While traveling, I either tend to read things that move quickly or that are otherwise giving me trouble. For my New Years’ travel this year, it was one of Donald E. Westlake’s crime novels, falling neatly into the first category. I’ve previously reviewed some of the other Parker novels here, both the original The Hunter and then a bunch of the others. These were all “classic” Parker, written in the sixties and seventies. Parker basically “retired” after Butcher’s Moon in 1974, but returned in Comeback in 1997 for a couple more encores. Breakout is one of the later, second period Parker novels, written in 2002.
Parker as a character has always been something of a blank slate. Besides the wife who died in The Hunter, he doesn’t have any family (besides the long-term girlfriend he picks up in The Rare Coin Score) or any backstory he’s ever shared with the reader, except in the most tangential possible way. We know that he’s around forty, that he grew up in cities, and that he’s one mean son of a bitch. He was stated to have received a bad conduct discharge for black marketeering in World War II, but while that would have made sense for the character in 1962 it certainly doesn’t for the same character in the new millennium unless he was portrayed as a geriatric. But no, Parker’s still always around forty and a mean son of a bitch, regardless of the year.
As much as I like Westlake and really enjoyed the Parker novels, I have to think that this character concept was reaching its sell-by date in the modern world. Parker steals cash, and in this wired world there’s just no cash to be had. Sure, he could knock over a payroll lender or a bank, but how far is that couple of grand going to get him? Same with his hot checks and credit cards. That sort of petty stuff won’t pay for his lake house, resort hotels, or periods of inactivity. The last big pools of cash liquidity these days are in the hands of organized crime, and while Parker isn’t necessarily against that sort of fratricide it’s often more trouble for him than it’s worth.
To his credit, Westlake appears to have realized this too. In Comeback, the first of the modern-era Parker novels, Parker and his crew hit a revival meeting, and in some of the other modern era novels he is diversifying into gemstones or, as in this case, certain valuable pharmaceuticals. The modern world also contains better police work, and so here he’s almost immediately busted and thrown into jail.
This is an entirely new direction for one of these stories, but the concept is essentially the same. Parker’s wanted in California for the murder of a prison guard. This was back in The Hunter, when he was doing a six-month stint on a vagrancy charge and was in a hurry to get out of the facility to get revenge. Ironically no one’s been incarcerated for vagrancy since the early 80s, as far as I know, meaning that he must have killed the guard while in for some other reason, since he’s still about forty and this takes place in the modern era. But I digress. He’s also wanted for a couple of murders in Nebraska, albeit under a different name, but they’ve got his prints. In short, he’s in trouble.
Since the Midwestern state where he’s located doesn’t want him for anything more than the warehouse break-in, they’re planning on shipping him to face the more serious charges elsewhere and holding him in an overcrowded facility with a bunch of other short-timers until then. Parker fights the extradition, and then in typical fashion begins viewing his options in his utterly amoral fashion. If he gets sent elsewhere or to a penitentiary, he may not be able to escape. Therefore, he must escape now. He will need to obtain help to do this. Only some of the prisoners are reliable; he will rely on them as much as he needs and no more. One will not help unless Parker agrees to work another job on the outside. He needs the help, therefore he will agree to do the job against his better nature. Having agreed to do something, he will do it unless and until someone crosses him, because that’s simply his nature.
Surprisingly, the jailbreak doesn’t take all that long and then the novel works its way through a dizzying array of impossible predicaments, first when the other job goes south in a horrific way and leaves Parker in almost a worse situation than he was already in, and then it just ratchets up the pressure on him again and again.
I’ve mentioned in my other reviews that Parker basically has no redeeming characteristics other than pride in a job well done, despite the fact that the job in question is immoral or illegal or both. Here he doesn’t really care if his compatriots die as long as their deaths don’t make life harder for him, and he sort of takes advantage of the fact that one of his associates feels like he owes Parker one (in a previous novel Parker helped this guy get away from a psychopathic partner and the police.) Parker gives a little internal viewpoint here in that he just doesn’t see the world that way – he considers abandoning the guy in a pretty bad spot since it will make his life easier, but decides not to because then he’ll hold a grudge and might make Parker’s life more difficult some day. But if the associate wants to think it’s altruism, then Parker’s perfectly okay with that.
