On the flight home, I read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned. It's hard to know what to think about it. On the plus side, some of the writing is really beautiful or mordantly funny. But the main characters are so unpleasant, and their problems so much of their own making, that it's hard to sympathize with their downfall.
But there's also the additional nuance that (to some extent), their marriage is a fictionalization of F. Scott and Zelda's own marriage. I think it's hard not to feel a sense that the author lived some of what he's writing. (I actually had no idea before I started reading the book that some of it was based on reality, but after I got this feeling, I looked up some biographical details, and it turned out my intuition was right). I think that sense of authenticity is really part of what makes the novel work.
Overall, I think it's a lesser work compared to The Great Gatsby. Because the Patches are so unpleasant, unredeemed by any self-awareness or wish to improve their situation, they don't have the tragic depth that Gatsby has in his chase after Daisy Buchanan.
I also read Kipling's The Man who Would be King on the flight. It was a bit of a surprise to me; I've always associated Kipling with the whole Britishers-bringing-civilization-to-the-natives thing, but this story was more nuanced than that. The three men who cross over the border carrying weapons into Afghanistan are not bringing civilization, they're bringing a more efficient way to make war. I'd write more, but I'm still jet-lagged from the trip -- maybe I'll continue when I tackle some of the other books I read recently
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Heaven's Prisoners, Amir Hamza, Apprentice Assassin
I was on vacation during the last two weeks, so I managed to cram in a lot of books -- always one of the side benefits of going on a trip.
The first book I polished off was Heaven's Prisoners, the second Dave Robicheaux book. I hadn't been really impressed with the first one, because it felt like there was a lot of politics about American involvement in South America shoehorned in where it didn't really fit, but I'd decided to go on to the next one, because in general Burke is a very solid writer (I've really enjoyed the Billy Bob Holland novels). This one was a tremendous improvement -- there's still a connection to politics (US immigration and drug policy), but it felt more integral to the story, and at the same time took up much less space.
I then began The Adventures of Amir Hamza, which is something between a long story and a collection of stories about Muhammad's uncle, who seems to have become this epic figure in Islamic folk stories, with a whole cycle of stories about his exploits. As a collection of folk stories, it's obviously going to be pretty episodic (though there is an over-arching story-line), but I'm not finding it to be too repetitive over-all, and I'm enjoying it much more than the Monkey King stories. I think it harms the experience of a book like this to read it straight through -- the repetition becomes more glaringly obvious -- so I'm reading a couple of chapters a day.
The New York Times Book Review had called Hamza a combination of Iliad and Odyssey (which is what intrigued me into reading it), and I think that does a disservice to both traditions. The two Greek poems are noted for their unity, their very composed nature. Hamza is much more digressive, and it lacks the Greek poems' tragic awareness. But if we look at it on its own terms, it's often very funny, with surprisingly poetic turns of phrase (a character wipes away tears with "the handkerchief of gentle words", for example).
Amar, the trickster friend of Hamza's, constantly upstages the nominal hero, and quickly became the kids' favorite character (I've been telling them bits of the story).
Amazon gives away some kindle books for free on a semi-regular basis, and one of the first was Robin Hobbs's Apprentice Assassin. I've been hearing good things about Robin Hobb for years, but her fantasies always looked a bit generic to me, so I was hesitant to give them a try. The free book proved irresistible, so I dived in. Ultimately, I think she is a good writer, and the fantasy setting isn't completely generic, but it never really grabbed me either. I think she can write some good solid characters, but I could never quite get myself to care about them (the most interesting character, I felt, was the court fool, and he remains an enigma throughout).
The first book I polished off was Heaven's Prisoners, the second Dave Robicheaux book. I hadn't been really impressed with the first one, because it felt like there was a lot of politics about American involvement in South America shoehorned in where it didn't really fit, but I'd decided to go on to the next one, because in general Burke is a very solid writer (I've really enjoyed the Billy Bob Holland novels). This one was a tremendous improvement -- there's still a connection to politics (US immigration and drug policy), but it felt more integral to the story, and at the same time took up much less space.
I then began The Adventures of Amir Hamza, which is something between a long story and a collection of stories about Muhammad's uncle, who seems to have become this epic figure in Islamic folk stories, with a whole cycle of stories about his exploits. As a collection of folk stories, it's obviously going to be pretty episodic (though there is an over-arching story-line), but I'm not finding it to be too repetitive over-all, and I'm enjoying it much more than the Monkey King stories. I think it harms the experience of a book like this to read it straight through -- the repetition becomes more glaringly obvious -- so I'm reading a couple of chapters a day.
