and memoranda of debt. Jones manages to get these facts right, then concocts from them a "conservative" motivation: "These were the highest badges of a legal system that in rebel eyes preferred contracts and statutes to trusted community tradition, and the rebels plundered the trove with glee." I'm pretty sure that the rebels were not making coordinated attempts to release prisoners and destroy debt records in order to preserve "tradition." I, for one, suspect the medieval underclasses had more ideological sophistication than Jones credits them with in this book.
I don't claim to know Dan Jones' ideological background. Perhaps the supposed ideological bias I scent is the fault of the newspaper-ready clichés Jones uses to get the gist across. "Freedom" has been corrupted by so many libertarian, right-populist, and neoliberal connotations that using it as a glib, anachronistic shorthand for a rebellion's demands might create a false sense of bias in the concerned reader. Regardless, even if it's merely an artifact of making the text more accessible, the lack of nuance in what should be a fascinating history is inexcusable. Any sense of what might have motivated the rebels of 1381 gets lost, along with their way of seeing the world and their social hierarchy, in the easy, ready-made modern clichés of "freedom."
Monday, January 1, 2018
2018 read #1: Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones.
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
329 pages
Published 1986
Read from November 30, 2017 to January 1
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
I've been having such a hard time reading fiction lately. Non-fiction gives me little trouble; I can stay focused and motivated to read even the driest history tome. Yet not even the sprightliest and most engaging fantasy can keep me turning pages these days. When I began this book, I found it to be the most charming YA fantasy I'd ever picked up, bursting with warmth and character. It only added to the charm that Sophie, the viewpoint character, reminded me quite a lot of a particular loved one. Nonetheless, after the first couple days and the first half of the book were behind me, I found my interest lagging. As much as I loved and rooted for Sophie, I just couldn't stay focused on the story. I'd pick it up, read a page or two, and get engrossed in Facebook before I'd even realized I'd put it down again. No doubt that was due to my recent (post-2016 election) reading slump, and how it's led me back into my bad old habits of dicking around online for hours at a time. For whatever reason, fiction seems more affected by my slump than non.
My slack attention span, alas, deteriorated my experience of this book. Not having seen the movie (nor, shamefully, anything by Studio Ghibli), I was surprised to find it was originally a young adult novel by an author I'd never read, yet had been peripherally aware of for some time. Without the movie as a foundation, and leaving the book aside for weeks at a time, I lost track of a number of characters and plotlines, and so found myself awash when they all came flooding back in a roar of twists and revelations in the final chapters. I'd quite forgotten who Fanny was, so her return -- no doubt an important and satisfying emotional beat -- left me scratching my head. I just couldn't follow the series of fake-outs, deceptions, misunderstandings, and suchlike. Entirely my fault, I think; if I'd just read through at a steady pace back in early December, the whole would have felt far more cohesive. I'll just have to see the movie at some point and see if I can make better sense of that.
329 pages
Published 1986
Read from November 30, 2017 to January 1
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
I've been having such a hard time reading fiction lately. Non-fiction gives me little trouble; I can stay focused and motivated to read even the driest history tome. Yet not even the sprightliest and most engaging fantasy can keep me turning pages these days. When I began this book, I found it to be the most charming YA fantasy I'd ever picked up, bursting with warmth and character. It only added to the charm that Sophie, the viewpoint character, reminded me quite a lot of a particular loved one. Nonetheless, after the first couple days and the first half of the book were behind me, I found my interest lagging. As much as I loved and rooted for Sophie, I just couldn't stay focused on the story. I'd pick it up, read a page or two, and get engrossed in Facebook before I'd even realized I'd put it down again. No doubt that was due to my recent (post-2016 election) reading slump, and how it's led me back into my bad old habits of dicking around online for hours at a time. For whatever reason, fiction seems more affected by my slump than non.
My slack attention span, alas, deteriorated my experience of this book. Not having seen the movie (nor, shamefully, anything by Studio Ghibli), I was surprised to find it was originally a young adult novel by an author I'd never read, yet had been peripherally aware of for some time. Without the movie as a foundation, and leaving the book aside for weeks at a time, I lost track of a number of characters and plotlines, and so found myself awash when they all came flooding back in a roar of twists and revelations in the final chapters. I'd quite forgotten who Fanny was, so her return -- no doubt an important and satisfying emotional beat -- left me scratching my head. I just couldn't follow the series of fake-outs, deceptions, misunderstandings, and suchlike. Entirely my fault, I think; if I'd just read through at a steady pace back in early December, the whole would have felt far more cohesive. I'll just have to see the movie at some point and see if I can make better sense of that.
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