Gillian Bradshaw's first few novels were historical fantasy, which I enjoyed very much back in my mis-spent youth. But then she pretty much dropped off my radar, and it turns out she's switched to straight historical fiction, no fantasy involved. Out of nostalgia as much as anything, I picked up The Sun's Bride, a novel set in and around Rhodes in 246 BCE, although I'm not much of a historical fiction buff.
I had mixed feelings about this novel. I'm still not a huge fan of historical novels, but Bradshaw avoids most of the pitfalls that bug me. One of the biggies is characters with modern attitudes in historical times -- Bradshaw avoids this one completely. Her characters are steeped in a culture where slavery is the norm, and even the hero doesn't particularly object to it.
My other problem with historical novels is that they tend to throw in all the major actors of the time -- a Civil War novel will find a reason to introduce Lincoln; a Roman novel will throw in Caesar, Cicero, and a host of others. Here, Bradshaw falls a bit into this trap. We end up encountering both Laodike, who triggered the Laodicean War between Egypt and Syria, and the King of Mycenae (although mostly in passing). Bradshaw makes it believable, but still...
On the other hand, Bradshaw is a good story-teller, and has a gift for making ancient Rhodes feel alive. I'd probably read more of her novels, but I'm also not in a huge rush to do so.
Showing posts with label historical fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label historical fiction. Show all posts
Friday, August 23, 2013
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Dissolution
I've felt for a long time that one thing that mysteries do well is provide structure to a novel, giving the author a skeleton for hanging characters, setting, etc on. C. J. Sansom provides yet another example with his novel Dissolution, set in the Tudor period at the height of Cromwell's power, a period I wouldn't normally be particularly interested in.
Sansom manages to work in a fair bit of the politics and history of the time without turning the novel into a history lesson. More interesting to me, though, was his central character, Matthew Shardlake. Shardlake is a reformer, somewhat liberal by the standards of the time, but Sansom resists the urge to put a 21st century person into the reign of Henry VIII. Shardlake's attitudes toward class and religion are pretty regressive, and he's also willfully blind to Cromwell's abuses. One could easily imagine a version of this novel with Shardlake as the villain of the piece.
My one quibble with the novel is one I have with many historical novels -- Sansom ends up dragging in extraneous historical characters (other than Cromwell, who is important to the novel), where it feels they don't necessarily belong. But it's hard to run down this novel for a pretty frequent failing in the genre.
Sansom manages to work in a fair bit of the politics and history of the time without turning the novel into a history lesson. More interesting to me, though, was his central character, Matthew Shardlake. Shardlake is a reformer, somewhat liberal by the standards of the time, but Sansom resists the urge to put a 21st century person into the reign of Henry VIII. Shardlake's attitudes toward class and religion are pretty regressive, and he's also willfully blind to Cromwell's abuses. One could easily imagine a version of this novel with Shardlake as the villain of the piece.
My one quibble with the novel is one I have with many historical novels -- Sansom ends up dragging in extraneous historical characters (other than Cromwell, who is important to the novel), where it feels they don't necessarily belong. But it's hard to run down this novel for a pretty frequent failing in the genre.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
The Jewel in the Crown
Paul Scott's Jewel in the Crown, the first book of his Raj Quartet, is one of the best novels I've read in a long time. The book circles around the rape of Daphne Manners in the Bibighar Gardens during anti-British rioting. Through this lens Scott looks at India at the end of the British Raj period from a variety of perspectives -- Hindu activists, British policemen, military and civil leaders, etc.
Impressively, none of them comes across as a "type"; instead, each person springs to life as an individual caught up in the affairs of the time. (The closest to an exception is the British military commander, who feels like a creation that Scott didn't have much empathy for -- he's a bit too close to the blustery stereotype we have of that sort of soldier. But even he feels pretty realistic).
I'd go on, but there's no point to just piling on superlatives -- this was a fantastic book, and there isn't much else to say.
Impressively, none of them comes across as a "type"; instead, each person springs to life as an individual caught up in the affairs of the time. (The closest to an exception is the British military commander, who feels like a creation that Scott didn't have much empathy for -- he's a bit too close to the blustery stereotype we have of that sort of soldier. But even he feels pretty realistic).
I'd go on, but there's no point to just piling on superlatives -- this was a fantastic book, and there isn't much else to say.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Sharpe's Prey
Sharpe's Prey seems to exist primarily to fill in the hole between Sharpe's Trafalgar and Sharpe's Rifles. Which doesn't necessarily make it a bad book; rather, it seems a little atypical, in that Sharpe has no particular reason to be in this story. Sharpe ends up in Denmark during the second British bombardment of Copenhagen. This part of history was new to me, and Cornwell does a great job bringing it to life. So from that standpoint, the book is a success.