The New York Times Book Review had called Hamza a combination of Iliad and Odyssey (which is what intrigued me into reading it), and I think that does a disservice to both traditions. The two Greek poems are noted for their unity, their very composed nature. Hamza is much more digressive, and it lacks the Greek poems' tragic awareness. But if we look at it on its own terms, it's often very funny, with surprisingly poetic turns of phrase (a character wipes away tears with "the handkerchief of gentle words", for example).
Amar, the trickster friend of Hamza's, constantly upstages the nominal hero, and quickly became the kids' favorite character (I've been telling them bits of the story).
Amazon gives away some kindle books for free on a semi-regular basis, and one of the first was Robin Hobbs's Apprentice Assassin. I've been hearing good things about Robin Hobb for years, but her fantasies always looked a bit generic to me, so I was hesitant to give them a try. The free book proved irresistible, so I dived in. Ultimately, I think she is a good writer, and the fantasy setting isn't completely generic, but it never really grabbed me either. I think she can write some good solid characters, but I could never quite get myself to care about them (the most interesting character, I felt, was the court fool, and he remains an enigma throughout).
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Elirc, stealer of Souls
Elric: The Stealer of Souls is a collection of early Elric stories by Michael Moorcock.
This is a hard volume to write about. If you have already read some Elric stories, this is an enjoyable way to see the evolution of the character. The historical material that's collected here is really great, including a fanzine story from early on, some musings by Moorcock that he wrote at the time, and so on. It's a great way to see Moorcock's evolution as a writer -- the early stories are very much more purple than the later ones, Elric soliloquizes more about an unfair fate, the symbolism is more transparent, and so on.
Sadly, those exact things make this a hard book to recommend to non-fans. The unfortunate fact is that the early Elric stories aren't nearly as good as the later ones, and the book only starts to come together in the second half. If you're new to Elric, it may be better to read the novels first, or maybe start with the second volume of this series. Although I've rated this book 4 stars, if you're not already a fan (or aren't interested in the background of the stories), I'd have to say 2 1/2 stars is more correct.
This is a hard volume to write about. If you have already read some Elric stories, this is an enjoyable way to see the evolution of the character. The historical material that's collected here is really great, including a fanzine story from early on, some musings by Moorcock that he wrote at the time, and so on. It's a great way to see Moorcock's evolution as a writer -- the early stories are very much more purple than the later ones, Elric soliloquizes more about an unfair fate, the symbolism is more transparent, and so on.
Sadly, those exact things make this a hard book to recommend to non-fans. The unfortunate fact is that the early Elric stories aren't nearly as good as the later ones, and the book only starts to come together in the second half. If you're new to Elric, it may be better to read the novels first, or maybe start with the second volume of this series. Although I've rated this book 4 stars, if you're not already a fan (or aren't interested in the background of the stories), I'd have to say 2 1/2 stars is more correct.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Nicholas Nickleby, A Most Wanted Man
I recently finished listening to Nicholas Nickleby and finished reading le Carre's A Most Wanted Man.
I decided to give Nicholas Nickleby a try because I didn't like Dickens back in high school, and I thought it was worth giving him another shot. I chose Nicholas Nickleby more-or-less at random, but it turned out to be a fantastic choice. It displayed all of Dickens's great strengths, as well as his typical faults, and I finally got over my dislike of Dickens.
Dickens's faults, I think, fall into two categories -- those that come about because he's writing in an episodic manner and those that are inherent to all his writing. In the former category you have things like the incredible coincidences he sometimes resorts to in order to get his plot back on course -- it's amazing how often the same group of 10 people keep randomly falling over each other in London. On a related note, he needs to sometimes pull props out of his hat (like the secret letter that reveals that heroine of the story is actually a rich heiress), because he wants to end the story now and doesn't have another way for her to end up with money. Finally, there are episodes that go nowhere, like when he has all the characters sit around the fire swapping old legends for two chapters -- I think he just didn't know what to do with them yet, and was sort of vamping until inspiration could strike.
In the latter category, faults that are inherent to his writing, I'd have to say that he paints his characters with a very broad brush. You instantly know who's good and bad, and people almost never switch from one side to the other. I know some people would put the sentimentality in here, but Nicholas Nickleby doesn't really display that side of Dickens's writing very much, so I'll have to reserve judgment.
Although these faults should be pretty damning, I found myself tremendously enjoying the book anwyay. For one thing, Dickens's wit carried me through a lot of spots where the plot was running thin. For instance, when Nicholas tries to get a job as a politician's secretary, the job's duties were very funny. The long sequence where Nicholas joins an acting troupe was very funny, even as though it ended up having a negligible effect on the plot.
