The Jewish Dog, Captain's Fury, Faerie Queene

I haven't written much about Asher Kravitz's The Jewish Dog, but I've been reading it steadily.  The dog, having been through a number of names, is now a guard dog in a concentration camp.  I have a feeling Kravitz is heading toward a moderately optimistic ending, where the dog helps his former owner to escape the camp, but this book has surprised me a few times already.

By now, Kravitz has abandoned the dog's naivete, which is probably just as well; it was getting to be more grating than funny.  Instead, the dog has become a much more straightforward narrator.

Jim Butcher's novels drive me crazy.  On the one hand, he is very good at constructing an over-arching plot-line, constructing interesting dilemmas for his characters (and giving them interesting ways to solve them), and general world-building.  On the other hand, on a sentence by sentence level, he's about the most leaden author I continue to read.  So every time I start one of his books, until it gets into the flow, I ask myself why I'm bothering.  Then things get into a groove, and his plot starts building steam, and he gets into great set pieces, and everything's great.  Then we get into a lull in the action, and the writing or dialog has me cringing again.  And just as I'm ready to throw in the towel, the plot picks up again, and I can't wait to see what will happen.

Captain's Fury is no exception to the general rule.  And that's probably about all that needs to be said about it.  (Well, almost.  I found the stage machinery to be more obvious this time than most; Butcher needs First Lord out of the way where he can't deus ex machina the whole main plot-line away, so he creates a whole side mission for him.  Although his mission may have dramatic consequences for the future of the series, in this novel it's pretty clearly just there to keep the most powerful characters out of the main plot).

In Book IV of The Faerie Queene.

Bend Sinister, Crisscross, Room, Faerie Queene

It's been a long time since I posted; lots piled up since then...

I finished Bend Sinister.  I should've guessed the identity of the narrator.  (I actually did, but then decided it was too meta, which was silly of me).  Overall, I think it wasn't as successful as some of Nabokov's other work.  The games felt separate from the core of the novel, somehow, unlike, say Pale Fire, where the game is the novel.  Also, I thought the authorial hand was too heavy-handed (no pun intended).

Speaking of heavy-handed authors, F. Paul Wilson has given his plots an interesting excuse in his "Repairman Jack" series.  Jack's actions are now being watched by a higher power of sorts, so there are no more coincidences in his life.  This gives Wilson the option to throw in a lot of coincidences into his plotting.  How does Jack happen to be in the right place at the right time?  The higher power.  How does every case he's involved in end up connected to the dark power?  The higher power.  And so on.

Fortunately, other than using this card in setting up Crisscross, Wilson doesn't otherwise invoke it.  Instead, he sets Jack up in his most non-fantastic plot yet.  (I don't exactly want to call it realistic, but it doesn't really have many overtly supernatural elements).  His plotting is actually pretty standard fare for thrillers, maybe even a cut above many, since he doesn't rely on crazy convoluted stories.  Overall, Crisscross is a decent entry in the series, even if it's not going to set the genre on fire.

Room is a sort of half-thriller, I think.  Donoghue has put together the elements of a thriller (a woman kidnapped, locked into an 11 x 11 room for 6 years with a baby, trying to get out), but her emphasis isn't on plot.  Instead, we look at the world through the eyes of the woman's now-5-year-old son Jack, as he tries to make sense of the world he finds himself in.  I think that Jack's viewpoint is the only possible one if this story is not to be a horror novel.  He's too innocent to really think about his life, and, by putting us in his place, Donoghue lets us dodge the implications of the back-story somewhat.

At the same time, I think a little bit of thriller pacing would have helped this book.  After Donoghue sets up Jack's viewpoint, there's a bit of a feeling of longeurs as we sort of get used to how things are, while we wait for his mother to act.  Then, again, after the escape, things are interesting for a time as we see Jack learning to cope with the much wider world. But, again, as he starts to heal, and things get to be more normal, a sense of longeurs sets in.  When Jack sees the beach, he's amazed, because he's never experienced anything quite like it.  But I'd imagine the same would be true if you took a 5-year-old from Ohio to the beach for the first time.  By the end of the novel, seeing Jack react to stuff is really losing steam, because he feels more like an every-child.  (I understand that this is by design, to show that he's becoming more normal, but I think that Donoghue should've had a better solution than just letting the book peter out).