As a whole, the book is a bit of a downer, which is different from the others. The British come across as the bad guys, even within the system of 18th century morality. And it's as much as stated that Sharpe's love interest will be executed once he's in no position to hear about it. In short, a good novel, just not really what I was expecting.
As a whole, the book is a bit of a downer, which is different from the others. The British come across as the bad guys, even within the system of 18th century morality. And it's as much as stated that Sharpe's love interest will be executed once he's in no position to hear about it. In short, a good novel, just not really what I was expecting.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
The Stress of Her Regard
I last read Tim Powers's The Stress of Her Regard some 20 years ago. I'm re-reading it, fortuitously it turns out, since the sequel just came out last week.
With 20 years under the bridge, it's a bit easier to see this book within the spectrum of Powers's ouevre. For good and for bad, it seems to take many of his usual themes and turn them up to 11. We have a secret history involving more than 10 real historical figures in major and minor roles (more typically Powers works with only a few, and rarely in major roles). Both hero and heroine suffer horrendous bodily damage, and more than once. Powers combines a bunch of disparate mythological references, here as far as apart as vampires, the graiae, the sphinx, and so on.
In all, I think he over-eggs the pudding a bit. In the excellent Last Call, every new revelation feels somehow inevitable, a feeling of "Aha! I should have guessed that it worked that way." Here, it sometimes feels forced -- OK, I get that vampires are disrupted by wooden stakes and silver bullets because the one is a non-conductor and the other is too good a conductor. But why the garlic?
Having said that, this book, while not up to the standards of Last Call, is very good. A number of the set pieces are as good as anything he's ever written (the whole Alp section, the ending, and the beginning in particular). His Byron is manages to be alternately sympathetic and horrible while remaining clearly one consistent character. Even knowing the end, I found the book to be consistently suspenseful, not an easy thing to pull off.
All in all, I'm eagerly looking forward to the new book.
With 20 years under the bridge, it's a bit easier to see this book within the spectrum of Powers's ouevre. For good and for bad, it seems to take many of his usual themes and turn them up to 11. We have a secret history involving more than 10 real historical figures in major and minor roles (more typically Powers works with only a few, and rarely in major roles). Both hero and heroine suffer horrendous bodily damage, and more than once. Powers combines a bunch of disparate mythological references, here as far as apart as vampires, the graiae, the sphinx, and so on.
In all, I think he over-eggs the pudding a bit. In the excellent Last Call, every new revelation feels somehow inevitable, a feeling of "Aha! I should have guessed that it worked that way." Here, it sometimes feels forced -- OK, I get that vampires are disrupted by wooden stakes and silver bullets because the one is a non-conductor and the other is too good a conductor. But why the garlic?
Having said that, this book, while not up to the standards of Last Call, is very good. A number of the set pieces are as good as anything he's ever written (the whole Alp section, the ending, and the beginning in particular). His Byron is manages to be alternately sympathetic and horrible while remaining clearly one consistent character. Even knowing the end, I found the book to be consistently suspenseful, not an easy thing to pull off.
All in all, I'm eagerly looking forward to the new book.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
I've finished Jacob de Zoet and coming to the end of Ghostwritten, so here are some more thoughts on both.
First, Ghostwritten is the more obviously bravura performance. I loved Jacob deZoet, but parts of Ghostwritten took my breath away. But Mitchell is playing post-modernist tricks in deZoet as well. The slave narrative at the beginning of part III and the long poem at the start of chapter 39 are the most obvious examples, but I wonder whether the whole of part II is another. I think part II is the weakest section, with all of hugger-mugger straight out of a Gothic novel (evil monks, crazy death cults, an inescapable monastery), but I wonder to what extent readers are expected to realize that it's a deliberate borrowing, not necessarily to be taken seriously. For that matter, I wonder to what extent a reader should take it seriously at all -- it feels pretty intrusive into the otherwise-realistic flow of the novel.
Second, Mitchell has an amazing ability to inhabit his characters and give us their voices. Again, Ghostwritten is the more obviously virtuosic of the two, but I think that creating a pious man like Jacob without making him a goody-two-shoes is a real achievement, as is the creation of Penhaligon. To me, this is the major thing connecting the two novels -- Mitchell's amazing array of voices.
Third, I'm now a David Mitchell fanboy, and I'm sure I'll be reading his other books in the near future.
First, Ghostwritten is the more obviously bravura performance. I loved Jacob deZoet, but parts of Ghostwritten took my breath away. But Mitchell is playing post-modernist tricks in deZoet as well. The slave narrative at the beginning of part III and the long poem at the start of chapter 39 are the most obvious examples, but I wonder whether the whole of part II is another. I think part II is the weakest section, with all of hugger-mugger straight out of a Gothic novel (evil monks, crazy death cults, an inescapable monastery), but I wonder to what extent readers are expected to realize that it's a deliberate borrowing, not necessarily to be taken seriously. For that matter, I wonder to what extent a reader should take it seriously at all -- it feels pretty intrusive into the otherwise-realistic flow of the novel.
