I wanted to like this book more than I did, and I'm having difficulty in pinpointing the reason, or reasons, for my lack of enthusiasm.
The plot's an effective blend of Victorian melodrama and an understated, po-mo knowingness: conflation of author and character, a novel about ... but let the book describe itself.
"... about accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind."
That's the narrator, Daniel, explaining mysterious events to the girl he loves: who says, with more honesty than devotion, "you sound like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel."
The novel takes place in Barcelona, in the 1950s -- I read it there, having asked friends to recommend a good Spanish novel set in the city I was about to visit for the first time -- and Barcelona, "a faraway city trapped between a crescent of mountains and a sea of light, a city filled with buildings that could exist only in dreams", is as much a character in the novel as its setting. Indeed, the city came to life, in the pages of this book, more than did some of the characters. I was immediately engaged by ex-tramp, ex-mental patient Fernan, but Daniel's father was seldom more than a shadowy outline in the background: his passivity made me sad.
I wonder if the reason that The Shadow of the Wind didn't draw me in was the quality of the translation. It was translated by Lucia Graves, daughter of Robert Graves, and there's a poetic quality to the prose: but it feels stilted in places, as though it's lost a certain colloquial quality, and much of its humour, in translation.
Or perhaps it's that I read it in determinedly sunny and cheerful modern Barcelona, rather than the grimy, oppressed city oppressed by Franco's secret police, where nobody is safe and corruption is rife. It's not a cheerful setting: Zafón evokes it convincingly.
There's a lot that I did like about The Shadow of the Wind: Victor Hugo's pen; 'a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things he would be unable to discover otherwise'; Julian Carax, the absent author at the heart of the mystery, and his warped sense of humour; and the description of Sagrada Familia as 'a cathedral ... that sounded like a large hair comb made of melting chocolate.'
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Thursday, February 16, 2006
#13: The Way of a Ship -- Derek Lundy
Derek Lundy is a keen sailor, some might say a mad one: as research for this book, he sailed a 50' steel-hulled boat around Cape Horn. Reading his reflections on this voyage, which are interleaved with a fictionalised account of his ancestor Benjamin Lundy's passage around the Horn in 1885, one gets the sense that he's actually rather disappointed not to have encountered more extreme weather.
Lundy captures the feel of being afloat under sail, the reliance on the elements that's absent in modern-day travel. The Beara Head he writes about did not exist, but she's typical of a number of square-rigger, steel-hulled, four-masted ships in the last days of sail: crewed by what any Napoleonic captain would've regarded as a skeleton crew of 22 men, carrying dangerous cargo (coal, which was prone to spontaneous combustion), Liverpool to Valparaiso in 150 days.
Lundy says near the beginning that he's drawn heavily on the works of three major nautical writers -- Melville, Conrad and Dana. (I hadn't heard of Dana, but his Two Years Before the Mast is apparently a classic, and much admired by Herman Melville.) It's Conrad who he returns to, cites, reveres: in fact, he waxed enthusiastic enough to encourage me to read 'The Secret Sharer', and I am now on a Conrad kick, having been put off at an early age. But that by the bye.
Lundy refers to Cape Horn as 'the largest natural mass graveyard marker in the world', and by the time the Beara Head nears the Horn, Lundy's instilled a healthy respect for it in the heart of his reader. He describes a rogue wave drowning the ship, the men hanging in the rigging and looking down on green water with four masts protruding from it: the ship not righting herself under the weight of thousands of tons of water ... the mate, a hard man who's given his crew a great deal of grief, overwhelmed by a 'passionate curiosity', a sense that this is the end. And then the ship bears up, the deckhouse torn away, a man overboard and instantly lost, the boats smashed and broken: and, as in O'Brian, that sense of the fragility of human life at sea. Work as hard as you can, as long as you can, or die.
The pacing is splendid. I found myself racing ahead, eager to read the next chapter of Benjamin's story as he metamorphosed from raw youth to experienced sailor: yet the intervening material is fascinating too. Derek Lundy's own voyage; the life of a sailor in the 19th century; the rapid rise of steam power, and the sailing ships (Lundy calls them 'wind ships' throughout) collaborating in their own demise by carrying coal more cheaply to the ports where the steamers were based; the sheer intricacy of a sailing ship. 'As self-sufficient as space-ships,' writes Lundy of wooden ships, which seems to me a backhanded sort of simile.
I learnt more about tacking and yards, stays and lines, how a sailing ship works, from this book than from all twenty-and-a-half volumes of O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels. It's not a fair comparison, though it's made more than once in the reviews I've noticed. Lundy isn't focussing on character or plot, though there is a sufficiency of both -- he imagines each crew-member's viewpoint, and the Plot is of course "Liverpool to Valparaiso via Cape Horn" -- but simply on what it might have been like for all those untold thousands of men who sailed the ocean blue.
