I ran across Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr Lao when I was unpacking a crate of books recently, and so, remembering it as a bit of an odd book, I decided to re-read it. Odd it certainly is; it's hard to even imagine it getting published today -- it's a slim 150 pages, and it couldn't possibly be expanded or turned into a series. Instead, we're given a day in the life of Abalone, Missouri when Dr. Lao's odd circus comes into the town.
There are no central characters, and there isn't really a plot. In the first third of the book, the people of the town react to the news that a circus is in town, then we look at the sideshows for the next third, and then we watch the circus, followed by the very odd catalog of all the characters, creatures, foods (!), and a list of unanswered questions. Through the whole book, Finney seems to be presenting two contradictory ideas. On the one hand, the townspeople are painted as too dull to perceive the magic in the circus -- faced with a werewolf-woman, two men are bored because when she turns human she looks 80 years old rather than the young girl they were hoping for. On the other hand, the magic itself is presented as being dull -- a man is resurrected from the dead, and the first thing he does is look at his watch and announce that he's late for an appointment, whereupon he runs off, not to be seen again in the story (though he shows up in the catalog).
The catalog often drives home the message that plenty of strange things happen in our daily lives, but in a distinctly non-romantic way. More like "you just never know what's going to happen to you -- it could be really great or really terrible" (or just boring, as Mrs. Cassan finds when she goes to the fortune-teller who tells her that the rest of her life will be the same as the previous 10 years; nothing new will ever happen to her. In her case, though, I think that Finney's problem with her is that she's constantly waiting for some outside thing to happen to her -- the dark handsome man to come into her life, or to inherit an oil well -- rather than looking around at her children).
If the word that describes The Circus is odd, the word that describes Peter Watts' Blindsight is cold. We're given a narrator who's had the empathy centers surgically removed from his brain. He sees all human interactions as games of one sort or another. He, along with 5 team-mates, is sent to check out the first alien intelligence that humanity has found. This is a very ambitious novel, with speculations on the nature of intelligence and sentience, the interaction of biology and environment, and some really good thoughts about where humanity is heading. And so I wanted to like it more than I actually did -- but for me, the void at the center of the novel made it hard to care about what happened to anyone in the book. The society back on earth is completely decadent, the only likable character dies about halfway through, and there's no-one to really anchor yourself to. But I think it's not even that I found the characters unlikable -- Macbeth, for example, is an unlikable character but we still want to know what happens to him. It's more that it's hard to invest any emotion in characters who are in some ways so alien already.
Ivanhoe is, of course, the medieval romantic/historical fiction par excellence. It's not typically a genre that I'm interested in, but I thought it might be fun to listen to on audible. Plus, I figure that if I'm going to read one book in a genre, it might as well be one of the best... I'm now at the 2/3 mark and having a blast with it. Scott's characters are nuanced, even though they're larger than life.
His treatment of the Jews is particularly noteworthy. Isaac the Jew seems at first to be a stereotype of a Jew (grasping and servile), but Scott does 2 things. The first time we see Isaac, Scott tells us that he acts the way he does because the Christians of the day have forced it on him. He then makes Isaac act occasionally generous (and more so than the abbot of the local monastery), while maintaining his essential character. More importantly, Isaac's daughter Rebecca comes across as the true heroine of the novel. Although the lady Rowena would seem to be the heroine when she first appears, she's actually a very passive character. Rebecca can verbally joust with the Templars, can heal the sick Ivanhoe, and on top of it all maintains her Jewish faith in the face of romantic and monetary temptations.
Scott's portrayal of Robin Hood is also a lot of fun to watch, and Wamba the jester is a great character as well. All of the characters, Norman and Saxon, are much more well-rounded than I was expecting, and I can already see why Ivanhoe is a classic.
In my Iliad readings, I've just gotten to the section where Hephaestus makes a shield for Achilles. It's a commonplace to note that the mortals in the Iliad act out the heroic tragedy, while the gods give us the counterpoint of domestic life, and I think that the sequence where Thetis visits Hephaestus is one of the great examples. We get some 30 lines of pleasantries as he and his wife Charis invite Thetis to join them at their meal and entertain her, while she asks Hephaestus's help. It's a charming scene, and it's a welcome interlude between Achilles' mourning of Patroclus (with his concommitant decision to die in battle at Troy rather than return home to a long life in Greece) and the long description of the shield which is to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment