A. S. Byatt's Ragnarok is, as the title implies, her retelling of the Norse story of Ragnarok, the final battle at the end of the world. In order to give a complete story, she starts with Yggdrasil and the creation of the world, moves through the story of the Midgard Serpent and Fenris Wolf, and ends up at the Final Battle.
This is a somewhat idiosyncratic rendering (Thor, for example, shows up for three pages), filtered through Byatt's concerns. Byatt takes the idea that the gods knew Ragnarok was coming, but couldn't bring themselves to take the steps necessary to avoid it, and uses it as a stand-in for our knowledge that our environmental depredation is bad, but can't really bring ourselves to lessen it. (She makes all this clear in a didactic afterword).
I enjoyed this book, but it's fairly minor as Byatt's books go. It would be hard to recommend as an introduction to Norse mythology; the telling is too idiosyncratic. It also plays against Byatt's strengths as a writer, I think. She chooses an intentionally distancing point-of-view, refracting the whole story through the eyes of a girl growing up outside London during WWII. Although Byatt is a very intellectual writer, I think her best writing has an emotional resonance to it, and this sort of distancing effect makes it hard to engage with the material. (Byatt has also chosen not to humanize her gods; in general, I agree with this approach, because gods should be something "other", but, again, it's not a register that she plays well in).
On the other hand, it's hard to be too negative about Ragnarok; even weak Byatt is better than most authors at the peak of their game. Although I'd prefer another Possession to this, Ragnarok is still better than many other books I've read lately.
Showing posts with label Byatt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Byatt. Show all posts
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Children's Book, David Copperfield
I finished both The Children's Book and David Copperfield this weekend.
I don't have very much to add to what I wrote about David Copperfield earlier. I still hate the Emily/Steerforth subplot, and still thought the rest was very good. Since everyone talks about Dickensian coincidence, I was glad to see that there wasn't so much of it in this novel (and what there was is mostly confined to the Emily plot, which I don't like anyway)
I think I need to really rethink my conception of The Children's Book. A lot of Byatt's themes start to come together when the novel reaches 1913, and WWI provides an important coda. Some themes that emerge are:
I don't have very much to add to what I wrote about David Copperfield earlier. I still hate the Emily/Steerforth subplot, and still thought the rest was very good. Since everyone talks about Dickensian coincidence, I was glad to see that there wasn't so much of it in this novel (and what there was is mostly confined to the Emily plot, which I don't like anyway)
I think I need to really rethink my conception of The Children's Book. A lot of Byatt's themes start to come together when the novel reaches 1913, and WWI provides an important coda. Some themes that emerge are:
- Fairy tales have a dark side that is aimed at adults (this is a theme across much of Byatt's oeuvre).
- The different British/German views on fairy tales and society
- British vs. German anarchism and how each society approached socialism/Marxism
- Of course, the British/German dichotomy comes to a head with WWI.
- Parent/child relationships are very important, from abusive parents like Fludd, through parents who seem attentive (but are actually self-absorbed) like Olive, or parents like the London Wellwoods who can't understand their children but really want to do their best anyway, and so on. The interplay between their parenting styles and their children's different personalities drives a lot of the book forward.
- This is a coming-of-age story for most of the characters. Even the adult characters are often child-like in some way at the start of the novel, trying to live in a fairy-tale world. By the end, they have to come to terms with the consequences of their actions, and some of them are too weak to bear it. (It's interesting that the two characters who commit suicide choose the same method -- a clear thematic link).
- Inner life vs outward appearance. This theme is especially obvious in Charles/Karl, who also represents the British/German dichotomy, but we also see the way nobody wants to confront Fludd's inner corruption because of his outward genius.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Lost Books of the Odyssey, David Copperfield, The Jewish Dog, The Children's Book, Music and Sentiment
The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason, is subtitled "A Novel." I know it's become pretty common to subtitle novels with "a novel," it's rather strange in this case. The book is a collection of out-takes, so to speak, from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Although Mason is clearly intimately familiar with both, he fortunately did not choose to write a pastiche in the Homeric style -- I imagine that the result would have been risible. Instead, he has written a series of episodes that are inspired by the events and characters of the two epics (as well as one that is really about Theseus), as well as some non-Greek stories (one episode owes something to The Tempest, for example).