From any objective sense, you shouldn’t want Parker to get away. He’s a thief and an unrepentant criminal and he’s killed dozens of people over the years, if he were real he’d be on an FBI list and they’d tell hushed tales of him around law enforcement breakfasts. But the narrative follows him, and you can’t help but hope he succeeds. Which he does, naturally. But the ending seems to really draw home the idea that Parker’s era is probably almost over, which aside from Westlake’s death it probably would have been anyway. I’d say it was bittersweet in its way if Parker had any emotion about it at all, but like the weather it’s just one of those things to him.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (and adapted by Peter Jackson)
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”.
So begins the 1937 fantasy classic, recently adapted into a new three-film epic film series by lunatic director Peter Jackson. I saw it over the winter break and then went back and re-read the book for the first time in probably a decade. I have various thoughts about the two, in which I will not hold back any particular spoilers for the film (if you’ve not seen it) or the book (if you can even call it spoilers for a book that is 76 years old).
I have a long association with The Hobbit. I’ve read it many times, and as many similarly-situated individuals tend to I fell from it into The Lord of the Rings in adolescence, and from there on to The Silmarillion and some of the other Tolkien works, but those with less enthusiasm. I’ve seen the Rankin-Bass adaptation of The Hobbit and Ralph Bakshi’s attempt at The Lord of the Rings. I even played the part of Dwalin in a children’s theater production one time (leading to my subsequent and otherwise inexplicable happiness that the film Dwalin is really cool). I naturally also saw Peter Jackson’s take on the Rings books. I really liked the first one but was less enthusiastic about the next two. But enough geek cred, let’s do the book.
One of the things that is easy to forget about The Hobbit is how funny it is. That’s not a word that tends to describe much of Tolkien’s later writing; there’s a bit of it towards the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, but at that point he thought he was writing an explicit Hobbit sequel and so that’s perhaps not surprising. There’s very little humor in the later LotR books or The Silmarillion at all. Given the subject matter, that’s perhaps to be expected, since in both cases we’re dealing with large armies in conflict against Satanic powers that intend to rule and dominate the world. Maybe that’s too bad, though, because Tolkien could actually do it quite well. The whole tone of The Hobbit is a traditional fairy tale told with barely contained delight. Although it’s generally told from Bilbo’s perspective there’s also an omniscient narrator who occasionally interrupts to throw in various asides and observations about the people and events.
Bilbo is of course the eponymous hobbit who is living in the luxury hole in the Shire, enjoying regular meals, his country squire lifestyle and not up to much of anything. Nonetheless, Gandalf the wizard sees something in him and decides to bring him along on a quest along with thirteen dwarves, billing him as an expert thief or “treasure hunter”, if he prefers. The dwarves don’t actually buy this but know better than to cross a wizard. Bilbo himself doesn’t even intend to go but basically gets tricked into it anyway by Gandalf, who essentially shoves him out the door without giving him a polite way to say “no”.
As a fairy tale this is absolutely great stuff. In terms of fitting into Tolkien’s legendarium, this is sort of a questionable undertaking. The dwarves are off to try to beat the dragon Smaug, who overthrew their mountain kingdom many years ago. In your average fairy tale, there’s a dragon under every other rock. This isn’t the case in Tolkien’s later works, where the dragons were created directly by Morgoth (Middle Earth’s equivalent of Satan), and although there were a reasonable number of them, only four were explicitly named, making even one dragon a pretty big deal – they were explicitly made for the purpose of fighting whole armies by themselves. Even here, though, we’re told that Smaug beat a whole human town and dwarven fortress all by himself back when he was younger. And this bunch of dwarves has no particular plan for defeating the dragon once they arrive at the mountain and no goal for what they are trying to do. They are also incompetent, since they get repeatedly beaten up and captured. In fact, let’s do a list of this.