And that brings me to Dickens's other great strength -- the interaction between the characters. Although the characters themselves are painted with a broad brush (the simple farmer, the nasty schoolmaster, the simpleton, etc), Dickens puts them through endlessly entertaining combinations, playing them off against each other. So even though, say, Nicholas and John the farmer are not very interesting in themselves, their scenes together are great. Throw the schoolmaster and his daughter into the scene and you end up with a great set-piece.
All in all, I think I'll be reading more Dickens in the near future.
Unfortunately, I can't be saying the same about John Le Carre. After my disappointment with a couple of his books several years ago, I relunctantly took him off my reading list. Then a recent review in The New York Times Book Review said that A Most Wanted Man was le Carre's return to his writing style in the good old days, so I decided to give it a try.
Normally, le Carre's strengths are the inverse of Dickens's weaknesses I talked about above. His best novels have intricate plots (but never overwhelming) with well-wrought characters acting in them. (Aside from the obvious George Smiley, think of the main characters in The Looking Glass War or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold). Sadly, A Most Wanted Man had neither.
The set-up is promising enough -- a young Chechnyan man sneaks into Germany, claiming to be the heir to a fortune in money stashed in a bank. The secret services clash, undecided over whether to arrest him immediately or use him to track down Muslim extremists. And is this young man what he seems to be?
Unfortunately, the whole work ends up being driven by le Carre's ideological cause du jour. In this case, he wants to tackle anti-immigrant feeling, and so he loses sight of the two sides of the question. Even though I agree with le Carre's viewpoint, he used to be better at acknowledging that there are two sides to every important policy debate, and the knaves and fools aren't all on one side with the angels on the other. His earlier novels derive their power from characters being forced to sacrifice one principle to uphold another, and from le Carre's implicitly asking whether the game is worth the candle.
Secondly, his anti-Americanism completely ruins the ending. He introduces a CIA officer late in the game who makes Dick Cheney look like a moderate and who ends up driving all the action. His anti-Americanism has always been there -- the "Cousins" in the earlier novels are depicted as gadet-happy, without the subtley that MI5 prides itself on. But this worked better when the Americans were off-stage, affecting the story by their presence but never entering directly.
I decided to give Nicholas Nickleby a try because I didn't like Dickens back in high school, and I thought it was worth giving him another shot. I chose Nicholas Nickleby more-or-less at random, but it turned out to be a fantastic choice. It displayed all of Dickens's great strengths, as well as his typical faults, and I finally got over my dislike of Dickens.
Dickens's faults, I think, fall into two categories -- those that come about because he's writing in an episodic manner and those that are inherent to all his writing. In the former category you have things like the incredible coincidences he sometimes resorts to in order to get his plot back on course -- it's amazing how often the same group of 10 people keep randomly falling over each other in London. On a related note, he needs to sometimes pull props out of his hat (like the secret letter that reveals that heroine of the story is actually a rich heiress), because he wants to end the story now and doesn't have another way for her to end up with money. Finally, there are episodes that go nowhere, like when he has all the characters sit around the fire swapping old legends for two chapters -- I think he just didn't know what to do with them yet, and was sort of vamping until inspiration could strike.
In the latter category, faults that are inherent to his writing, I'd have to say that he paints his characters with a very broad brush. You instantly know who's good and bad, and people almost never switch from one side to the other. I know some people would put the sentimentality in here, but Nicholas Nickleby doesn't really display that side of Dickens's writing very much, so I'll have to reserve judgment.
Although these faults should be pretty damning, I found myself tremendously enjoying the book anwyay. For one thing, Dickens's wit carried me through a lot of spots where the plot was running thin. For instance, when Nicholas tries to get a job as a politician's secretary, the job's duties were very funny. The long sequence where Nicholas joins an acting troupe was very funny, even as though it ended up having a negligible effect on the plot.
And that brings me to Dickens's other great strength -- the interaction between the characters. Although the characters themselves are painted with a broad brush (the simple farmer, the nasty schoolmaster, the simpleton, etc), Dickens puts them through endlessly entertaining combinations, playing them off against each other. So even though, say, Nicholas and John the farmer are not very interesting in themselves, their scenes together are great. Throw the schoolmaster and his daughter into the scene and you end up with a great set-piece.
All in all, I think I'll be reading more Dickens in the near future.
