Giant Bones by Peter S. Beagle
273 pages
Published 1997
Read from November 24 to November 26
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
It's been a while since I read and reviewed a collection of short stories, hasn't it? (Ignoring Dandelion Wine, which was a fixup and accordingly not reviewed chapter by chapter, it's been nine months and almost sixty books since my last dalliance with the short form.) I'm no stranger to Beagle's short stories -- I read one of his collections last year, in addition to sundry inclusions in various best-of anthologies -- but this book takes an odd tack, presenting six new stories set in the world of The Innkeeper's Song. When I recall that book, I think of its multiplicity of perspectives and the vividness of many of its characters. What doesn't spring to mind is, well, the world. I remember the inn well enough, but the rest is a minimally defined map of rather basic fantasy terrain: the bucolic home village, some woods or something, a river in a gorge, the villain's fortress on a crag -- and I'm not even certain of some of those details. As Beagle himself says in his introduction, the "world" of Song "was never supposed to be more than a backdrop, a stage-set. It wasn't intended to last." Only one story here concerns characters from Song itself. So heading into these tales, I'm skeptical of the collection's premise -- what, exactly, makes any of these stories a certain part of the Innkeeper's world? -- although I have trust in Beagle as a storyteller: even his most mediocre stories have been reliably tender and intimate, sentimental (in the positive reading of that term), very human, as I've emphasized in past reviews.
Onward to the stories!
"The Last Song of Sirit Byar." The magic of song is one of the hoariest fantasy cliches out there. I tend to give Beagle the benefit of the doubt, and he did manage to squeeze a sweet little tale out of a hackneyed general premise, but I'd rate this as far from his most affecting venture. As soon as the titular bard went into the "songs have power" line, then opened up about the dangling loose end of his tragic backstory, it all became pat and predictable, albeit spun along its inevitable course with Beagle's signature softness and humanity.
"The Magician of Karakosk." A perfectly pleasant little fable with a surprisingly old school fantasy feel -- this would have been right at home in the sword 'n' sorcery days of the 1970s, except, of course, for being far better written than almost any of those stories. It stirred some nostalgia for Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy anthologies, though this was better than 90% of what I read in those all-too-often garbage volumes. Think of this story as the fantasy equivalent of a classy chef doing his rendition of pub grub: tasty and comforting, with less of the grease, and fewer stomach pains.
"The Tragical Historie of the Jiril's Players." A passable exercise in escalating farce, with outsize villains upstaged in a theater plot by an unassuming bit player, all structured quite tidily but lacking a certain oomph. Somewhat of a forgettable piece, honestly.
"Lal and Soukyan." Thus far the uniting thread through all of these stories (as well as The Innkeeper's Song itself) is not so much the setting as a certain style of narration, each tale (or chapter, in the original novel) related, ostensibly orally, in the first person by a personable narrator. This, the only story in Giant Bones involving characters from Innkeeper, eschews this stylistic uniformity in favor of third person. It fits the story, a sweetly melancholy spin on the old school fantasy staple of two mismatched adventurers, finding Lal and Soukyan reuniting for one last journey, a quest for a sense of atonement in their twilight years. Soukyan's motivation -- to apologize to the son of a prison guard Soukyan shamed in front of him, forty years before -- never quite feels solid to me; the idea that this one incident in a long and checkered career of near escapes and mercenary violence would plague him near the end of his life seems on the shaky side, especially as everything resolves very tidily when Soukyan is made to understand that other people benefited from that long-ago jailbreak, which is so damn obvious it makes Soukyan appear stupid. The stuff in between, with the geriatric pair intervening to save an escaping slave from his vengeful captor and the former slave's fixation on finding the ghost of his father -- is satisfying, albeit never operating at the level of brilliance and affect Beagle is capable of at his best. I've been craving old school fantasy infused with a more modern sense of emotional complexity, so I have no real complaints, even if (like the rest of the stories so far) "Lal and Soukyan" is content to hit the obvious beats.
"Choushi-wai's Story." A cute little just-so story about a clever peasant girl abducted to be the bride of a kindly old king, the talking fish she befriends, and their escape with the aid of a thief called the Thief. Winsomely narrated but insubstantial.