The results vary from thoughtful to surprising to contrived. In one story, Odysseus returns home to find Penelope married, in another he finds her in the Underworld, in yet another she's a werewolf. As you'd expect with a book like this, it occasionally gets too meta-textual for its own good. There are several stories in which the Iliad or Odyssey themselves show up, and they're usually more cutesy than thought-provoking, with one notable exception. But that's my only issue with thought-provoking collection.
I"m also in the middle of a few books, and thought I'd mention my intermediary reactions.
David Copperfield is interesting in a few ways. It's one of only two books that Dickens wrote in first person, the other being Great Expectations. It's also his most autobiographical work. These influences combine to create a work that is, in some places, stylistically very different from the others of his that I've read. The first few chapters, for example, are surprisingly impressionistic. We get a couple of paragraphs remembering, say, a local church, then a couple about what dinners were like, then a bit about the house, and so on. David's wedding day is also depicted in this way -- a few sentences suffice to sketch a moment here, then a moment there.
I"m not so impressed with the more standard Dickensian sub-plot about Steerforth and Emily. If you've read any Victorian-era melodrama it's really clear where this one is going from the beginning, and it feels like a paint-by-the-numbers exercise to stretch out the book. On the other hand, the Uriah Heep plot is really good; Heep is one of the best Dickens villains I've run across.
In addition to listening to an actual Victorian novel in David Copperfield, I've been reading about the Victorian era in The Children's Book, by A. S. Byatt. She follows a few families from the end of the Victorian era through to the beginning of WWI (I don't know how far into the war she goes, since I'm still in 1908). I'm still not sure if I like this book or not, despite being several hundred pages in (it's a very long novel). On the one hand, Byatt takes a lot of pains to give us a faithful representation of what one part of England might have been like, while also giving us really rounded characters who are not just types chosen to represent their era. On the other hand, it's such a faithful representation that (at least for now) it feels like the novel has no narrative structure (just like real life). There's no build-up of tension across the novel; individual characters have their ups and downs, but they don't happen to coincide with anyone else's.
Byatt writes beautifully, and it's always a pleasure to read her. But I'm not sure how much I could recommend this novel to someone who isn't already interested in the late Victorian/early Edwardian eras.
I want to make a quick caveat to the above comments. She divides the book up into "The Golden Age," "The Silver Age," and "The Lead Age" (the last of which I assume is WWI, though I haven't gotten there yet), so Byatt clearly has some sort of structure in mind, and it may become more apparent to me as I make my way through the book.
I'm reading The Jewish Dog in Hebrew, about a dog's view of the Holocaust. It's funny and depressing by turns. The dog is abnormally intelligent, and has learned human speech, but his view of things is off-kilter, leading to some odd ironic humor. (For example, he's happy when the local coffee shop puts up a sign banning Jews and dogs, because now he doesn't have to wait outside while his master drinks coffee. This sign makes him optimistic that his life will continue to improve under the new rules).
I'm a huge fan of Charles Rosen's music writing. I think he is very clear about a topic which is both abstract and subjective. In Music and Sentiment, he tackles the representation of sentiment in music, starting with the baroque era and going through the moderns. I'm in what seems to be his favorite era, the classical, and I'm enjoying his lucid examination of the move from the baroque conception of one sentiment per piece to the classical idea of an opposition of sentiments which lead to a new synthesis.
The results vary from thoughtful to surprising to contrived. In one story, Odysseus returns home to find Penelope married, in another he finds her in the Underworld, in yet another she's a werewolf. As you'd expect with a book like this, it occasionally gets too meta-textual for its own good. There are several stories in which the Iliad or Odyssey themselves show up, and they're usually more cutesy than thought-provoking, with one notable exception. But that's my only issue with thought-provoking collection.