Unfortunately, I can't be saying the same about John Le Carre. After my disappointment with a couple of his books several years ago, I relunctantly took him off my reading list. Then a recent review in The New York Times Book Review said that A Most Wanted Man was le Carre's return to his writing style in the good old days, so I decided to give it a try.
Normally, le Carre's strengths are the inverse of Dickens's weaknesses I talked about above. His best novels have intricate plots (but never overwhelming) with well-wrought characters acting in them. (Aside from the obvious George Smiley, think of the main characters in The Looking Glass War or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold). Sadly, A Most Wanted Man had neither.
The set-up is promising enough -- a young Chechnyan man sneaks into Germany, claiming to be the heir to a fortune in money stashed in a bank. The secret services clash, undecided over whether to arrest him immediately or use him to track down Muslim extremists. And is this young man what he seems to be?
Unfortunately, the whole work ends up being driven by le Carre's ideological cause du jour. In this case, he wants to tackle anti-immigrant feeling, and so he loses sight of the two sides of the question. Even though I agree with le Carre's viewpoint, he used to be better at acknowledging that there are two sides to every important policy debate, and the knaves and fools aren't all on one side with the angels on the other. His earlier novels derive their power from characters being forced to sacrifice one principle to uphold another, and from le Carre's implicitly asking whether the game is worth the candle.
Secondly, his anti-Americanism completely ruins the ending. He introduces a CIA officer late in the game who makes Dick Cheney look like a moderate and who ends up driving all the action. His anti-Americanism has always been there -- the "Cousins" in the earlier novels are depicted as gadet-happy, without the subtley that MI5 prides itself on. But this worked better when the Americans were off-stage, affecting the story by their presence but never entering directly.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Rainfall, Florida Roadkill
This weekend was one for mindless crime novels, and it taught me yet again that there are vast differences between good mindless and lousy mindless novels.
Florida Roadkill is a crazy romp of a novel, a caper story on meth. There are something like a dozen characters chasing after a bag containing $5 million, and only the people who actually have the money have no idea that they're carrying $5 million in the trunk of their car. Most of the dozen villains die in one ironic way or another, sometimes at each others hands, and it's general hilarity all the way through, partly because there are sympathetic characters as such.
Rainfall wants to be a high-octane thriller about an assassin who learns the error of his ways, but is embroiled too deeply into evil plots to walk away. But the stock characters (the assassin with a heart of gold, the brilliant hacker, the evil government functionary) render the whole thing ultra predictable instead.
Florida Roadkill is a crazy romp of a novel, a caper story on meth. There are something like a dozen characters chasing after a bag containing $5 million, and only the people who actually have the money have no idea that they're carrying $5 million in the trunk of their car. Most of the dozen villains die in one ironic way or another, sometimes at each others hands, and it's general hilarity all the way through, partly because there are sympathetic characters as such.
Rainfall wants to be a high-octane thriller about an assassin who learns the error of his ways, but is embroiled too deeply into evil plots to walk away. But the stock characters (the assassin with a heart of gold, the brilliant hacker, the evil government functionary) render the whole thing ultra predictable instead.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Daniel Silva, Reliquary, Time and the Gods
I've been picking out kindle books to take on vacation, and one of the frustrating things is that if you want to start a new series, the first book(s) are not always kindle-ized. So I got out Daniel Silva's first two Gabriel Allon books from the library, as well as Reliquary, the sequel to Relic (which I wrote about in my previous entry).
Reliquary was a total dud. The only good thing was that I didn't take it on vacation and find out that I couldn't get through it.
The two Gabriel Allon books were decent espionage/suspense novels, although reviews unfairly seem to hype Silva as the next le Carre. I think that does Silva a disservice, aside from the fact that he's not as skillful a writer as le Carre -- he's not really working in the same territory. Le Carre writes about people with a fairly ordinary skillset; they may be good at languages, or very clever, but they can't single-handedly infiltrate a heavily-guarded compound or kill 4 people with their bare hands. Silva is writing about a skilled assassin.
I was going to write that le Carre is more realistic, but I'm not sure that's the case. There are certainly some small number of very skilled operatives out there, and Silva's actual plots are not of the over-the-top save the world variety, especially in The English Assassin. Silva is working more in Frederick Forsyth or Len Deighton's territories, and he's a very skilled practitioner in that area.