In short, this book is really as good as I remembered it. Excellent stuff.
When I first heard that Jackson was going to adapt it to the screen, I was a little hesitant and a little excited. I think that The Lord of the Rings is really almost impossible to film, and Jackson and his crew did probably about the best job that you could expect within the American studio system and the different media. A lot of the changes that were made were justified, but at the same time he threw in some pretty stupid humor (e.g., dwarf-tossing jokes) and sucked out most of the poetry and quiet contemplation. The literary confrontation between Gandalf and Denethor in the book, a masterpiece of passive-aggressive spoken and unspoken antagonism later apologized as a “conflict between two terrible old men” devolved into one of the individuals beating another with a stick and driving him off a cliff while on fire. Points for spectacle, demerits for subtlety. But then, a glance at his filmography shows that restraint has never been Jackson’s strong point.
So the somewhat lighter tone of The Hobbit matches Jackson’s strengths, I thought, but then I hear that the studio wanted to make it three movies rather than two, and they filmed it in super high framerate 3D, and there was grousing. So I didn’t have super high expectations, and furthermore I heard so much negative stuff about the 3D version I didn’t even try it. And after it all, I have to say they did a pretty good job.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and just say that a lot of the problems inherent in trying to do this adaptation are Tolkien’s, not Jackson’s. Lord of the Rings is generally somber, serious, and epic. The Hobbit has Cockney-accented trolls, talking animals of every sort (eagles, spiders, dragons) and is generally goofy. If you’re trying to adapt both into the same coherent universe then you have to make adjustments to one or the other, and they made LotR first, so there you go, that thematic problem isn’t the filmmakers’ necessarily. They also decided to throw in a bunch of other random crap from the Appendices of LotR and other ancillary Tolkien material, which I guess you have to do if the studio is making you add three hours of screen time, and that is self-inflicted, since most of that stuff is also serious and doesn’t mesh too well with The Hobbit necessarily.
There are also a lot of different levels of Tolkien fandom out there. You’ve got people who know that it was Gandalf who entered Dol Goldur, not Radagast, and that the corruption of Greenwood the Great began long before Bilbo Baggins ever left the Shire, and this stuff ruins their movie experience. Then you’ve got people like me who know those things but don’t care as long as the movie is coherent. And then you’ve got people like my wife who are only there because their spouse agreed to see Guilt Trip in exchange and don’t know what an orc is. Jackson basically ignores the first category, throws bones where possible to the second category and doesn’t dumb things down too much for the third, although there are occasional glitches.
Anyway, this movie starts with a frame story of Ian Holm as Old Bilbo narrating the story of his adventure shortly before the birthday party which will play an important role in Fellowship of the Ring. Or perhaps it really starts with the tale of how Smaug the dragon kicked the dwarves out from under the Lonely Mountain – a well done scene where you don’t see the dragon very much. And there are further flashbacks and forwards, covering stuff like the Battle of Azanulbizar and a pretty unnecessary cameo of Frodo dealing with party invitations. This is a long movie and it takes a while to get going. Somewhat surprisingly Jackson actually shortens the introduction of the dwarves, who show up in more separate groups in the book. Here you get Dwalin, then Balin, then Fili and Kili, and then the filmmakers figure you get the point after that. A little surprising that they actually cut something, but there you go. They do something similar with the three trolls, where the book version of the dwarves get caught in ones and twos over a surprisingly long period of time.
I think that Gandalf maybe mentions “goblins” one time in the whole movie, the rest of the time sticking to “orc” for the primary antagonists. This is consistent with LotR and makes sense, but that’s sort of emblematic of the tone. Orcs sound meaner than goblins. They’re also leather-clad dermatologically challenged assholes who ride around on hyenas. Somewhat surprisingly they openly ride around in broad daylight – they aren’t trolls of course, this wouldn’t turn them to stone or anything, but in all of Tolkien’s works your average garden-variety orc would only come aboveground at night or on overcast days if they had any say whatsoever about it. I don’t remember if this was addressed in Jackson’s previous movies or not, and it’s actually such a minor nitpick that I can’t believe I’m even mentioning it. Moving on.