On Book III of The Faerie Queene.  I don't really have much to say about it, except that I'm really enjoying it.  It's got a reputation as being the longest English poem, but I think that, even on a micro level, it's a very fine poem.  There are some standout alliterations, cool chiasmus, and all the good stuff that a classical poem should have.

Barchester Towers, Bend Sinister, Faerie Queene

I finished Barchester Towers, not really much to add to what I wrote before.  Except that, of all the Victorian novelists I've read, Trollope's sexism is by far the hardest to overlook.  I think it's because he has such a strong authorial voice, and his narrator constantly tells us what's ladylike and what's not.

Anyways, having finished that, I started listening to Nabokov's Bend Sinister.  In retrospect, it's not really a natural choice for listening to.  The narration is very slippery, jumping between 1st and 3rd person without notice, with one long foray into 2nd.  I must admit that I'm still not sure of the identity of the 1st person narrator (not finished the novel yet), although I suspect it is Adam Krug himself.

This novel has obvious political overtones, but they're almost not worth discussing, they're so blatant.  Instead, I think that a major theme of this novel is reflections.  They're a subject we'll see Nabokov return to later, in Pale Fire and (AFAIK) Ada.  Nabokov's title already tells us as much, as the introduction tells us.  In addition, we find police arresting people in pairs; there are two boys who get mixed up; and so on.  I think that some otherwise pointless digressions make sense in this light. 

The Padukgraph, which makes copies of a person's handwriting, takes up an inordinate amount of space in this trim novel.  The otherwise puzzling Hamlet discussion can also be seen in this light -- Fortinbras is seen as a sort of double for Hamlet, but Fortinbras, in this reading, is the real hero of the novel.  Even small oddities make some sense here.  For example, the narrator constantly inserts words and phrases in French, German, Russian (I think that's all of them), immediately followed by a translation into English.  In other novels, Nabokov is certainly not averse to non-English phrases, but he almost never translates them.  I think that the constant translation gives you a feel that you're seeing a refracted reflection -- it's like the original, but not the same.

Is there an ultimate deeper meaning to all the twinning?  I'm not sure yet; I'll have to write more as I finish listening.

Lastly, I'm reading Spenser's Faerie Queene.  Not so much to say about it, except that I love the poetry of it.  It's inventive like Orlando Furioso, but I think it's more poetic (although of course, I've only read Orlando  in translation).

Dead Men's Boots, Barchester Towers

Dead Men's Boots is the third novel about exorcist Felix Castor, a series which I think is far and away the best of the urban noir subgenre (although I think Child of Fire gives it a run for the money).  Here Felix is embroiled in an investigation into the ghost of an American serial killer who somehow ended up possessing a man in London.

It's hard to overstate how well Carey has caught the cadences of the hard-boiled detective novel here.  Castor is not a detective, but he ends up playing that role.  Carey also throws a bit of a curve ball by making this a more optimistic novel than the previous two, which was a nice change.

I see that I read the previous Castor book at the same time as I read The Warden, Trollope's first novel about the town of Barchester.  So it's an odd coincidence that I read the second Barchester novel, Barchester Towers at the same time as the third Castor novel.  Here, Trollope moves into a more broadly comic vein, particularly once he hits his stride in volume II.  At first, I would have put Trollope as a distant third behind Dickens and George Elliot -- his humor isn't as broad as Dickens's, and his realism is not as well-observed as Elliot's.  But once he hit his stride, I could see why he's rated so highly

He shifts into high comic mode at some point, invoking the muse ("Tell me o muse of the wrath of Mr. Slope"), apostrophizing his heroes, and so on.  His extended similes also make his subjects ridiculous, whether by magnifying them (comparing marital discord to war between massive armies) or comparing them to insignificant things (that same marital discord is compared more than once to cocks fighting over a dunghill).  His deus ex machina (Dr Gwinn) is kept off-stage for most of the story with a broken ankle and arrives too late to do anything.

