Warm Glowing Warming Glow

Fifty-Fifty Split

Misfortune, Wesley Stace. This is a novel about a boy raised as a girl, in an English estate, in the 19th century.  The author is more famous as John Wesley Harding, the relatively successful folk-rock singer. (I'm going to say his biggest hit is "I'm Wrong about Everything," from the High Fidelity soundtrack.) Misfortune is a weird hybrid: in the readers' guide, Stace says that he set out to write a modern novel, set in the 19th century, rather than a Victorian pastiche. I would argue that he ended up splitting the difference: while he mostly uses 21st century language and structures, the complicated, coincidence-dependent plot strikes me as very 19th century. It doesn't matter, though. The novel is compelling -- the plot moves, it's intermittently very funny, and the psychology is absolutely convincing. -- Peter

Book Report

Some things I've read lately:

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.  This is the craziest book I've read possibly ever. It's like Great Expectations only with eye-gouging, a prison break, opium, a cholera epidemic, guerrillas, torture and 900-some pages of other stuff I hope to never encounter in real life, all set in Bombay and Afghanistan. Apparently almost everything described in the book actually happened to the author. Really, really, oddly readable. Plus, now I know how to hold a knife if I'm ever in a prison laundry knife fight, and what to do in the event of a rat stampede or if set upon by a pack of feral dogs.

Ode to Kirihito by Osamu Tezuka. This is a very dark, very long thriller from the godfather of manga. Book design is beautiful -- I wanted to carry it with me just to show it off on the subway, but I also wanted to put it somewhere very safe. This is a good read, even if you're not a manga person. (I'm not.) There's almost none of the cutesy, infantilized stuff that tends to put me off the genre. The story -- about an array of characters investigating a disease that seems to transform humans into dog-like creatures -- is in turns engrossing, disturbing and sad. -- Peter

Chamber of Secrets

For the past two weeks or so, since I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I've been meaning to write a longish, critical response either to the book itself or to the series as a whole, spurred mostly by a long, intellectually-irresponsible talk my sister and I had about subtext.  I'm too lazy to actually do the research required to develop or back up our claims about Hogwarts, though, so I'm just going to throw some down here:

1. For a children's book, there sure is a lot of sexual imagery -- wands, swords, snakes, cauldrons, chalices, lockets . . . Maybe at some point, everything is a cigar, I'm not sure. I do think that it's interesting that Chamber of Secrets is the first really scary book in the series (I remember talks, around when that came out, about people feeling like that one wouldn't be appropriate for their kids to read, because of the basilisk being upsetting.) and it's the one in which a giant snake is ravaging Hogwarts and it's also the one in which an attraction between Harry and Ginny is first introduced. Also, in Order of the Phoenix, Harry has all those violent dreams about Nagini that lead to him feeling irrational guilt.

2. In terms of gender, the wizard world is pretty conservative. In fact, I think that you can argue that J.K. Rowling is in a lot of ways a pretty conservative author. The Harry Potter books tend to promote tolerance, but they also tend to extol boys and athletics over girls and intellectual pursuits. Harry, while introduced as an outsider and freak, quickly emerges as a popular kid and a great Quidditch player. Snape, meanwhile, the perennial outsider, is vilified, pretty much throughout. One can argue that Hermione, Luna and Neville are non-conforming kids, and each does get at least a moment or two of glory, but each is secondary if not tertiary to Harry. Traditional families are a big part of the wizarding world and non-traditional families -- let alone single people -- tend to lead to trouble. Also, back to gender: girls tend to be girly. Female characters are subordinate to the male; even the Hogwarts houses founded by women (Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw) are pretty minor -- and pretty girly.  Both are associated with stereotypically female virtues. 

3. I was working up something about  each of the houses of Hogwarts representing something important about Great Britain, but I don't think there's anything there. I do think that something's going on with Gryffindor and Imperialism, but I'm getting tired just thinking about trying to develop it.

4. The series takes place between the years 1991 and 1997, yet it was written during the late 1990s to about 2006, and is clearly informed by early 2000s mores -- the middle books seem to be obviously influence by the invasion of Iraq and by heightened paranoia, post-9/11. Yet it's weird to think of the world of wizards existing anywhere around the same era as ours. It feels like the books should be set in about 1938 to 1944, with the return of Voldemort mirrored by the Blitz.

Fun Home

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel. At this point, just from the books I've read in the last month or so, I have pretty close to the full reading list for an English class on the topic Unhappy Marriages in English and American Literature, which is strange because I'm not doing this on purpose: mostly I'm reading either things I picked up in London or what I spot on the New Arrivals shelf at my public library. Fun Home is Bechdel's graphic  (in several senses) memoir of her childhood in rural Pennsylvania with her emotionally distant parents, particularly her father, an English teacher/funeral home director who may or may not have committed suicide when the author was 20. This book is just about the best thing I've read in a long, long while. It amazed me so much I don't even think I can evaluate anymore whether or not it's objectively good. I think it's possible Bechdel tells more than she shows, but I'm so overwhelmed by the reading experience that I'm afraid I may be making that part up.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Amazon

I spent all day Saturday waiting for UPS to deliver my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I know.  This is why people don't read blogs -- the danger of embarrassing revelations.  Anyway, it was a whole thing -- UPS apparently subcontracted all Harry Potter deliveries to the US Postal Service, but didn't bother to communicate that; then my mail carrier delivered, in lieu of my copy, a cryptic note, which seemed to suggest that . . . something . . . had been returned to the post office, which was closed, because it's Saturday, and it's just a damned children's book, anyway, and then it turned out that my super was holding it for me and . . . mischief managed. 