Jackson gets good work out of the cast, with Ian McKellan once more turning in a bravura performance as Gandalf the wizard. Martin Freeman is a good Bilbo, even if he seemed as perplexed as I did why he actually decides to tag along on this adventure (Gandalf doesn’t trick him here, and he uses surprisingly good sense in deciding to initially decline). The dwarves are also surprisingly effective and there aren’t as many Bombur jokes as I feared. They’ve got good camaraderie. The riddle game with Gollum also steals the whole film, as you might expect.
Like I said above, I think most of the changes that were made were reasonable or at least justifiable in the film transition. For instance, here no one's seen the dragon in 60 years and due to some other signs the dwarves aren't even really sure Smaug is even still alive, making their quest slightly less foolhardy than it otherwise might be, and more dwarves actually escaped from Smaug here.
There was only one change that really bothered me, and it was at the very end of the film. In the book the protagonists are treed by wolves and Gandalf responds by flinging improvised incendiary grenades at them. This works, but then the goblins show up – they’re not afraid of fire and they’ve got the ability to use tools, so they redirect the fire towards the trees that our heroes are hiding in and just wait to see how they will choose to die. Even Gandalf is out of ideas at this point, and the goblins sit around and sing some mocking songs at them.
Obviously such a powerless situation is to be avoided in a major studio action picture these days, as we just got through a long scene of the protagonists hacking through ten thousand CGI monster dudes. Instead of the goblins whose leader was just killed chasing them, it’s a totally different group of orcs that catch up and the trees are also more spaced out, and there’s a dramatic cliff there too for some reason. Rather than sitting up in the tree waiting to burn up and being scared to come down, we end up with yet another fight scene on the ground where Bilbo finally finds his courage and fights some giant orc to the death. Now I’m sorry, these scene had really good cinematography and was suitably dramatic, but really? Bilbo did kill some giant spiders in the book, but that’s about it for battle prowess and he did it while invisible, at that. So I ended up being pretty disappointed at the very end after being reasonably entertained up till then. This may just be me, though.
So, classic book, reasonably entertaining movie, enough to get me to watch the sequels, at any rate. I can’t fathom how there’s extra footage in the directors extended cut, but apparently there is. The mind boggles.
So begins the 1937 fantasy classic, recently adapted into a new three-film epic film series by lunatic director Peter Jackson. I saw it over the winter break and then went back and re-read the book for the first time in probably a decade. I have various thoughts about the two, in which I will not hold back any particular spoilers for the film (if you’ve not seen it) or the book (if you can even call it spoilers for a book that is 76 years old).
I have a long association with The Hobbit. I’ve read it many times, and as many similarly-situated individuals tend to I fell from it into The Lord of the Rings in adolescence, and from there on to The Silmarillion and some of the other Tolkien works, but those with less enthusiasm. I’ve seen the Rankin-Bass adaptation of The Hobbit and Ralph Bakshi’s attempt at The Lord of the Rings. I even played the part of Dwalin in a children’s theater production one time (leading to my subsequent and otherwise inexplicable happiness that the film Dwalin is really cool). I naturally also saw Peter Jackson’s take on the Rings books. I really liked the first one but was less enthusiastic about the next two. But enough geek cred, let’s do the book.
One of the things that is easy to forget about The Hobbit is how funny it is. That’s not a word that tends to describe much of Tolkien’s later writing; there’s a bit of it towards the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, but at that point he thought he was writing an explicit Hobbit sequel and so that’s perhaps not surprising. There’s very little humor in the later LotR books or The Silmarillion at all. Given the subject matter, that’s perhaps to be expected, since in both cases we’re dealing with large armies in conflict against Satanic powers that intend to rule and dominate the world. Maybe that’s too bad, though, because Tolkien could actually do it quite well. The whole tone of The Hobbit is a traditional fairy tale told with barely contained delight. Although it’s generally told from Bilbo’s perspective there’s also an omniscient narrator who occasionally interrupts to throw in various asides and observations about the people and events.