Second, Mitchell has an amazing ability to inhabit his characters and give us their voices. Again, Ghostwritten is the more obviously virtuosic of the two, but I think that creating a pious man like Jacob without making him a goody-two-shoes is a real achievement, as is the creation of Penhaligon. To me, this is the major thing connecting the two novels -- Mitchell's amazing array of voices.
Third, I'm now a David Mitchell fanboy, and I'm sure I'll be reading his other books in the near future.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Thoussand Autumns of Jacob deZoet, Ghostwritten
Due to one thing and another, I'm listening to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob deZoet while reading Ghostwritten, both by David Mitchell. If nothing else, the two books show Mitchell's versatility. Thousand Autumns is a fairly straightforward historical novel about a Dutch trading outpost in Japan in the late 1700s, while Ghostwritten is a loosely linked collection of narratives (each with a very distinct narrator).
I'm less than halfway through either book, so I'm hesitant to give impressions. The third story in Ghostwritten, for example, was radically different from what had come before, and more reversals could easily come. But it's clear that Mitchell has some serious literary chops, and I'm enjoying both books very much.
On a side note, I finished book 23 of the Iliad, coming up now to the big finale. Woohoo, it's been a long journey.
I'm less than halfway through either book, so I'm hesitant to give impressions. The third story in Ghostwritten, for example, was radically different from what had come before, and more reversals could easily come. But it's clear that Mitchell has some serious literary chops, and I'm enjoying both books very much.
On a side note, I finished book 23 of the Iliad, coming up now to the big finale. Woohoo, it's been a long journey.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Holmes on the Range, SPQR III: The Sacrilege
A couple of historical mysteries this time round.
Holmes on the Range is set in 1890s Montana; one of the drovers at a ranch is a devotee of Sherlock Holmes', and applies Holmes' methods to a murder on the ranch. I wanted this to be funnier; Hockensmith's humor tends to the slapstick, and there isn't that much of it. Unfortunately, there isn't much of anything else -- the characters are too thin to carry the novel when the conceit wears thin.
SQPR III is the third story of Decius Caecilius Metellus the younger, as he falls into yet another case based on one of Cicero's orations. Unlike the previous entry, The Catiline Conspiracy, Decius isn't directly involved in the case that historically went to trial. Instead, author Roberts uses the case as a jumping-off point for a conspiracy among what would become the first Triumvirate. That part is a bit dull if you know the actual history, because it's telegraphed miles away. But the rest is a fun light romp through an interesting period of Roman history.
Holmes on the Range is set in 1890s Montana; one of the drovers at a ranch is a devotee of Sherlock Holmes', and applies Holmes' methods to a murder on the ranch. I wanted this to be funnier; Hockensmith's humor tends to the slapstick, and there isn't that much of it. Unfortunately, there isn't much of anything else -- the characters are too thin to carry the novel when the conceit wears thin.
SQPR III is the third story of Decius Caecilius Metellus the younger, as he falls into yet another case based on one of Cicero's orations. Unlike the previous entry, The Catiline Conspiracy, Decius isn't directly involved in the case that historically went to trial. Instead, author Roberts uses the case as a jumping-off point for a conspiracy among what would become the first Triumvirate. That part is a bit dull if you know the actual history, because it's telegraphed miles away. But the rest is a fun light romp through an interesting period of Roman history.
Monday, July 11, 2011
The Prestige (concluded)
I finished The Prestige yesterday. Great book, but the ending was a real let-down. In the end, Priest goes for a cheap scare with a conclusion that doesn't hold up logically. But getting there was a great ride. Yet another example of Lafferty's dictum that stories are better off without their final pages.
Friday, July 8, 2011
The Prestige
I'm most of the way through Christopher Priest's The Prestige, and it's turning out to be an incredible book, pulling off a number of feats.
The main story is about two rival magicians in late 19th century London. Priest chose to tell the story from each man's perspective, first one then the other, in a sort of he-said-she-said model. That kind of story is tricky to pull off, because the second version can often feel repetitive and anti-climactic. Priest avoids that in a couple of ways; for one, the first account is a memoir written in 1900-3, while the second is a diary, so there are many events that are prominent in one but missing in the other. More importantly, as we start seeing the truth behind the facade of the second magician's life, the tension is increased by knowing some of what's going to happen.
The major theme of this story is the truth behind a facade. Priest's narrators remind us several times that the truth is a small thing compared to the illusion, and yet each fails to apply that lesson to the way they he sees his rival.
On a side note, I'm a bit of an enthusiast about stage magic, and it feels to me like Priest has really done his homework. His taxonomy of the 6 types of trick is one that I've seen elsewhere, his magicians talk properly about misdirection, and so on. He also uses his time period very effectively -- this is a novel that couldn't work if transported more than a few years in either direction.