I"m also in the middle of a few books, and thought I'd mention my intermediary reactions.
David Copperfield is interesting in a few ways. It's one of only two books that Dickens wrote in first person, the other being Great Expectations. It's also his most autobiographical work. These influences combine to create a work that is, in some places, stylistically very different from the others of his that I've read. The first few chapters, for example, are surprisingly impressionistic. We get a couple of paragraphs remembering, say, a local church, then a couple about what dinners were like, then a bit about the house, and so on. David's wedding day is also depicted in this way -- a few sentences suffice to sketch a moment here, then a moment there.
I"m not so impressed with the more standard Dickensian sub-plot about Steerforth and Emily. If you've read any Victorian-era melodrama it's really clear where this one is going from the beginning, and it feels like a paint-by-the-numbers exercise to stretch out the book. On the other hand, the Uriah Heep plot is really good; Heep is one of the best Dickens villains I've run across.
In addition to listening to an actual Victorian novel in David Copperfield, I've been reading about the Victorian era in The Children's Book, by A. S. Byatt. She follows a few families from the end of the Victorian era through to the beginning of WWI (I don't know how far into the war she goes, since I'm still in 1908). I'm still not sure if I like this book or not, despite being several hundred pages in (it's a very long novel). On the one hand, Byatt takes a lot of pains to give us a faithful representation of what one part of England might have been like, while also giving us really rounded characters who are not just types chosen to represent their era. On the other hand, it's such a faithful representation that (at least for now) it feels like the novel has no narrative structure (just like real life). There's no build-up of tension across the novel; individual characters have their ups and downs, but they don't happen to coincide with anyone else's.
Byatt writes beautifully, and it's always a pleasure to read her. But I'm not sure how much I could recommend this novel to someone who isn't already interested in the late Victorian/early Edwardian eras.
I want to make a quick caveat to the above comments. She divides the book up into "The Golden Age," "The Silver Age," and "The Lead Age" (the last of which I assume is WWI, though I haven't gotten there yet), so Byatt clearly has some sort of structure in mind, and it may become more apparent to me as I make my way through the book.
I'm reading The Jewish Dog in Hebrew, about a dog's view of the Holocaust. It's funny and depressing by turns. The dog is abnormally intelligent, and has learned human speech, but his view of things is off-kilter, leading to some odd ironic humor. (For example, he's happy when the local coffee shop puts up a sign banning Jews and dogs, because now he doesn't have to wait outside while his master drinks coffee. This sign makes him optimistic that his life will continue to improve under the new rules).
I'm a huge fan of Charles Rosen's music writing. I think he is very clear about a topic which is both abstract and subjective. In Music and Sentiment, he tackles the representation of sentiment in music, starting with the baroque era and going through the moderns. I'm in what seems to be his favorite era, the classical, and I'm enjoying his lucid examination of the move from the baroque conception of one sentiment per piece to the classical idea of an opposition of sentiments which lead to a new synthesis.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Angels and Insects, Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
The second story in Angels and Insects, "Conjugal Angel," is sort of the obverse face to Byatt's earlier novel Possession. The heart of Possession is the love affair between two Victorian poets that Byatt invented. One of the attractions of that book is her pitch-perfect mimicry of poems she invents for her characters, and the analysis she has her literary detectives perform on the poems.
All this falls flat, though, in "Conjugal Angel," when she takes the game a step further and concerns herself with the real poet Alfred Tennyson and the real poem "In Memoriam." Now, instead of giving us a whole new poem, she only gives snatches (since, after all, one can read the real poem anywhere), and gives the analysis to Tennyson himself and his sister, which just feels tendentious. Underneath it all, there's a nice romantic story trying to get out (just as in Possession and also in "Morpho Eugenia"), but here it's too buried in all the Tennyson details.
Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, by Gordon Dahlquist, takes an intriguing idea and chracters, and pulls them until they're spread paper-thin, which is a pity. The novel, set in Victorian England, gets off to a good start when Miss Temple gets a letter ending her engagement to Roger Bascombe, and she decides to follow him and see why he might have broken the engagement. Dahlquist writes wonderful scenes, and is great at imagining derring-do and hairbreadth escapes. But, at the end, it just didn't amount to very much -- a simple adventure doesn't suddenly become deep just because it's been stretched to 800 pages.
All this falls flat, though, in "Conjugal Angel," when she takes the game a step further and concerns herself with the real poet Alfred Tennyson and the real poem "In Memoriam." Now, instead of giving us a whole new poem, she only gives snatches (since, after all, one can read the real poem anywhere), and gives the analysis to Tennyson himself and his sister, which just feels tendentious. Underneath it all, there's a nice romantic story trying to get out (just as in Possession and also in "Morpho Eugenia"), but here it's too buried in all the Tennyson details.
Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, by Gordon Dahlquist, takes an intriguing idea and chracters, and pulls them until they're spread paper-thin, which is a pity. The novel, set in Victorian England, gets off to a good start when Miss Temple gets a letter ending her engagement to Roger Bascombe, and she decides to follow him and see why he might have broken the engagement. Dahlquist writes wonderful scenes, and is great at imagining derring-do and hairbreadth escapes. But, at the end, it just didn't amount to very much -- a simple adventure doesn't suddenly become deep just because it's been stretched to 800 pages.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Angels and Insects, Confession
"Morpho Eugenia", the first story in A. S. Byatt's Angels and Insects, is a literary mirror maze, starting with the title. Morpho Eugenia is a species of butterfly which is beautiful to behold, but poisonous to eat, and Eugenia Alabaster, the eldest daughter of the Alabaster household, was betrothed once, only to have her fiance die, and is now pursued by a second lover.
So the mirror seems clear enough, until we realize that Eugenia isn't the main character of the story, and in fact disappears from it for most of the second half, as the story focuses on the naturalist William Adamson. His name, I think, also gives us clues to the theme of the story -- Adam, of course, named the animals, as a naturalist does (the references to Linnaeus just cement this theme). But, in another inversion, Adamson spends most of the story pointedly not discovering new species to name, as he so dearly wishes to do, but instead is stuck in England, teaching the Alabaster children about the ants in their own backyard.
This all sets us up for the main mirror in the story, insect and human society. Byatt draws some clear parallels to start with: the males who do nothing except flock around the queen = the young men who do little but drink and hunt; the hive with all the workers = the Alabaster house with its many servants, and so on. But I think she's also playing a bit of game with all this. Throughout the story, many people are mentioned as drawing lessons from the insect world -- insects are cooperative like socialists, or insects care for their young as God cares for us, or insects take slaves like evil humans, and so on. Ultimately, the insects can't be anthropomorphized so easily, as William himself constantly reminds us. They must be studied on their own terms if we want to understand them.
Mattie Crompton reminds us that things aren't always what they seem. The Alabaster house seems like a hive, and sometimes has a hive-mind, but people within it can change roles (as a caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, another persistent image). Eugenia herself changes from object of pursuit to object of disgust, and, of course, Mattie herself goes through the biggest changes of all, finding her voice as an author and naturalist.
There's so much going on in this story (I feel I'm just scratching the surface with these musings -- I haven't even touched on the questions of hybrids, Darwinism, the stories-in-stories) that it's almost hard to believe it's just a novella. I've started on the other story in the collection, but so far it seems relatively barren; I hope that will change as I finish it.
On the other side of the literary spectrum, Olen Steinhauer's Confession is a police procedural set in a Soviet state around the time of the Hungarian Uprising. (He doesn't give his state a name, but it's clearly supposed to be near Hungary). The mystery itself is fairly hum-drum -- it's not hard to stay ahead of the detectives in figuring it out -- but Steinhauer is more focused on the tension of living in a totalitarian state, where one can be shipped off to labor camps for any infringement, and sometimes for no infringement at all. Ferenc, the main character, ends up doing vicious and brutal things, just to be able to do something over which he has control, and I think that this same theme is reflected in the characters who return from the work camps driven by revenge.