"Giant Bones." Another sweet but slight tale. Not a lick wrong with it on a technical level, and deft and kindly as Beagle's stories tend to be, but, like essentially every story in this volume, it doesn't bother to transcend sweetly-sad to become anything deep or affecting or heartbreaking, not like Beagle's best efforts do. I mean, it does become unexpectedly moving toward the end, with that sweet humane acceptance of mortality that pervades Beagle's work, but even if I were to say this is the best story in the collection (which it might very well be), that doesn't elevate it to Beagle's upper tier. Perhaps it's too much to expect a particular author to crank out the equal to A Fine and Private Place or "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" (reviewed here) anytime he chooses; perhaps if this were any other author, I might be more lenient with the overall rating (though they're all arbitrary, every one of them). But none of these stories (with the possible exception of this one -- it's much too soon to tell) seem likely to really linger with me, not the way I expect Beagle stories to do. None of them were really great -- merely amiable, and sweet, and a little melancholy, and pretty good, like this collection as a whole.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
2015 read #65: Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner.
Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
269 pages
Published 1987
Read from November 20 to November 24
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
With its languid nobles, dashing rogues, Louis Quatorze meets Sir Walter Raleigh esthetic, bisexual eroticism, ritualized violence, political scheming, and plots-within-plots denouement, Swordspoint could be seen as the grand-mère of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart -- though Kushner's sensual sensibilities here hew closer to Thomas Canty than to Fetlife. The schemes of nobility require a deeper cast list, perhaps, than the page count can support. The only two characters that seem adequately fleshed out are the central swordsman, Richard St. Vier, and his enigmatic boyfriend Alec; the rest of the players are sketches only, deftly enough drawn, suggesting depths but never revealing them. I would have liked to know more about the Duchess Tremontaine and Katherine Blount, who seem like they could have supported novels in their own right had the focus been on them -- they certainly have the presence of leading characters, even if they lack much in the way of development. (Perhaps the various Riverside sequels will serve them better? I honestly have no idea what to expect from the ensuing volumes; the fifteen year gap between Swordspoint and The Fall of the Kings suggests either a brilliant new direction or a desperate cash-grab.) One-note characters aside, this was a lush and quite fetching novel, and I can only hope the rest of the series lives up to it.
Also, let's spare a moment to mention just how remarkable it is that a mainstream fantasy novel would have several openly bisexual characters -- in 1987!
269 pages
Published 1987
Read from November 20 to November 24
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
With its languid nobles, dashing rogues, Louis Quatorze meets Sir Walter Raleigh esthetic, bisexual eroticism, ritualized violence, political scheming, and plots-within-plots denouement, Swordspoint could be seen as the grand-mère of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart -- though Kushner's sensual sensibilities here hew closer to Thomas Canty than to Fetlife. The schemes of nobility require a deeper cast list, perhaps, than the page count can support. The only two characters that seem adequately fleshed out are the central swordsman, Richard St. Vier, and his enigmatic boyfriend Alec; the rest of the players are sketches only, deftly enough drawn, suggesting depths but never revealing them. I would have liked to know more about the Duchess Tremontaine and Katherine Blount, who seem like they could have supported novels in their own right had the focus been on them -- they certainly have the presence of leading characters, even if they lack much in the way of development. (Perhaps the various Riverside sequels will serve them better? I honestly have no idea what to expect from the ensuing volumes; the fifteen year gap between Swordspoint and The Fall of the Kings suggests either a brilliant new direction or a desperate cash-grab.) One-note characters aside, this was a lush and quite fetching novel, and I can only hope the rest of the series lives up to it.
Also, let's spare a moment to mention just how remarkable it is that a mainstream fantasy novel would have several openly bisexual characters -- in 1987!
Friday, November 20, 2015
2015 read #64: Unseemly Science by Rod Duncan.