The main story is about two rival magicians in late 19th century London. Priest chose to tell the story from each man's perspective, first one then the other, in a sort of he-said-she-said model. That kind of story is tricky to pull off, because the second version can often feel repetitive and anti-climactic. Priest avoids that in a couple of ways; for one, the first account is a memoir written in 1900-3, while the second is a diary, so there are many events that are prominent in one but missing in the other. More importantly, as we start seeing the truth behind the facade of the second magician's life, the tension is increased by knowing some of what's going to happen.
The major theme of this story is the truth behind a facade. Priest's narrators remind us several times that the truth is a small thing compared to the illusion, and yet each fails to apply that lesson to the way they he sees his rival.
On a side note, I'm a bit of an enthusiast about stage magic, and it feels to me like Priest has really done his homework. His taxonomy of the 6 types of trick is one that I've seen elsewhere, his magicians talk properly about misdirection, and so on. He also uses his time period very effectively -- this is a novel that couldn't work if transported more than a few years in either direction.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Sharpe's Trafalgar
In Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe ends up at the Battle of Trafalgar, where (as Cornwell himself admits) he has no business. So, on the one hand, the book is a great look at the famous battle, letting the reader really feel like he might have been there. On the other hand, it's not a really good Sharpe book, because Sharpe himself has almost no role to play; his expertise is on the ground, not ship battles.
There's a romance between Sharpe and noble-born lady which was OK, but also seemed to be out of character for Sharpe; he hasn't up till now seemed like the kind to fall distractedly head-over-heels for someone the way he seems to here, to the point where he doesn't notice the plotting of the antagonists.
There's a romance between Sharpe and noble-born lady which was OK, but also seemed to be out of character for Sharpe; he hasn't up till now seemed like the kind to fall distractedly head-over-heels for someone the way he seems to here, to the point where he doesn't notice the plotting of the antagonists.
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.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Venus in Copper, Academ's Fury
It's been a busy couple of weeks, so not much time for reading.
Following up The Catiline Conspiracy, I decided to try a Roman mystery by a different author, Lindsey David. Her novels are set a little bit later, in the time of Vespasian, but it's still the time of the high Roman Empire. Overall, the book didn't do anything for me. Davis has obviously done her research; there are a lot of details about Roman food, housing, and so on. But the characters felt like modern Britons playing in a meticulously detailed set -- they never felt to me like people from another, somewhat alien, culture.
I haven't finished Jim Butcher's Academ's Fury yet, but it's another fun popcorn novel. Lots of excitement and heart-stopping moments, and Butcher is just good enough to keep his plot under control. He'll never win any writing prizes, but he achieves his goal, and that's more than can be said of many books.
Following up The Catiline Conspiracy, I decided to try a Roman mystery by a different author, Lindsey David. Her novels are set a little bit later, in the time of Vespasian, but it's still the time of the high Roman Empire. Overall, the book didn't do anything for me. Davis has obviously done her research; there are a lot of details about Roman food, housing, and so on. But the characters felt like modern Britons playing in a meticulously detailed set -- they never felt to me like people from another, somewhat alien, culture.
I haven't finished Jim Butcher's Academ's Fury yet, but it's another fun popcorn novel. Lots of excitement and heart-stopping moments, and Butcher is just good enough to keep his plot under control. He'll never win any writing prizes, but he achieves his goal, and that's more than can be said of many books.
Friday, July 9, 2010
The Fall of Rome, In the Woods, The Catiline Conspiracy
Tana French breaks one of the mystery genre's prime conventions in In the Woods, which is that murders must be solved, even cold cases from twenty years ago. Her central character, Adam Ryan, was playing in the woods with two friends who disappeared, leaving him behind. He was traumatized by the experience, and, when he was found two days later, had lost all memory of the event.
Flash forward twenty years, and Adam is an investigator in the murder squad. When a child is murdered near the same woods that Adam's friends disappeared from, he and his partner dive into the investigation and he becomes quickly convinced that there's a connection to the old case. In the end, though, there isn't actually a connection, and Adam descends into a breakdown; in fact, the old case is never resolved, and Adam is left in disgrace.
French has left us some ambiguous clues to the first case, and I saw some threads where readers had some ingenious solutions to the case, but I think that they're missing the point. The novel is more of an existential statement -- some mysteries are truly insoluble, particularly to the people most tied up in them. Adam is in a sort of limbo; he consciously wants to never think about the old events (he tells us so many, many times), but his subconscious drives him to solve the mystery. In the end, the contradiction is too great, and he runs away from every attempt to actually resolve his issues.