All this is a kind of humor we don't really find in Dickens, even though I found them superficially similar at first -- both writers write broad characters without a lot of depth.  They're mostly types rather than actual characters.  Trollope occasionally tries to give his people more depth, by explaining that their innermost motivations are not as villainous (or virtuous) as they appear, but the end result is much the same.  Mr. Slope may not be a complete hypocrite, for example, but his actions are nonetheless odious, and his better qualities never lead him to do anything actually good.  But Dickens's humor lies more in what his characters say & do, while much of Trollope's humor is in his narrative voice, like the above-mentioned epic prose.

I'm still finishing Barchester Towers as I write this, so I may have more to say later, but I don't think so, somehow.

On a side note, I've started The Faerie Queene.  At 1000 pages, I guess I'll be at it for a while...

Death of Dalziel

I've been slowly catching up to the present on the Dalziel/Pascoe books.  Every time I think that author Reginald Hill has worn out his bag of tricks, he changes up the game somehow.

Here, he takes out Andy Dalziel, who most would have said is the mainstay of the series.  Dalziel is caught in a bomb blast and laid up in a coma for most of the novel, leaving everything in his understudy Pascoe's hands.  Pascoe begins to take on some aspects of Dalziel's character over the course of the novel -- he's always been the good cop to Dalziel's bad cop, and now he finds that the bad cop persona has its uses.

Overall, a solid entry in the series, Hill is at the top of his craft here.  He knows how to spin an artful sentence as well as anyone in the genre and better than most, he knows how to weave an interesting plot, and he writes dialog very well.  But I feel like the heart got left behind a few books ago; the middle novels often left me moved in a way this one didn't.

Palimpsest

I've liked most everything I've read by Catherine Valente, but not so much with Palimpset.  In general, I like her poetic language and willingness to play with the boundaries of fiction, whether with the story-in-a-story concept of Orphan's Tales or the thicket of confusion that was Yume no Hon.  But Palimpset is relatively straightforward as a novel, and that's its downfall.

Valente wants to wander around her city of Palimpsest more than she wants to tell a story.  The shortness of the individual stories in Orphan's Tales or Yume no Hon restrained her, or, in any case it just didn't matter so much, because we moved on to the next thing quickly.   (I think the same is true of Calvino's Invisible Cities -- there's no plot, and so it doesn't matter so much that he meanders around).  But here, the plot exists uneasily with the sight-seeing.

Child of Fire, "The Dead"

I was pleasantly surprised by Harry Connolly's Child of Fire.  It's a first novel that a few people had told me was worth taking a look at, and amazon had a sale on it, so I picked it up, despite my misgivings.

I think the publisher does the book a disservice by making it seem more generic than it really is.  For one thing, the cover screams "generic urban fantasy."  The jacket copy reads like another tough-guy urban fantasy.  But the actual book is not so typical.  Ray Lilly, the protagonist, is pretty  is squeamish and vomits when confronted with violence.  In addition, in a genre filled with powerful heroes (Harry Dresden, John Taylor), Ray is just a sidekick, and an expendable one at that.

My major beef with the book is that it constantly alludes to a back story between the two major characters, but leaves it completely opaque.  This is clearly just sequel fodder, which is just annoying.

I was listening to a lecture on literary analysis, and the best thing about reading literary analysis is that it can inspire you to re-read a book, or in this case a short story.  The lecturer was talking about Joyce's use of symbolism in "The Dead," a story that I've talked about before.  My feelings about the story haven't changed particularly, so I won't rehash them (I'm a little less sanguine about Gabriel's chances of changing than I was, but I still think "The Dead" is the most optimistic story in the collection).  But it's interesting to see the craft in Joyce's use of light & dark, snow, and open spaces.  Joyce uses light and darkness to separate Gabriel from his wife, as well as to show Gabriel's isolation from others.

The snow, of course, links everyone together -- Ireland is a metonomy for the world, I think.  This goes without saying, except it gives me a chance to quote the beautiful ending:

It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

I have changed my idea that the story is told from Gabriel's viewpoint.  The beginning is told from the maid's perspective: "LILY, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."  Gabriel would never make such a solecism as "literally run off her feet."  In the first half of the story we whirl in and out of Gabriel's consciousness.  We have to see from outside sometimes, so that we can have a foretaste of his epiphany when he sees himself in the mirror.