Unseemly Science by Rod Duncan
380 pages
Published 2015
Read from November 18 to November 20
Rating: ★★ out of 5
The first volume of Duncan's Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire series, The Bullet Catcher's Daughter, was sustained by its zippy prose, which flung from one incident to the next with enjoyable velocity, if nothing else. Unseemly Science, the second installment, unfortunately lacks that same sense of propulsion. The titular mystery doesn't become evident until halfway through the book -- the first half, instead, is taken up with incidents of disguise, pursuit, and incarceration that serve as a muddled postscript to the events of the first book, without adding anything particularly new to the overarching plot (which promises nothing short of global revolution and the smashing of class hierarchies), nor even any beats that weren't already hit in Daughter (which saw our heroine similarly disguised, pursued, and jailed). When the "unseemly science" finally makes itself visible, our investigators fail to notice clues that, for the reader, may as well have neon arrows pointing at them -- never a good state of affairs in what is ostensibly a novel of mystery and investigation. The climax lands with a thud, Duncan's former skill at maintaining momentum getting gummed up with a succession of sadistic heavies and mad scientists who struggle to maintain one dimension to their characterizations, let alone two, and action sequences that stumble and clunk rather than swerve and stab. As a whole, Science is mediocre and forgettable rather than outright bad, I suppose, but given that I've been waiting about four months to get my hands on a copy, that's more than enough to leave me disappointed.
380 pages
Published 2015
Read from November 18 to November 20
Rating: ★★ out of 5
The first volume of Duncan's Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire series, The Bullet Catcher's Daughter, was sustained by its zippy prose, which flung from one incident to the next with enjoyable velocity, if nothing else. Unseemly Science, the second installment, unfortunately lacks that same sense of propulsion. The titular mystery doesn't become evident until halfway through the book -- the first half, instead, is taken up with incidents of disguise, pursuit, and incarceration that serve as a muddled postscript to the events of the first book, without adding anything particularly new to the overarching plot (which promises nothing short of global revolution and the smashing of class hierarchies), nor even any beats that weren't already hit in Daughter (which saw our heroine similarly disguised, pursued, and jailed). When the "unseemly science" finally makes itself visible, our investigators fail to notice clues that, for the reader, may as well have neon arrows pointing at them -- never a good state of affairs in what is ostensibly a novel of mystery and investigation. The climax lands with a thud, Duncan's former skill at maintaining momentum getting gummed up with a succession of sadistic heavies and mad scientists who struggle to maintain one dimension to their characterizations, let alone two, and action sequences that stumble and clunk rather than swerve and stab. As a whole, Science is mediocre and forgettable rather than outright bad, I suppose, but given that I've been waiting about four months to get my hands on a copy, that's more than enough to leave me disappointed.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
2015 read #63: Illywhacker by Peter Carey.
Illywhacker by Peter Carey
600 pages
Published 1985
Read from November 4 to November 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
You wouldn't think it would take me two weeks to read a Peter Carey novel, but here we are. Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America was among the first of my new favorite books, barely two weeks into my vow to read more and to blog about it; I loved (was, in fact, "amazed" by) its "delightful frolic of language used well." Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, which I read later that same year, didn't reach the same exuberant ecstasy of wordcraft, but the hardy eloquence and rough poetry of its vernacular was quite impressive. Illywhacker, Carey's second novel, published fourteen years before Parrot & Olivier, lacks much in the way of distinctive prose, relying more on shuffled timelines and unreliable narration to earn its modern lit cred. Where it fails, in my estimation, is in sheer length -- I think the damn thing just goes on too long.
The first 200 pages or so, if excised and allowed to breathe on their own, would make for a slim but outstanding novel following a small-time conman in 1910s Australia, a zippy through-line from the crackup of his airplane to his increasingly grandiose schemes to his rooftop love affair with his patron's daughter, Phoebe. The succeeding 200 pages are something of a step down, interest-wise, but seeing the conman and his new family scraping through the Depression by sleeping in a car and doing magic shows had quite a bit of potential. The final third of the novel is where it lost me, abandoning the energetic presence of its heretofore central character for the thicker, duller tale of his alienated son's reach for respectability in the international pet trade, and the sort of literalizing of domestic tensions (his wife Emma finds herself most fulfilled living in a cage!) that could be clever but more often feels silly and try-hard. Except that, in the end, it all ties back together (this talk of cages, mirroring -- I had essentially forgotten it before the last few pages reminded me -- Phoebe building a figurative birdcage for herself in the first third of the novel; it's actually quite clever) into some vast, inelegant metaphor for Australian dependence on and inferiority complex toward Britain and America.
