Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Changes, Side Jobs, The End of the Affair

More Jim Butcher with Changes  and Side Jobs.  Guess I'm sort of addicted, even though I the writing is pedestrian at best.  More people raise one eyebrow in 10 pages than I've seen do it in my life.  Same with snorting.  But from a plot perspective, Butcher keeps things moving.  And he's not afraid to change up the series -- Changes definitely lives up to its name, closing off several long-running plot threads, including one that I thought would keep going till the end.

Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is a much more weighty novel, even though it clocks in at less than half the length of a Dresden novel.  On the one hand, this is a fairly intellectual novel about the nature of faith and God and suffering.  But it's also a cri de coeur for the protagonist, who can't deny God's existence, but also can't accept His cruelty.

Usually, I'd feel that there were one too many miraculous events near the end of the novel, but here they heighten the intellectual tension.  Rather than giving the author an easy way out, they point up the arbitrary nature of miracles -- one person is saved, another dies from flu.

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