In the end, I found the book emotionally devastating, in a way that Child 44 (a natural comparison to this book) never was. Child 44 is more focused on the hero's slow discovery that the Soviet state is not just brutal (which he already knew), but brutal toward innocent targets, and not always interested in actual justice. In the end of that novel, he's offered the chance to create a true police force, and there's a sense of closuer. In Confession, there's never a sense that justice is served. It's true that the main antagonist is executed, but for the wrong reasons, and, in the meantime, innocent lives remain ruined. Ferenc discovers that vengeance doesn't set things right, and can make things even worse, but isn't given anything to replace it with. In the end, justice is arbitrarily handed out, and sometimes you're lucky and the right person is punished.
So the mirror seems clear enough, until we realize that Eugenia isn't the main character of the story, and in fact disappears from it for most of the second half, as the story focuses on the naturalist William Adamson. His name, I think, also gives us clues to the theme of the story -- Adam, of course, named the animals, as a naturalist does (the references to Linnaeus just cement this theme). But, in another inversion, Adamson spends most of the story pointedly not discovering new species to name, as he so dearly wishes to do, but instead is stuck in England, teaching the Alabaster children about the ants in their own backyard.
This all sets us up for the main mirror in the story, insect and human society. Byatt draws some clear parallels to start with: the males who do nothing except flock around the queen = the young men who do little but drink and hunt; the hive with all the workers = the Alabaster house with its many servants, and so on. But I think she's also playing a bit of game with all this. Throughout the story, many people are mentioned as drawing lessons from the insect world -- insects are cooperative like socialists, or insects care for their young as God cares for us, or insects take slaves like evil humans, and so on. Ultimately, the insects can't be anthropomorphized so easily, as William himself constantly reminds us. They must be studied on their own terms if we want to understand them.
Mattie Crompton reminds us that things aren't always what they seem. The Alabaster house seems like a hive, and sometimes has a hive-mind, but people within it can change roles (as a caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, another persistent image). Eugenia herself changes from object of pursuit to object of disgust, and, of course, Mattie herself goes through the biggest changes of all, finding her voice as an author and naturalist.
There's so much going on in this story (I feel I'm just scratching the surface with these musings -- I haven't even touched on the questions of hybrids, Darwinism, the stories-in-stories) that it's almost hard to believe it's just a novella. I've started on the other story in the collection, but so far it seems relatively barren; I hope that will change as I finish it.
On the other side of the literary spectrum, Olen Steinhauer's Confession is a police procedural set in a Soviet state around the time of the Hungarian Uprising. (He doesn't give his state a name, but it's clearly supposed to be near Hungary). The mystery itself is fairly hum-drum -- it's not hard to stay ahead of the detectives in figuring it out -- but Steinhauer is more focused on the tension of living in a totalitarian state, where one can be shipped off to labor camps for any infringement, and sometimes for no infringement at all. Ferenc, the main character, ends up doing vicious and brutal things, just to be able to do something over which he has control, and I think that this same theme is reflected in the characters who return from the work camps driven by revenge.
In the end, I found the book emotionally devastating, in a way that Child 44 (a natural comparison to this book) never was. Child 44 is more focused on the hero's slow discovery that the Soviet state is not just brutal (which he already knew), but brutal toward innocent targets, and not always interested in actual justice. In the end of that novel, he's offered the chance to create a true police force, and there's a sense of closuer. In Confession, there's never a sense that justice is served. It's true that the main antagonist is executed, but for the wrong reasons, and, in the meantime, innocent lives remain ruined. Ferenc discovers that vengeance doesn't set things right, and can make things even worse, but isn't given anything to replace it with. In the end, justice is arbitrarily handed out, and sometimes you're lucky and the right person is punished.
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