If I had the energy for it, and could remember the earlier sections better, I could unpack something about what seems to be a current of misogyny throughout the novel, mostly Phoebe's scheming and Emma's cowlike placidity in the cages, but I don't recall how Carey's other novels portrayed women, and honestly I wouldn't know what to say about it beyond pointing it out before moving on.
600 pages
Published 1985
Read from November 4 to November 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
You wouldn't think it would take me two weeks to read a Peter Carey novel, but here we are. Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America was among the first of my new favorite books, barely two weeks into my vow to read more and to blog about it; I loved (was, in fact, "amazed" by) its "delightful frolic of language used well." Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, which I read later that same year, didn't reach the same exuberant ecstasy of wordcraft, but the hardy eloquence and rough poetry of its vernacular was quite impressive. Illywhacker, Carey's second novel, published fourteen years before Parrot & Olivier, lacks much in the way of distinctive prose, relying more on shuffled timelines and unreliable narration to earn its modern lit cred. Where it fails, in my estimation, is in sheer length -- I think the damn thing just goes on too long.
The first 200 pages or so, if excised and allowed to breathe on their own, would make for a slim but outstanding novel following a small-time conman in 1910s Australia, a zippy through-line from the crackup of his airplane to his increasingly grandiose schemes to his rooftop love affair with his patron's daughter, Phoebe. The succeeding 200 pages are something of a step down, interest-wise, but seeing the conman and his new family scraping through the Depression by sleeping in a car and doing magic shows had quite a bit of potential. The final third of the novel is where it lost me, abandoning the energetic presence of its heretofore central character for the thicker, duller tale of his alienated son's reach for respectability in the international pet trade, and the sort of literalizing of domestic tensions (his wife Emma finds herself most fulfilled living in a cage!) that could be clever but more often feels silly and try-hard. Except that, in the end, it all ties back together (this talk of cages, mirroring -- I had essentially forgotten it before the last few pages reminded me -- Phoebe building a figurative birdcage for herself in the first third of the novel; it's actually quite clever) into some vast, inelegant metaphor for Australian dependence on and inferiority complex toward Britain and America.
If I had the energy for it, and could remember the earlier sections better, I could unpack something about what seems to be a current of misogyny throughout the novel, mostly Phoebe's scheming and Emma's cowlike placidity in the cages, but I don't recall how Carey's other novels portrayed women, and honestly I wouldn't know what to say about it beyond pointing it out before moving on.
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
2015 read #62: Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente.
Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
432 pages
Published 2015
Read from October 29 to November 4
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
Metafiction, to my tastes, is best enjoyed in small, measured doses, rather like children's medicine that, no matter how sweetened, has to be choked down with reluctance. Honestly, I admire it more often than I enjoy it. And really, short fiction (rather than novels) seems best suited to experiments with form and presentation. It took almost one hundred pages before I began to concede that Radiance might have something of its own to say, rather than repeating (at much wordier length) the essential points of Valente's short fiction masterpiece, "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" (which I read and reviewed here). Perhaps it took so long because chunks of "The Radiant Car" are recycled in Radiance, once or twice crammed verbatim, with little regard for speech rhythms, into the mouths of side characters. Further, the bulk of Radiance is comprised of film scripts, interrogation transcripts, gossip columns, cargo manifests -- none of which permit Valente's intoxicating prose to reach its full strength, as it does in The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World.
Beyond those first hundred or so pages, however, as Radiance found its own momentum and swung a dizzying, decopunk parabola beyond the constraints of "The Radiant Car," I found myself quite satisfyingly drunk with it. Radiance earned a rare distinction, becoming the first book in recent memory that I've wanted to reread while still barely half done with it. Part of that urge had to do with writing a better review: I had found myself what I considered a clever and perceptive angle upon the concepts and layered perspectives of Valente's novel, but then, after a weekend break for trick-or-treating and hiking, couldn't scrounge up so much as a crumb of my supposed insight from the messy desk of my memory, and I wanted to go back and sniff it down again from the first page. But even without that case of the missing exegesis (I never did recall what I had been so proud to figure out), Radiance is a book that would reward a second read -- and certainly a more careful immersion than my usual page-a-minute pace.
As with the original short story, Radiance is a work of style-as-substance. Layers of perspective, re-shoots and second takes, revisions and outright fabrications are all we are given of the story at its heart. And disregarding the quite lovely digressions and spectacular subplots, that story remains little more substantial than it was in "The Radiant Car," pinned on some kind of quantum foam / matrix of reality stuff that would have seemed hoary in the 1990s (though told with such elegantly baffling Valente-esque vigor). But the style! Disappeared filmmaker Severin Unck's final film is projected onto the naked bodies of fair-goers. Her father, filmmaker Percival Unck, struggles with his writing partner to craft a fitting end for her story, a proper cinematic ending, and the genre zigzags from noir to Gothic to fairy tale to a locked room mystery, its final reveal sung by a tapdancing cartoon octopus and mongoose. There's a religious play enacted by players dressed as Uranus and its moons, spoken in a pidgin of Valente's own devising. It's fantastic. It's fanatical. It's heady. It's dizzying and delirious and delightful.
432 pages
Published 2015
Read from October 29 to November 4
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
Metafiction, to my tastes, is best enjoyed in small, measured doses, rather like children's medicine that, no matter how sweetened, has to be choked down with reluctance. Honestly, I admire it more often than I enjoy it. And really, short fiction (rather than novels) seems best suited to experiments with form and presentation. It took almost one hundred pages before I began to concede that Radiance might have something of its own to say, rather than repeating (at much wordier length) the essential points of Valente's short fiction masterpiece, "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" (which I read and reviewed here). Perhaps it took so long because chunks of "The Radiant Car" are recycled in Radiance, once or twice crammed verbatim, with little regard for speech rhythms, into the mouths of side characters. Further, the bulk of Radiance is comprised of film scripts, interrogation transcripts, gossip columns, cargo manifests -- none of which permit Valente's intoxicating prose to reach its full strength, as it does in The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World.
Beyond those first hundred or so pages, however, as Radiance found its own momentum and swung a dizzying, decopunk parabola beyond the constraints of "The Radiant Car," I found myself quite satisfyingly drunk with it. Radiance earned a rare distinction, becoming the first book in recent memory that I've wanted to reread while still barely half done with it. Part of that urge had to do with writing a better review: I had found myself what I considered a clever and perceptive angle upon the concepts and layered perspectives of Valente's novel, but then, after a weekend break for trick-or-treating and hiking, couldn't scrounge up so much as a crumb of my supposed insight from the messy desk of my memory, and I wanted to go back and sniff it down again from the first page. But even without that case of the missing exegesis (I never did recall what I had been so proud to figure out), Radiance is a book that would reward a second read -- and certainly a more careful immersion than my usual page-a-minute pace.
As with the original short story, Radiance is a work of style-as-substance. Layers of perspective, re-shoots and second takes, revisions and outright fabrications are all we are given of the story at its heart. And disregarding the quite lovely digressions and spectacular subplots, that story remains little more substantial than it was in "The Radiant Car," pinned on some kind of quantum foam / matrix of reality stuff that would have seemed hoary in the 1990s (though told with such elegantly baffling Valente-esque vigor). But the style! Disappeared filmmaker Severin Unck's final film is projected onto the naked bodies of fair-goers. Her father, filmmaker Percival Unck, struggles with his writing partner to craft a fitting end for her story, a proper cinematic ending, and the genre zigzags from noir to Gothic to fairy tale to a locked room mystery, its final reveal sung by a tapdancing cartoon octopus and mongoose. There's a religious play enacted by players dressed as Uranus and its moons, spoken in a pidgin of Valente's own devising. It's fantastic. It's fanatical. It's heady. It's dizzying and delirious and delightful.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
2015 read #61: The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen.
The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen
435 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 21 to October 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Between October 11, when I finished China Dolls, and October 21, when I began this book, I don't think I read so much as a dozen pages. Part of the reason for that was my fruitless attempt to read Holly Black's Tithe -- for whatever reason, it just wasn't grabbing me, nixing my confident plan to breeze through Black's Faery Tale trilogy to beef up my book numbers for the month. But most of the blame can be laid with one word: Minecraft. Downloading and playing it for the very first time on October 7, I got hooked bad for a while there, playing literally every free hour of the day, and dreaming in cubes at night.
But I kept on accumulating books from the library, books I was eager to have read but couldn't quite get myself to read, if that makes sense. What I wanted was a book of old school high fantasy, a fun, pulpy adventure through what-the-fuck that would make me feel like I was inside a Roger Dean painting. But I wanted it packaged with adequate prose and some semblance of modern progressive ethics and values.