Then I lost another day reading the damned thing, and now I'm trying to decide what I thought of it.  I think fans of the series will be completely satisfied with the conclusion: it does the same things the other six books do, and it does them about as well as those do.  I think, at the end, all questions are answered satisfactorily.  With a few exceptions, every character and magical object that appeared in the other books pops up for at least a cameo. 

Those who don't care for the books and those who read them but are critical will not be disappointed, either -- about the same weaknesses as the other books.   There's a huge freight of exposition at the end, some of the bullshit metaphysical variety ("and then your soul did X"); some of the bullshit psychological variety ("because my parents hated Muggles . . .").  Some of it, though, to be fair, is handled impressively: there's at least one late-round revelation that's a bit shocking.  As with all the rest of the books, there are long middle passages in which nothing much happens while Harry, Ron and Hermione endlessly chew over the plot to date.  Apart from those, though, unlike the placeholder sixth volume, there's a lot of action. 

Now I'm off to read other reviews and analyses.  If I find anything good, I'll post the links.  -- Peter

P.S. Here's the only commentary that hasn't annoyed me. 

What I'm Reading

I'm clearing the decks for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (is that really the title?) . . . The most recent books I've read don't really have anything to do with magic or puns, but have a lot in common with each other.

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead.  This article convinced me to read this book, about a disastrously ill-suited couple who use their six children to torment each other, a long time ago, but then it took me a long time to get to it.  Then it took me forever to finish it, because it's so appalling that I could only read it in small doses.   The father feeds one of the children partially digested food out of his own mouth; I take a break.  The eldest daughter helps a neighbor drown her cat; I take a break.  Repeat.  It's really good, though, and once I gave myself over to the horror of it, I couldn't put it down.  Stead really created an entire world in this book: the reading experience is claustrophobic, like Stead's attention to the Pollit family is too close; looking back, though, it's surprising how broad Stead's scope is -- you get not just the family but their entire milieu -- neighbors, schools, grandparents, co-workers, etc. 

The Woodlanders, Thomas Hardy.  Another entry in the "Are you sure marriage is for you?" genre.  This is maybe not one of Hardy's best-known novels, but it's among his most interesting.  In general, I think Hardy's characterizations of women and his views on both gender relations and sex are surprisingly modern for a Victorian.  This book is probably one of his most modern in that regard.  Interesting narrative structure: whereas in others of Hardy's novels (thinking especially of The Mayor of Casterbridge and Far from the Madding Crowd, but I think Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are like this, too) the plot is pretty heavy and complicated throughout, in The Woodlanders, almost nothing seems to happen (not to say it's boring, just more naturalistic) until about the final 50 pages, at which point it becomes almost unbearably suspenseful.

Blue Heaven, Joe Keenan.  More of the same theme, only completely different mood: a gay man and a straight woman decide to marry in order to cash in on the wedding presents.  Then things get really complicated.  Keenan was a staff writer and producer on Frasier, which makes a lot of sense -- very much the same sensibility and pacing.  Only intermittently is it laugh-out-loud funny, but overall it's breezy and enjoyable.  Very good update -- was going to say "modernization" but that's not right -- of P.G. Wodehouse.  See also Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames.    

Forget It, Jake. It's Chinatown.

A while ago, one of my friends asked me to define "film noir."  I said something about the entanglement of private and public corruption.  I was wrong -- some of the best film noir (The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, The Asphalt Jungle . . .) is about crime that has nothing to do with the common weal.  On the other hand, there is a growing sub-genre of noir books and films that follow the Chinatown model of using the hard-boiled detective genre to talk about crime both private and public. 

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon.  This novel is getting a lot of attention right now, and deservedly so.  It's been what?  Six years since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay?   A while.  This novel didn't  have the same effect on me that the earlier one did, in part, probably, because Chabon sticks to the noir formula so closely: genre conventions do tend to eliminate the flashes of unexpected brilliance in which Kavalier & Clay abounded.  The Yiddish Policemen's Union is very, very good, however: there are passages in which Chabon makes it look so easy that I actually thought out loud, "Oh, I could write this."  (I couldn't write that.)  For a genre exercise, the novel is unusually inaccessible, however.  I consider myself pretty Jew-adjacent.  I know a fair amount of Yiddish and a good deal about Jewish social convention and religious practices, but I still spent the first half of the book wrestling with words and trying to figure out which parts Chabon invented wholesale. 