Jenna bought me R. A. Lafferty's The Fall of Rome, just about the only one of his books I don't own. It's an interesting read from a number of perspectives. The subject matter itself is moderately interesting, and Lafferty is a lively writer, making it easier to keep track of the many personages who wander through the history. But it's also interesting as a lens through which to view Lafferty's fiction. He has the same themes; the forces of disorder are constantly nibbling at the edges of established order, and will eventually bring it down. He's got the same ideas of archetypes recurring again and again (in Fall, one of the Goths is Cain, waiting to swoop in and destroy his brother and the Roman empire).
His other typical touches work well with a history from this period. One of the oddities of Lafferty's style is a third-person seemingly-omniscient narrator who will nevertheless flat-out tell you that things couldn't have happened the way he just told you they did. Here, he does something similar -- he'll quote a source, then tell you it makes no sense, but after all the source was there and we weren't.
From the fall of the Empire, I jumped back to just before its start, in John Maddox Roberts's Catiline Conspiracy, a historical mystery set at the time of the Catiline Conspiracy (who'da thunk it?). Roberts's protagonist, a low-level noble named Decius Metellus, is an engaging narrator, and the minor characters are enjoyable. But he has a fundamental problem with fictionalizing the conspiracy -- in the end, the conspirators weren't that competent (which is why Cicero was able to stop them so easily). So he adds in a sort of super-conspiracy, of which Catiline was just the most visible part, and I found it to be not so convincing. I enjoy the narration, but Roberts is a little too tied-down by the real history, so I may just jump ahead a couple of books -- the next one goes from a real case that Cicero tried, but after that he has Decius working on cases too minor to be part of the historical record.
Flash forward twenty years, and Adam is an investigator in the murder squad. When a child is murdered near the same woods that Adam's friends disappeared from, he and his partner dive into the investigation and he becomes quickly convinced that there's a connection to the old case. In the end, though, there isn't actually a connection, and Adam descends into a breakdown; in fact, the old case is never resolved, and Adam is left in disgrace.
French has left us some ambiguous clues to the first case, and I saw some threads where readers had some ingenious solutions to the case, but I think that they're missing the point. The novel is more of an existential statement -- some mysteries are truly insoluble, particularly to the people most tied up in them. Adam is in a sort of limbo; he consciously wants to never think about the old events (he tells us so many, many times), but his subconscious drives him to solve the mystery. In the end, the contradiction is too great, and he runs away from every attempt to actually resolve his issues.
Jenna bought me R. A. Lafferty's The Fall of Rome, just about the only one of his books I don't own. It's an interesting read from a number of perspectives. The subject matter itself is moderately interesting, and Lafferty is a lively writer, making it easier to keep track of the many personages who wander through the history. But it's also interesting as a lens through which to view Lafferty's fiction. He has the same themes; the forces of disorder are constantly nibbling at the edges of established order, and will eventually bring it down. He's got the same ideas of archetypes recurring again and again (in Fall, one of the Goths is Cain, waiting to swoop in and destroy his brother and the Roman empire).
His other typical touches work well with a history from this period. One of the oddities of Lafferty's style is a third-person seemingly-omniscient narrator who will nevertheless flat-out tell you that things couldn't have happened the way he just told you they did. Here, he does something similar -- he'll quote a source, then tell you it makes no sense, but after all the source was there and we weren't.
From the fall of the Empire, I jumped back to just before its start, in John Maddox Roberts's Catiline Conspiracy, a historical mystery set at the time of the Catiline Conspiracy (who'da thunk it?). Roberts's protagonist, a low-level noble named Decius Metellus, is an engaging narrator, and the minor characters are enjoyable. But he has a fundamental problem with fictionalizing the conspiracy -- in the end, the conspirators weren't that competent (which is why Cicero was able to stop them so easily). So he adds in a sort of super-conspiracy, of which Catiline was just the most visible part, and I found it to be not so convincing. I enjoy the narration, but Roberts is a little too tied-down by the real history, so I may just jump ahead a couple of books -- the next one goes from a real case that Cicero tried, but after that he has Decius working on cases too minor to be part of the historical record.
Friday, April 16, 2010
SPQR I: The King's Gambit, Metamorphoses
SPQR is a fun series (or at least the first book is fun) about a detective-equivalent in ancient Rome. John Maddox Roberts seems to know his history pretty well, even to the extent that one could probably place the exact year in which this book is set (13 years before Caesar's assassination, a couple of years before the Catiline conspiracy). It's also subject to the usual problems in these novels -- Decius Septimus, the protagonist, manages to run into most of the major historical figures of the period, as well as a few minor ones (so Julius Caesar appears in a walk-on, as do Cicero, Catiline, and Pompey. Claudis Pulcher and his sister have bigger roles, and so on). Also, Roberts occasionally likes to show off his research in pointless asides, like the one where he tells us about Cicero's secretary inventing shorthand. Moderately cool if you didn't already know, I suppose, but there's no reason to think that Decius the character would care about it.
Having made those complaints, I must say it was a fun novel, and I'd probably read another in the series.