At first The Queen of the Tearling seemed to fit my order exactly, a straightforward fantasy of a young queen emerging from hiding and getting shit done, written in prose that didn't make me cringe or toss it across the room. But within a couple chapters, I saw signs that Queen was, if anything, too old school -- and in fact, it proved to be aggressively formulaic. There's the rightful heir, raised in seclusion, bookish and idealistic! There's the technomagical Macguffin, the power of which our queen learns to access exactly when she needs it! The technomagical Macguffin allows her to see visions and shoot bolts of electricity, but its use might cost her! There's the stoic and competent guard captain with a troubled past! There's a dashing and handsome and mysterious King of Thieves! There's the spidery secondary bad guy! There's the evil ruler of evil, her rooms curtained in crimson, who uses and disposes of sex slaves nightly! The evil ruler of evil even calls herself the Red Queen of Mortmense, for fuck's sake, and calls upon the power of a shadowy being who feeds on the blood of children. It's as if every high fantasy series of the '80s and early '90s regurgitated into a bowl, and watered the mixture down to yield this mess.
With the author mentioning her sense of social justice in the acknowledgements, and the central hero being a self-conscious and chubby 19 year old woman who kicks ass and holds onto her idealism, you'd think that Tearling would at least satisfy my desire for progressive ethics and values. One book into a trilogy, with much of the history and background of the setting intentionally left mysterious (for example, is it set on an alien planet, the tale of a founding space voyage corrupted into a myth of a sea voyage, or is it set on an Earth modified by magic, and the Tearling founded with an actual sea voyage across a magically expanded sea?), perhaps it's too early to tell which elements of Tearling society were chosen by the author to make a point, and which slipped in from unconscious bias. Whichever way the Tearling was founded, it was envisioned as a socialist utopia, breaking free from the corruption and near-feudal oligarchy of modern day or near-future America. So why is everyone white? When a brown or black character appears for a page or two, their existence is commented upon as a curiosity, which doesn't explain why they're so rare. Is this a deliberate choice on Johansen's part, to be explored in detail in following volumes? Was William Tear a racist piece of shit? Or did Johansen just neglect to imagine that a utopian colony drawn together by socialist idealism from modern Americans would be considerably darker and more diverse than she depicts here?
And why, oh why, would a girl raised in total isolation by a kindly old man and a strict, in-command woman be obsessed with her looks? Why would she emerge from a vision of horror and invasion and be able to think only of stroking the bare chest of her guard? A sex-positive heroine is still a novelty in fantasy literature, a chubby one still rarer, but honestly, at times Kelsea felt less like a progressive new figure and more like the blushing, looks-obsessed damsels of old school fantasy.
435 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 21 to October 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Between October 11, when I finished China Dolls, and October 21, when I began this book, I don't think I read so much as a dozen pages. Part of the reason for that was my fruitless attempt to read Holly Black's Tithe -- for whatever reason, it just wasn't grabbing me, nixing my confident plan to breeze through Black's Faery Tale trilogy to beef up my book numbers for the month. But most of the blame can be laid with one word: Minecraft. Downloading and playing it for the very first time on October 7, I got hooked bad for a while there, playing literally every free hour of the day, and dreaming in cubes at night.
But I kept on accumulating books from the library, books I was eager to have read but couldn't quite get myself to read, if that makes sense. What I wanted was a book of old school high fantasy, a fun, pulpy adventure through what-the-fuck that would make me feel like I was inside a Roger Dean painting. But I wanted it packaged with adequate prose and some semblance of modern progressive ethics and values.
At first The Queen of the Tearling seemed to fit my order exactly, a straightforward fantasy of a young queen emerging from hiding and getting shit done, written in prose that didn't make me cringe or toss it across the room. But within a couple chapters, I saw signs that Queen was, if anything, too old school -- and in fact, it proved to be aggressively formulaic. There's the rightful heir, raised in seclusion, bookish and idealistic! There's the technomagical Macguffin, the power of which our queen learns to access exactly when she needs it! The technomagical Macguffin allows her to see visions and shoot bolts of electricity, but its use might cost her! There's the stoic and competent guard captain with a troubled past! There's a dashing and handsome and mysterious King of Thieves! There's the spidery secondary bad guy! There's the evil ruler of evil, her rooms curtained in crimson, who uses and disposes of sex slaves nightly! The evil ruler of evil even calls herself the Red Queen of Mortmense, for fuck's sake, and calls upon the power of a shadowy being who feeds on the blood of children. It's as if every high fantasy series of the '80s and early '90s regurgitated into a bowl, and watered the mixture down to yield this mess.