Lundy captures the feel of being afloat under sail, the reliance on the elements that's absent in modern-day travel. The Beara Head he writes about did not exist, but she's typical of a number of square-rigger, steel-hulled, four-masted ships in the last days of sail: crewed by what any Napoleonic captain would've regarded as a skeleton crew of 22 men, carrying dangerous cargo (coal, which was prone to spontaneous combustion), Liverpool to Valparaiso in 150 days.
Lundy says near the beginning that he's drawn heavily on the works of three major nautical writers -- Melville, Conrad and Dana. (I hadn't heard of Dana, but his Two Years Before the Mast is apparently a classic, and much admired by Herman Melville.) It's Conrad who he returns to, cites, reveres: in fact, he waxed enthusiastic enough to encourage me to read 'The Secret Sharer', and I am now on a Conrad kick, having been put off at an early age. But that by the bye.
Lundy refers to Cape Horn as 'the largest natural mass graveyard marker in the world', and by the time the Beara Head nears the Horn, Lundy's instilled a healthy respect for it in the heart of his reader. He describes a rogue wave drowning the ship, the men hanging in the rigging and looking down on green water with four masts protruding from it: the ship not righting herself under the weight of thousands of tons of water ... the mate, a hard man who's given his crew a great deal of grief, overwhelmed by a 'passionate curiosity', a sense that this is the end. And then the ship bears up, the deckhouse torn away, a man overboard and instantly lost, the boats smashed and broken: and, as in O'Brian, that sense of the fragility of human life at sea. Work as hard as you can, as long as you can, or die.
The pacing is splendid. I found myself racing ahead, eager to read the next chapter of Benjamin's story as he metamorphosed from raw youth to experienced sailor: yet the intervening material is fascinating too. Derek Lundy's own voyage; the life of a sailor in the 19th century; the rapid rise of steam power, and the sailing ships (Lundy calls them 'wind ships' throughout) collaborating in their own demise by carrying coal more cheaply to the ports where the steamers were based; the sheer intricacy of a sailing ship. 'As self-sufficient as space-ships,' writes Lundy of wooden ships, which seems to me a backhanded sort of simile.
I learnt more about tacking and yards, stays and lines, how a sailing ship works, from this book than from all twenty-and-a-half volumes of O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels. It's not a fair comparison, though it's made more than once in the reviews I've noticed. Lundy isn't focussing on character or plot, though there is a sufficiency of both -- he imagines each crew-member's viewpoint, and the Plot is of course "Liverpool to Valparaiso via Cape Horn" -- but simply on what it might have been like for all those untold thousands of men who sailed the ocean blue.
Saturday, February 11, 2006
#12: Lady Thief -- Kay Hooper
When you're a big-name author (as Kay Hooper apparently is) you get to publish work that might not otherwise see the light of print. Lady Thief is Hooper's very first novel: she's known for contemporary romances, but this is a Regency romance, and one that owes more to the swashbuckling tradition than to Austen or Heyer.
Jennifer Courtenay is set on avenging the death of her father, murdered by a mysterious visitor while investigating treason and espionage during the Napoleonic Wars. In order to find the talisman ring that was taken from him by the murderer, she dresses up as a highwayman, assumes the name 'The Cat', and robs innocent noblemen in their coaches. She's a dab hand with a sword, and she has the help of Jason (a genuine highwayman, middle-aged but devoted to her). There are some issues with her step-father; her sister's ill-considered romance with a penniless lordling; and Jenny's strong, but irrational, attraction to the Duke of Spencer. And there are some more testing issues, such as anachronistic speech, the sort of plot that I can only describe as 'just in time' (with some elements that seem unlikely, to say the least), and some rather two-dimensional characterisation.
It's easy to tell, comparing this and 'Masquerade' -- a novella written rather later in Hooper's career, which deals with the hackneyed 'seeking refuge after failure of vehicle in snowstorm' plot, and manages it with a modicum of grace and style, and some interesting backstory -- that Lady Thief was Hooper's very first novel. It's not especially well-written and there are some problems with plot and setting.
Jennifer Courtenay is set on avenging the death of her father, murdered by a mysterious visitor while investigating treason and espionage during the Napoleonic Wars. In order to find the talisman ring that was taken from him by the murderer, she dresses up as a highwayman, assumes the name 'The Cat', and robs innocent noblemen in their coaches. She's a dab hand with a sword, and she has the help of Jason (a genuine highwayman, middle-aged but devoted to her). There are some issues with her step-father; her sister's ill-considered romance with a penniless lordling; and Jenny's strong, but irrational, attraction to the Duke of Spencer. And there are some more testing issues, such as anachronistic speech, the sort of plot that I can only describe as 'just in time' (with some elements that seem unlikely, to say the least), and some rather two-dimensional characterisation.