I also finished Metamorphoses book 5. I think I'll take a break from that and switch over to the Aeneid for a while.
Having made those complaints, I must say it was a fun novel, and I'd probably read another in the series.
I also finished Metamorphoses book 5. I think I'll take a break from that and switch over to the Aeneid for a while.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Sharpe's Tiger, Pictures of Perfection, Lizardmen Island, The Dead Yard
After evoking Dickens in Recalled to Life, Reginald Hill moves on to Austen in Pictures of Perfection. Considered purely as a novel, Pictures is more successful. As much as I enjoyed Recalled to Life, Hill had to stretch a bit to get Dalziel to New York, whereas Pictures is set very firmly in Yorkshire. Through the course of the novel, we hear about Enscombe's traditions and history, and it's largely a very self-contained world. By the end of the novel, even as Enscombe goes through significant changes, none of them will impinge on the outside world -- Dalziel leaves with no arrests to make, or even any crimes to report; Pascoe's life with Ellie is left unchanged. Instead, Hill focuses on village life, using Sgt Wield as a catalyst to speed up events, and as our window into this insular village.
On the other hand, Hill invites comparisons to Austen -- every epigraph comes from her letters, the opening line is a pastiche of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, and, of course, the plot depends on entailments and the descent of property, which was a mainstay of her work. Unfortunately, I think that Hill is less successful here. His natural bent is more Dickensian than Austenian, tending more to broad humor. The ending, in which everything is resolved neatly by sudden legal maneuvering, is a great example of writing that's more Dickens than Austen.
Still, when I put the Austen allusions out of my head, I feel that this is one of the strongest entries in the Dalziel/Pascoe series.
On a totally different tack, I've been tackling Bernard Cornwell's "Richard Sharpe" series. Normally, I like to read a series chronologically in the order they were published, but it's next to impossible to find a list like that for Sharpe (and I don't feel like comparing (c) dates on each book), so I've gone to the book that's set the earliest, Sharpe's Tiger, even though it was written 17th or something. Sharpe is a private in the British Army during the conquest of India, serving under Colonel Wellsley (later the Duke of Wellington). By this point in his writing, Cornwell obviously has a good grasp on who Sharpe is, and he's presented vividly -- very smart, loyal to his friends, and not particularly scrupulous about his methods.
More interesting than Sharpe himself, though, is the setting. Cornwell has obviously done a slew of research into the period, and it's a great glimpse into history. He has a little historical note at the end about which characters and events are real (which is also forthright about the Cornwell's making up the central event of the battle of Seringpatam), and many of the real ones are so well-integrated into the story that I'd thought they were his own inventions.
I've also been reading a Japanese collection of mystery stories, and I've just finished the second one, about a man and his wife who are trapped by aboriginal "lizard men" on an unexplored island. It's a great example of how setting and humor can overcome a dismal plot. The man and his wife are to be sacrificed to the lizard woman goddess (there's an untranslatable pun in there), but when her cave door is opened, it turns out she's dead and mummified. Shock all around, and the man's wife volunteers to find the killer in exchange for their freedom. The actual details of the solution are pretty dumb (as I think most locked-room mysteries are), but I enjoyed the story anyway, because the narrator's voice is so funny -- he's completely bemused by the whole thing, and it's played very deadpan.
The first story was not so good, because it also depended on a silly plot device (in that case, a hotel in Alaska built on an iceberg which breaks away from the mainland, so the narrator's sense of direction is all screwed up because the sun is coming in from the wrong side(!). I kid you not). I really hope that the third gets away from the trick plots -- even when it's okay, like in the lizardmen story, it'd be better if the plot were stronger.
I've also started listening to Adrian McKinty's The Dead Yard. I'm about a quarter of the way in, and I gather from the foreshadowing that it's going to turn out tragic, but for now I'm mostly finding it funny. Early on, Michael is recruited by MI6 for a hair-brained attempt to infiltrate a splinter IRA cell, and ends up on the scene of a failed assassination attempt. I don't know if McKinty intended it to be funny, but I could only think of that line that "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." There was a tense shoot-out scene in the first book, Dead I Well May Be, and here we have one assassin with a broken weapon and another whose shots go wildly off into the walls, while Michael and Kit make their escape.
So far, I'm enjoying the book -- Michael's turns of phrase are as funny as ever, and I'm enjoying his interaction with Kit. Looking forward to hearing the rest of the book. (Though Doyle can't do an American accent :-( ).
On a personal note, it was amusing for me to note that Michael arrives in Boston on the same month and year that I returned to Boston, although to rather different fates...
On the other hand, Hill invites comparisons to Austen -- every epigraph comes from her letters, the opening line is a pastiche of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, and, of course, the plot depends on entailments and the descent of property, which was a mainstay of her work. Unfortunately, I think that Hill is less successful here. His natural bent is more Dickensian than Austenian, tending more to broad humor. The ending, in which everything is resolved neatly by sudden legal maneuvering, is a great example of writing that's more Dickens than Austen.