I also finished Time and the Gods, one of the first books I picked up for the kindle. It's by Lord Dunsany, and contains more stories in his Pegana mythos (although "mythos" sounds very grand and unified, and these stories are not really unified). In general, I'm quite a Dunsany fan -- I like The King of Elfland's Daughter, loved The Charwoman's Shadow, and mostly like his short stories. But these stories were very much of one note -- the gods are at best malignly neglectful, but if you choose to defy them or claim they don't exist, they'll punish you. A few of the stories are witty -- his description of famine as a creature that drinks all of the water from the soil and the air, for example, was really memorable. But as a whole, I found it too repetitive.
Reliquary was a total dud. The only good thing was that I didn't take it on vacation and find out that I couldn't get through it.
The two Gabriel Allon books were decent espionage/suspense novels, although reviews unfairly seem to hype Silva as the next le Carre. I think that does Silva a disservice, aside from the fact that he's not as skillful a writer as le Carre -- he's not really working in the same territory. Le Carre writes about people with a fairly ordinary skillset; they may be good at languages, or very clever, but they can't single-handedly infiltrate a heavily-guarded compound or kill 4 people with their bare hands. Silva is writing about a skilled assassin.
I was going to write that le Carre is more realistic, but I'm not sure that's the case. There are certainly some small number of very skilled operatives out there, and Silva's actual plots are not of the over-the-top save the world variety, especially in The English Assassin. Silva is working more in Frederick Forsyth or Len Deighton's territories, and he's a very skilled practitioner in that area.
I also finished Time and the Gods, one of the first books I picked up for the kindle. It's by Lord Dunsany, and contains more stories in his Pegana mythos (although "mythos" sounds very grand and unified, and these stories are not really unified). In general, I'm quite a Dunsany fan -- I like The King of Elfland's Daughter, loved The Charwoman's Shadow, and mostly like his short stories. But these stories were very much of one note -- the gods are at best malignly neglectful, but if you choose to defy them or claim they don't exist, they'll punish you. A few of the stories are witty -- his description of famine as a creature that drinks all of the water from the soil and the air, for example, was really memorable. But as a whole, I found it too repetitive.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Judas Unchained, Relic, The French Lieutenant's Woman
After my glowing comments on Pandora's Star, it's almost embarrassing to write about how much I hated the follow-up, Judas Unchained. What makes it particularly galling is that many of things that I praised in the first novel turned out to be particularly irritating in the second.
Hamilton continues to provide a full sense of place, and his characters continue to give us a panoramic sense of the universe. The problem here is that the tempo of the plot in Judas Unchained has sped up considerably -- the full extent of the alien threat becomes clear in the first 100 pages -- but the writing continues at the same snail's pace. One of the climactic scenes of the novel is pages of stuff about a guy trying to control a hang-glider. Ironically, it's more or less a repeat of a scene that happens early in Pandora's Star, where there's almost nothing riding on the outcome; the second time around should have been much punchier and to the point; unfortunately, that was symptomatic of the whole book -- scenes that should've been quick and exciting just dragged.
Relic, on the other hand, is quick and exciting, if ultimately completely shallow. But once in a while it's nice to read something mindless but competently written, to see the workmanship that goes into a good thriller.
On the heavy side, I also finished listening to Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, which is an odd mash-up of Victorian and post-modern sensibilities. Aside from the story itself, which is set in Victorian England, Fowles gives us digressions on the sexual mores, the status of servants, the falling of the upper class, and so on. But he also does things like inserting himself into the story, giving us two endings, and so on. I found it to be very tastefully done, and the writing was gorgeous. I hope to write a bit more about this fascinating novel in my next post.
Hamilton continues to provide a full sense of place, and his characters continue to give us a panoramic sense of the universe. The problem here is that the tempo of the plot in Judas Unchained has sped up considerably -- the full extent of the alien threat becomes clear in the first 100 pages -- but the writing continues at the same snail's pace. One of the climactic scenes of the novel is pages of stuff about a guy trying to control a hang-glider. Ironically, it's more or less a repeat of a scene that happens early in Pandora's Star, where there's almost nothing riding on the outcome; the second time around should have been much punchier and to the point; unfortunately, that was symptomatic of the whole book -- scenes that should've been quick and exciting just dragged.
Relic, on the other hand, is quick and exciting, if ultimately completely shallow. But once in a while it's nice to read something mindless but competently written, to see the workmanship that goes into a good thriller.
On the heavy side, I also finished listening to Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, which is an odd mash-up of Victorian and post-modern sensibilities. Aside from the story itself, which is set in Victorian England, Fowles gives us digressions on the sexual mores, the status of servants, the falling of the upper class, and so on. But he also does things like inserting himself into the story, giving us two endings, and so on. I found it to be very tastefully done, and the writing was gorgeous. I hope to write a bit more about this fascinating novel in my next post.
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