It's easy to tell, comparing this and 'Masquerade' -- a novella written rather later in Hooper's career, which deals with the hackneyed 'seeking refuge after failure of vehicle in snowstorm' plot, and manages it with a modicum of grace and style, and some interesting backstory -- that Lady Thief was Hooper's very first novel. It's not especially well-written and there are some problems with plot and setting.
#11: Natural History -- Justina Robson
This 2003 novel is the prequel to Living Next Door to the God of Love, which I've recently read and adored. Natural History is more firmly grounded in time and in space: it's set more than five hundred years in our future (and thirty years before Living Next Door), and most of the events take place in solar space. Not all of them, though: the mysterious, abandoned, earthlike planet where Voyager Lonestar Isol finds herself after an accident en route to Barnard's Star is nowhere near earth. In a sense, it's placeless.
Robson focuses, in this novel, on the Forged: cyborgs, I suppose, a deliberate blend of machine and human. The technology's come a long way since Anne McCaffrey's 'The Ship Who Sang'. Robson's Forged are asteroid miners, spaceships, terraformers, messengers (Phaeries), hive minds ... and each one of them is also a human being, regardless of Form and Function. The characterisation and insight in this novel are superbly credible. Yes, this is what it's like to be a massive creature trying to terraform a planet: this is how you'd think about the soil, the seeds, the atmosphere. Yes, this is what it's like to be utterly alone and further from home than anyone's ever been. Yes, this is what it's like to be an Unevolved human on an alien shore, abandoned except for the dubious support of a possibly-mad Forged.
I like these people. Even the ones who are essentially unpleasant. They're all profoundly human.
The point of the novel is Stuff, which is a sentient technology: it's what an earlier sentient race has become. (I think so, anyway. There's so much in this novel, in this uni/multiverse, that I kept wondering if my sense of understanding was a defence mechanism. Robson doesn't dumb down or condescend, and there are some difficult ideas in there.) Stuff welcomes humanity, welcomes it to become. Stuff is compassionate (the first sign of its sentience is when it smiles at somebody). Stuff is whatever somebody wants it to be: and it's everything that everyone involved with it has been, thought, dreamt.
They want to know, to live, to experience all lives. .. You study people throughout the ages. You wanted a thousand lives. Now you can have a billion lives, in there with them. You can be anything in a hundred worlds -- more, even. You could be me... Imagine a universe of history and life, living it all, from every angle.
The best science fiction shows the engagement of technology and humanity, and this is a prime example. Robson focuses on the reactions of those who encounter Stuff: Corvax achieving his heart's desire, his escape; Isol furiously rejecting everything it stands for, turning away, wanting to be alone; Zephyr, the student of humanity, finding a new life.
It's a very cinematic novel. Wide-screen vistas of space, the interstellar void, with Isol coasting through, 'American Pie' playing in her mind. (What it means to be Forged: you can play all of Earth's music in just over two years. But when the novel starts, Isol's slowed the song right down, a line a second.) Corvax's imaginary, unflyable aeroplane, and the house on the marshes. Rooftop parkland in a London that's still recognisable.
I'm not overly keen on the last chapter and its point of view: it feels like an afterthought and I don't know what it adds. But overall, I like the book very much indeed: an excellent example of how science fiction can explore the big philosophical questions (what it is to be human, what it is to be an individual, what price freedom etc) without resorting to infodumps or long debates.
I want to see how differently I read Living Next Door to the God of Love now that I know what came before.
Robson focuses, in this novel, on the Forged: cyborgs, I suppose, a deliberate blend of machine and human. The technology's come a long way since Anne McCaffrey's 'The Ship Who Sang'. Robson's Forged are asteroid miners, spaceships, terraformers, messengers (Phaeries), hive minds ... and each one of them is also a human being, regardless of Form and Function. The characterisation and insight in this novel are superbly credible. Yes, this is what it's like to be a massive creature trying to terraform a planet: this is how you'd think about the soil, the seeds, the atmosphere. Yes, this is what it's like to be utterly alone and further from home than anyone's ever been. Yes, this is what it's like to be an Unevolved human on an alien shore, abandoned except for the dubious support of a possibly-mad Forged.
I like these people. Even the ones who are essentially unpleasant. They're all profoundly human.