With the author mentioning her sense of social justice in the acknowledgements, and the central hero being a self-conscious and chubby 19 year old woman who kicks ass and holds onto her idealism, you'd think that Tearling would at least satisfy my desire for progressive ethics and values. One book into a trilogy, with much of the history and background of the setting intentionally left mysterious (for example, is it set on an alien planet, the tale of a founding space voyage corrupted into a myth of a sea voyage, or is it set on an Earth modified by magic, and the Tearling founded with an actual sea voyage across a magically expanded sea?), perhaps it's too early to tell which elements of Tearling society were chosen by the author to make a point, and which slipped in from unconscious bias. Whichever way the Tearling was founded, it was envisioned as a socialist utopia, breaking free from the corruption and near-feudal oligarchy of modern day or near-future America. So why is everyone white? When a brown or black character appears for a page or two, their existence is commented upon as a curiosity, which doesn't explain why they're so rare. Is this a deliberate choice on Johansen's part, to be explored in detail in following volumes? Was William Tear a racist piece of shit? Or did Johansen just neglect to imagine that a utopian colony drawn together by socialist idealism from modern Americans would be considerably darker and more diverse than she depicts here?
And why, oh why, would a girl raised in total isolation by a kindly old man and a strict, in-command woman be obsessed with her looks? Why would she emerge from a vision of horror and invasion and be able to think only of stroking the bare chest of her guard? A sex-positive heroine is still a novelty in fantasy literature, a chubby one still rarer, but honestly, at times Kelsea felt less like a progressive new figure and more like the blushing, looks-obsessed damsels of old school fantasy.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
2015 read #60: China Dolls by Lisa See.
China Dolls by Lisa See
384 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 7 to October 11
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I think I'll always need genre training wheels on my literature. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but at times I see it as a personal failing as a reader that I so rarely seek out, much less enjoy, what might be styled "conventional" literary fiction. I've talked before about my disdain for the "Napa Valley wedding" novel, the sort of dreadfully boring yet eternally popular upper-middle class verisimilitude in which rich people bruise each other's feelings and, like, ride horses or something. If a book is mired in dull realism, is set in the present day, and deals nigh-exclusively with class-privileged folks, I just can't bring myself to carry it so much as an inch closer to the library checkout counter. The only thing more boring to me would be some inane murder mystery for the protagonist to unravel -- and the two overlap far more often than I would have credited before I began combing my library's stacks for new things to read.
Almost every entry on my literary fiction tag falls into some additional category that spiced it up for my palate: YA, much of which features protagonists specially crafted to appeal to bookish, socially awkward types of any age; historical fiction, which, with its exotic and often educational settings, is essentially genre fiction in its own right; vague, softball psychological horror, which tends to be much less interesting than the publisher's plot description or the cover art; some surreal or fantastical element, as with the works of Murakami or Oyeyemi, which I won't hesitate to label fantasy (as an inverse of those "fantasy" novels of the mid-'80s and early '90s, such as The Doubleman and Briar Rose, which have nothing whatsoever fantastical about them). Far too infrequently, there is another category I've been known to enjoy: literary fiction set more or less in the present that deals with places or peoples I know nothing about, or lifestyles and situations I have no experience of. One of the few books I read in 2012, before beginning this blog, was The Geometry of God by Uzma Aslam Khan, which impressed me very much at the time; I'd love to read more works like that, excellent fiction that, however minutely, expands my cultural and social horizons.