City of Tiny Lights, Patrick Neate.  I wonder if Chabon was influenced at all by this novel, about a Pakistani-English private investigator who becomes embroiled in a murder investigation that is in turn related to terrorism.  Neate uses similar narrative techniques to discuss similar themes.  Somehow, I don't think that this book sold that well in the U.S.: I had never heard of it before picking up a copy at a flea market.  Since then, I've seen copies fairly often at used bookstores and charity sales.  If you should happen to spy one, you should probably buy it, because it is very good.

No Dominion, Charlie Huston.  I may have talked about this book before.  I know I've talked about Charlie Huston before.  He seems to be going through a very prolific period right now: he's published something like five books in the last two or three years.  All of them are very violent and very good.  No Dominion is the second volume in a series about a vampire private investigator and it's awfully good.  (I think there might be a similar TV series debuting this fall, possibly on CBS.)

The Curious Incident of the Wacky Family

On my way to Ljubljana, I stopped in London, and ganked a couple of books not yet available in the Colonies.  So, to rub it in . . .

A Spot of Bother, Mark Haddon.  Haddon's last book, of course, was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the book everyone was reading in I'm going to say 2003.  (At some point, I want to do a study of some sort about how it seems like at any given time, everyone you know is reading one particular book.  Like right now, I think everyone is reading Jodi Picoult.  Last year, it was Middlesex.)  A Spot of Bother is neither as buzz-prone (no flashy narrative tricks, no mystery) nor as -- um, good -- as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  It actually reads a bit like Brothers & Sisters in novel form.   Haddon does an excellent job with one character, however: George, the patriarch balancing between existential anxiety and full-blown madness, is so compelling he almost throws the book off balance.

The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly.   Wow.  I'm not sure where to start.  Let's try, imagine The Wizard of Oz or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, only informed by actual psychological insight.   On the eve of World War II, a London adolescent loses his mother.  When the Blitz begins, his family -- father, stepmother, baby half-brother -- withdraws to a remote house while the boy withdraws into his reading.  Then either he goes completely bat-shit crazy, or there's magic, or he's just working things out, allegorically -- take your pick.  No matter how you interpret what's going on, though, there's a lot that's just really disturbing and amazing.  I think people are letting their kids read this book, which . . . bravo. 

Heresy

The Amber Spyglass is the longest of the books, by far.  Technically, it's maybe the weakest: long passages where not much happens, an anti-climactic ending, some plot holes (How did Lord Asriel amass his army in about a week, let alone build his fortress and develop all those Intention Craft prototypes?) and weird detours (Um, the hair bomb?).  It makes up for that by being completely, awesomely bombastic, even compared to its two prequels.  Let's see: God is dead, let's kill the pretender; gay angels; the Christians are completely evil and want to steal free will; eternal life is a big fat lie, or actually an enormous prison camp; the only way to save the world is for two pre-teens to get it on, says the ex-nun.  Does that cover it?  Oh, there's a monk who's gotten some sort of special dispensation to do whatever he wants, so he can assassinate a little girl. 

One of the things Pullman set out to do, in writing these books, was to attack, in a way, C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.  Point by point, he pretty much nails it: Iorek Byrnison, for instance, seems to be a response to the fluffy talking animals that populate Narnia.  In place of Lewis's unswerving orthodoxy, we have an unremittingly evil church.  Pullman's big problem, though, according to an interview he did with Salon (which I can't find now because Salon's search engine sucks), was Lewis's misogyny.  Pullman argues that, for Lewis, girls are only acceptable as long as they're basically boys.  Post-pubescent girls are liable, like Susan Pevensie in The Last Battle, to be too concerned with make-up and boys.  Susan's punishment is to be locked out of the Kingdom of Heaven.  In The Amber Spyglass, Lyra gets to be a girl and, while she suffers a similar punishment -- she and Will are exiled from each other --, she gets to build her own Heaven on Earth. 

I don't think that Pullman completely succeeds in shutting misogyny from his book, however.  What is really going on with Mrs Coulter?  Portrayed as wicked through the first two books, she seems to sort of possibly redeem herself at the end, but it's an uncomfortable redemption: she all of a sudden discovers maternal love.   What's interesting is that Lord Asriel, who is doing things every bit as dubious from beginning to end, and is if anything worse to his daughter than Mrs Coulter is (Who thinks he wouldn't have sacrificed her at the end of The Golden Compass, had Roger not fortuitously shown up?), escapes Pullman's ire.

More Pullman Talk

What's cool about The Subtle Knife is how Pullman throws away pretty much everything from The Golden Compass: not just the world -- a move foreshadowed at the end of the previous book -- but most of the characters, for most of the time, as well.  Lyra doesn't appear for a good 50 pages and even then, we see her through Will's eyes.  The structure is completely different, too.  Instead of another heroic quest, we get a series of small episodes, in which Will and Lyra set out to solve problem after problem.  Meanwhile, in bits and pieces, we see what's going on in the worlds around them.  When those larger events finally catch up with Will and Lyra, the result is a series of jaw-dropping reversals, setting up one of the best cliffhanger endings I can name.

I was thinking I was going to have more to say about this, but can't think of anything.  It's possibly technically the best book of the three, kind of surprising: middles of trilogies tend to be clunky.