Still, when I put the Austen allusions out of my head, I feel that this is one of the strongest entries in the Dalziel/Pascoe series.
On a totally different tack, I've been tackling Bernard Cornwell's "Richard Sharpe" series. Normally, I like to read a series chronologically in the order they were published, but it's next to impossible to find a list like that for Sharpe (and I don't feel like comparing (c) dates on each book), so I've gone to the book that's set the earliest, Sharpe's Tiger, even though it was written 17th or something. Sharpe is a private in the British Army during the conquest of India, serving under Colonel Wellsley (later the Duke of Wellington). By this point in his writing, Cornwell obviously has a good grasp on who Sharpe is, and he's presented vividly -- very smart, loyal to his friends, and not particularly scrupulous about his methods.
More interesting than Sharpe himself, though, is the setting. Cornwell has obviously done a slew of research into the period, and it's a great glimpse into history. He has a little historical note at the end about which characters and events are real (which is also forthright about the Cornwell's making up the central event of the battle of Seringpatam), and many of the real ones are so well-integrated into the story that I'd thought they were his own inventions.
I've also been reading a Japanese collection of mystery stories, and I've just finished the second one, about a man and his wife who are trapped by aboriginal "lizard men" on an unexplored island. It's a great example of how setting and humor can overcome a dismal plot. The man and his wife are to be sacrificed to the lizard woman goddess (there's an untranslatable pun in there), but when her cave door is opened, it turns out she's dead and mummified. Shock all around, and the man's wife volunteers to find the killer in exchange for their freedom. The actual details of the solution are pretty dumb (as I think most locked-room mysteries are), but I enjoyed the story anyway, because the narrator's voice is so funny -- he's completely bemused by the whole thing, and it's played very deadpan.
The first story was not so good, because it also depended on a silly plot device (in that case, a hotel in Alaska built on an iceberg which breaks away from the mainland, so the narrator's sense of direction is all screwed up because the sun is coming in from the wrong side(!). I kid you not). I really hope that the third gets away from the trick plots -- even when it's okay, like in the lizardmen story, it'd be better if the plot were stronger.
I've also started listening to Adrian McKinty's The Dead Yard. I'm about a quarter of the way in, and I gather from the foreshadowing that it's going to turn out tragic, but for now I'm mostly finding it funny. Early on, Michael is recruited by MI6 for a hair-brained attempt to infiltrate a splinter IRA cell, and ends up on the scene of a failed assassination attempt. I don't know if McKinty intended it to be funny, but I could only think of that line that "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." There was a tense shoot-out scene in the first book, Dead I Well May Be, and here we have one assassin with a broken weapon and another whose shots go wildly off into the walls, while Michael and Kit make their escape.
So far, I'm enjoying the book -- Michael's turns of phrase are as funny as ever, and I'm enjoying his interaction with Kit. Looking forward to hearing the rest of the book. (Though Doyle can't do an American accent :-( ).
On a personal note, it was amusing for me to note that Michael arrives in Boston on the same month and year that I returned to Boston, although to rather different fates...
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
The Shape of Water, Ivanhoe
With one thing and another, I had a fair amount of time for reading over the New Year break. I've decided to split my posting into a few parts, because otherwise it will become one long tl;dr.
It took longer than I thought to finish Ivanhoe, since I didn't have much time for listening, but I finished it yesterday morning, and I thought it ended quite well. The ending has come in for some criticism for being pretty unromantic, with Ivanhoe marrying Lady Rowena and Rebecca going off to Spain, but I'm not sure that's true or even much of a criticism.
We've seen since the beginning that Ivanhoe is in love with Rowena and that the feeling is mutual. The idea that he would instead marry Rebecca only comes about, I think, because Rebecca ends up being such a stronger character than the relatively colorless Rowena -- Scott doesn't devote much time to Rowena, because we already know that Ivanhoe will marry her if he can, whereas it almost feels like he (Scott) became more attached to Rebecca as the story continues.
One other thing that struck me was Scott's portrayal of Richard. He comes across as a hail-fellow-well-met, and I was grousing a bit, because of course Richard was actually a terrible king, but then Scott threw in little gibes about how it was Richard's love of riding around like a knight errant and other sorts of romantic chivalry that made his rule such a mess -- he'd rather do those things than spend time building up institutions and the life of the people -- and I thought it was a good way to make Richard heroic in the story while acknowledging his less than stellar kingship.
I also started a new detective series by Andrea Camilleri, this one set in Sicily. The Shape of Water was a wonderful novel in every way except for the actual detective parts. The characters all seemed to jump off the page, the story was humorous in the right places, Montalban, the lead character, is very appealing, and so on. The only problem is that all his detecting doesn't actually lead anywhere; everything proceeds pretty much as if he weren't there. The victim's nephew exacts revenge on the murderer, then commits suicide, end of story. There's never a role for Montalban to do anything.