The point of the novel is Stuff, which is a sentient technology: it's what an earlier sentient race has become. (I think so, anyway. There's so much in this novel, in this uni/multiverse, that I kept wondering if my sense of understanding was a defence mechanism. Robson doesn't dumb down or condescend, and there are some difficult ideas in there.) Stuff welcomes humanity, welcomes it to become. Stuff is compassionate (the first sign of its sentience is when it smiles at somebody). Stuff is whatever somebody wants it to be: and it's everything that everyone involved with it has been, thought, dreamt.
They want to know, to live, to experience all lives. .. You study people throughout the ages. You wanted a thousand lives. Now you can have a billion lives, in there with them. You can be anything in a hundred worlds -- more, even. You could be me... Imagine a universe of history and life, living it all, from every angle.
The best science fiction shows the engagement of technology and humanity, and this is a prime example. Robson focuses on the reactions of those who encounter Stuff: Corvax achieving his heart's desire, his escape; Isol furiously rejecting everything it stands for, turning away, wanting to be alone; Zephyr, the student of humanity, finding a new life.
It's a very cinematic novel. Wide-screen vistas of space, the interstellar void, with Isol coasting through, 'American Pie' playing in her mind. (What it means to be Forged: you can play all of Earth's music in just over two years. But when the novel starts, Isol's slowed the song right down, a line a second.) Corvax's imaginary, unflyable aeroplane, and the house on the marshes. Rooftop parkland in a London that's still recognisable.
I'm not overly keen on the last chapter and its point of view: it feels like an afterthought and I don't know what it adds. But overall, I like the book very much indeed: an excellent example of how science fiction can explore the big philosophical questions (what it is to be human, what it is to be an individual, what price freedom etc) without resorting to infodumps or long debates.
I want to see how differently I read Living Next Door to the God of Love now that I know what came before.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
#10: Living Next-Door to the God of Love -- Justina Robson
I finished this novel yesterday and I'm still struggling to assimilate it. There's so much in here -- a convoluted plot, a thriving and evolving multiverse, hormones and dopamines, genre staples (vampires, cyborgs, dragons, comic-book heroes) harnessed as metaphor, teenaged lust, fairy-tale imagery, and a love story or two, or three -- that I find myself quite overwhelmed. I'm longing to go back and reread in one or two sessions, with an eye for the details I missed, because Robson's worlds -- and especially her characters -- are so beguiling that I want to understand every nuance.
There's some truly stunning writing in here, the kind that has me reading sentences aloud to an empty room because I want to register my admiration. There's one truly stomach-churning scene, which reminded me -- not in content, but in impact -- of Banks' Use of Weapons: there are switches from exotic locations to Cornwall in the 1980s that almost derail the reader with their sheer contrast. There's language so intense that it reminds me not of other prose writers, but of poets such as Eliot and Pound.
I haven't seen reviews of this novel yet (and don't want to, because I'll be writing one) but I'd bet that one of the criticisms levelled at it will be that it's self-indulgent. Another one might be that it's to eclectic: that it drags in too many elements, and reads in places like a catalogue of sfnal tropes. (I don't agree with either of these criticisms, by the way: but I can see how the sheer joie de vivre of the novel might be taken for a lack of control on the author's part.)
One thing that Living Next-Door to the God Of Love achieves is the exploration of some hoary cyberpunk issues (intelligence and its interaction with the body; conflicting data models of the universe; what happens when the machines don't obey) via characters who are as real, as engaging, as flawed as any I've encountered on the printed page.
Perhaps once I've read it again, I'll be able to summarise it.
There's some truly stunning writing in here, the kind that has me reading sentences aloud to an empty room because I want to register my admiration. There's one truly stomach-churning scene, which reminded me -- not in content, but in impact -- of Banks' Use of Weapons: there are switches from exotic locations to Cornwall in the 1980s that almost derail the reader with their sheer contrast. There's language so intense that it reminds me not of other prose writers, but of poets such as Eliot and Pound.
I haven't seen reviews of this novel yet (and don't want to, because I'll be writing one) but I'd bet that one of the criticisms levelled at it will be that it's self-indulgent. Another one might be that it's to eclectic: that it drags in too many elements, and reads in places like a catalogue of sfnal tropes. (I don't agree with either of these criticisms, by the way: but I can see how the sheer joie de vivre of the novel might be taken for a lack of control on the author's part.)
One thing that Living Next-Door to the God Of Love achieves is the exploration of some hoary cyberpunk issues (intelligence and its interaction with the body; conflicting data models of the universe; what happens when the machines don't obey) via characters who are as real, as engaging, as flawed as any I've encountered on the printed page.
Perhaps once I've read it again, I'll be able to summarise it.
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