China Dolls (recommended to me by my friend Francesca) is set primarily within the (so-called) "Oriental" nightclub scene in the years before and during World War II. It's a time and a social environment I know little about, so it appeals to me not only as a historical novel but also as a horizon-expanding exposure to a social context seldom discussed in our current mainstream (white, affluent) culture. Yet much of the actual plot follows the fortunes, friendships, secrets, and ongoing betrayals of its three central characters -- the sort of thing that would feel so dreadfully dull had it been set amongst the vineyards and inheritance lawyers of Napa Valley. The whole literary schtick about "secret traumas lead to horrible betrayals among friends or family members" can feel artificial, a fill-in-the-blank plot starter kit -- nowhere near as egregious as "parent/old friend/estranged sibling dies in mysterious circumstances, and architect/lawyer/novelist protagonist must open old wounds and confront family/town secrets to uncover the truth," but off-putting nonetheless. In China Dolls, those at-long-last-revealed secrets are devastating and pack an emotional heft, which renders the betrayals and melodrama of earlier chapters far more affecting in retrospect, but before that point, which came (of course) at the climax of the book, I found my attention wandering, despite the fascinating historical milieu. Hence me musing about my need for genre training wheels to get me through just about every book, no matter how good the book itself might be.
To be fair, my attention would have been wandering anyway, divided between YouTube videos of thru-hikes and a payday impulse-purchase of Minecraft. For two or three nights now I've been dreaming in cubes.
384 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 7 to October 11
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I think I'll always need genre training wheels on my literature. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but at times I see it as a personal failing as a reader that I so rarely seek out, much less enjoy, what might be styled "conventional" literary fiction. I've talked before about my disdain for the "Napa Valley wedding" novel, the sort of dreadfully boring yet eternally popular upper-middle class verisimilitude in which rich people bruise each other's feelings and, like, ride horses or something. If a book is mired in dull realism, is set in the present day, and deals nigh-exclusively with class-privileged folks, I just can't bring myself to carry it so much as an inch closer to the library checkout counter. The only thing more boring to me would be some inane murder mystery for the protagonist to unravel -- and the two overlap far more often than I would have credited before I began combing my library's stacks for new things to read.
Almost every entry on my literary fiction tag falls into some additional category that spiced it up for my palate: YA, much of which features protagonists specially crafted to appeal to bookish, socially awkward types of any age; historical fiction, which, with its exotic and often educational settings, is essentially genre fiction in its own right; vague, softball psychological horror, which tends to be much less interesting than the publisher's plot description or the cover art; some surreal or fantastical element, as with the works of Murakami or Oyeyemi, which I won't hesitate to label fantasy (as an inverse of those "fantasy" novels of the mid-'80s and early '90s, such as The Doubleman and Briar Rose, which have nothing whatsoever fantastical about them). Far too infrequently, there is another category I've been known to enjoy: literary fiction set more or less in the present that deals with places or peoples I know nothing about, or lifestyles and situations I have no experience of. One of the few books I read in 2012, before beginning this blog, was The Geometry of God by Uzma Aslam Khan, which impressed me very much at the time; I'd love to read more works like that, excellent fiction that, however minutely, expands my cultural and social horizons.
China Dolls (recommended to me by my friend Francesca) is set primarily within the (so-called) "Oriental" nightclub scene in the years before and during World War II. It's a time and a social environment I know little about, so it appeals to me not only as a historical novel but also as a horizon-expanding exposure to a social context seldom discussed in our current mainstream (white, affluent) culture. Yet much of the actual plot follows the fortunes, friendships, secrets, and ongoing betrayals of its three central characters -- the sort of thing that would feel so dreadfully dull had it been set amongst the vineyards and inheritance lawyers of Napa Valley. The whole literary schtick about "secret traumas lead to horrible betrayals among friends or family members" can feel artificial, a fill-in-the-blank plot starter kit -- nowhere near as egregious as "parent/old friend/estranged sibling dies in mysterious circumstances, and architect/lawyer/novelist protagonist must open old wounds and confront family/town secrets to uncover the truth," but off-putting nonetheless. In China Dolls, those at-long-last-revealed secrets are devastating and pack an emotional heft, which renders the betrayals and melodrama of earlier chapters far more affecting in retrospect, but before that point, which came (of course) at the climax of the book, I found my attention wandering, despite the fascinating historical milieu. Hence me musing about my need for genre training wheels to get me through just about every book, no matter how good the book itself might be.
To be fair, my attention would have been wandering anyway, divided between YouTube videos of thru-hikes and a payday impulse-purchase of Minecraft. For two or three nights now I've been dreaming in cubes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)