Still, the characters and setting were so interesting I'm looking forward to trying to next one in the series, hoping that Camilleri's plotting has improved.
It took longer than I thought to finish Ivanhoe, since I didn't have much time for listening, but I finished it yesterday morning, and I thought it ended quite well. The ending has come in for some criticism for being pretty unromantic, with Ivanhoe marrying Lady Rowena and Rebecca going off to Spain, but I'm not sure that's true or even much of a criticism.
We've seen since the beginning that Ivanhoe is in love with Rowena and that the feeling is mutual. The idea that he would instead marry Rebecca only comes about, I think, because Rebecca ends up being such a stronger character than the relatively colorless Rowena -- Scott doesn't devote much time to Rowena, because we already know that Ivanhoe will marry her if he can, whereas it almost feels like he (Scott) became more attached to Rebecca as the story continues.
One other thing that struck me was Scott's portrayal of Richard. He comes across as a hail-fellow-well-met, and I was grousing a bit, because of course Richard was actually a terrible king, but then Scott threw in little gibes about how it was Richard's love of riding around like a knight errant and other sorts of romantic chivalry that made his rule such a mess -- he'd rather do those things than spend time building up institutions and the life of the people -- and I thought it was a good way to make Richard heroic in the story while acknowledging his less than stellar kingship.
I also started a new detective series by Andrea Camilleri, this one set in Sicily. The Shape of Water was a wonderful novel in every way except for the actual detective parts. The characters all seemed to jump off the page, the story was humorous in the right places, Montalban, the lead character, is very appealing, and so on. The only problem is that all his detecting doesn't actually lead anywhere; everything proceeds pretty much as if he weren't there. The victim's nephew exacts revenge on the murderer, then commits suicide, end of story. There's never a role for Montalban to do anything.
Still, the characters and setting were so interesting I'm looking forward to trying to next one in the series, hoping that Camilleri's plotting has improved.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
The Cricus of Dr Lao, Blindsight, Ivanhoe, Iliad
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Stone Diaries, Sharpe's Triumph
While I was at my parents this weekend, I read The Stone Diaries on Jenna's recommendation.
The writing was definitely beautiful, and Shields rings the changes on the different styles of writing. One section is epistolary, one is written from the points of view of many characters, and so on. On the other hand, it was all in the service of a void.
I felt like the point of the novel is the difficulty people have understanding each other, or even themselves. To illustrate this idea, Shields very rarely gives us any insight into her main character, but only gives us the fragmentary impressions of others (it's telling, for example, that the above-mentioned epistolary section contains no letters by the main character, only letters to her and about her). I think that having a vacuum at the center can be done (though no examples spring to mind right now), but Daisy, the main character, is too slender a reed to stand up to the task.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the passive Daisy is Richard Sharpe, hero of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Triumph. Set during the British conquest of India, the novel is about Richard Sharpe's rise from sergeant to ensign, which was apparently a difficult feat in those times (ensigns were the lowest rank of officer, and getting promoted to that rank allowed a man to become a gentleman). It's one of those historical novels where the parts that are hardest to believe are also the most accurate -- in this case, Sharpe is involved in the battle of Assaye, in which 10,000 British troops beat a force 5 times their size and with superior firepower.
It was a fast-paced read and gave me a feel for the time and place -- in the end, that's what I was looking for, and I'm sure I'll be reading more of Sharpe's adventures in the near future.
The writing was definitely beautiful, and Shields rings the changes on the different styles of writing. One section is epistolary, one is written from the points of view of many characters, and so on. On the other hand, it was all in the service of a void.
I felt like the point of the novel is the difficulty people have understanding each other, or even themselves. To illustrate this idea, Shields very rarely gives us any insight into her main character, but only gives us the fragmentary impressions of others (it's telling, for example, that the above-mentioned epistolary section contains no letters by the main character, only letters to her and about her). I think that having a vacuum at the center can be done (though no examples spring to mind right now), but Daisy, the main character, is too slender a reed to stand up to the task.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the passive Daisy is Richard Sharpe, hero of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Triumph. Set during the British conquest of India, the novel is about Richard Sharpe's rise from sergeant to ensign, which was apparently a difficult feat in those times (ensigns were the lowest rank of officer, and getting promoted to that rank allowed a man to become a gentleman). It's one of those historical novels where the parts that are hardest to believe are also the most accurate -- in this case, Sharpe is involved in the battle of Assaye, in which 10,000 British troops beat a force 5 times their size and with superior firepower.
It was a fast-paced read and gave me a feel for the time and place -- in the end, that's what I was looking for, and I'm sure I'll be reading more of Sharpe's adventures in the near future.
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