Bilbo is of course the eponymous hobbit who is living in the luxury hole in the Shire, enjoying regular meals, his country squire lifestyle and not up to much of anything. Nonetheless, Gandalf the wizard sees something in him and decides to bring him along on a quest along with thirteen dwarves, billing him as an expert thief or “treasure hunter”, if he prefers. The dwarves don’t actually buy this but know better than to cross a wizard. Bilbo himself doesn’t even intend to go but basically gets tricked into it anyway by Gandalf, who essentially shoves him out the door without giving him a polite way to say “no”.
As a fairy tale this is absolutely great stuff. In terms of fitting into Tolkien’s legendarium, this is sort of a questionable undertaking. The dwarves are off to try to beat the dragon Smaug, who overthrew their mountain kingdom many years ago. In your average fairy tale, there’s a dragon under every other rock. This isn’t the case in Tolkien’s later works, where the dragons were created directly by Morgoth (Middle Earth’s equivalent of Satan), and although there were a reasonable number of them, only four were explicitly named, making even one dragon a pretty big deal – they were explicitly made for the purpose of fighting whole armies by themselves. Even here, though, we’re told that Smaug beat a whole human town and dwarven fortress all by himself back when he was younger. And this bunch of dwarves has no particular plan for defeating the dragon once they arrive at the mountain and no goal for what they are trying to do. They are also incompetent, since they get repeatedly beaten up and captured. In fact, let’s do a list of this.
- They are first captured by a trio of trolls, who intend to eat them, almost immediately after starting out. Gandalf manages to save them.
- They are then captured by goblins in the mountains, who steal their horses and all their supplies. Originally this is just because the goblins are assholes and do this to anyone they can catch, but the goblins do decide to murder them specifically once they find out who this particular bunch is. Again, Gandalf manages to bail them out.
- This may be a continuation of #2, but after trying to get away they get treed by evil wolves and hide in the treetops, at which point the goblins they just escaped catch up with them. The goblins respond by setting the forest on fire. Our heroes are saved by giant, talking eagles.
- They’re subsequently captured by giant spiders. This time, Bilbo has acquired an invisibility ring and frees the dwarves.
- After escaping the spiders they are captured by elves and thrown into a dungeon. Bilbo manages to get them out, again with the invisibility ring.
In short, this book is really as good as I remembered it. Excellent stuff.
When I first heard that Jackson was going to adapt it to the screen, I was a little hesitant and a little excited. I think that The Lord of the Rings is really almost impossible to film, and Jackson and his crew did probably about the best job that you could expect within the American studio system and the different media. A lot of the changes that were made were justified, but at the same time he threw in some pretty stupid humor (e.g., dwarf-tossing jokes) and sucked out most of the poetry and quiet contemplation. The literary confrontation between Gandalf and Denethor in the book, a masterpiece of passive-aggressive spoken and unspoken antagonism later apologized as a “conflict between two terrible old men” devolved into one of the individuals beating another with a stick and driving him off a cliff while on fire. Points for spectacle, demerits for subtlety. But then, a glance at his filmography shows that restraint has never been Jackson’s strong point.
So the somewhat lighter tone of The Hobbit matches Jackson’s strengths, I thought, but then I hear that the studio wanted to make it three movies rather than two, and they filmed it in super high framerate 3D, and there was grousing. So I didn’t have super high expectations, and furthermore I heard so much negative stuff about the 3D version I didn’t even try it. And after it all, I have to say they did a pretty good job.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and just say that a lot of the problems inherent in trying to do this adaptation are Tolkien’s, not Jackson’s. Lord of the Rings is generally somber, serious, and epic. The Hobbit has Cockney-accented trolls, talking animals of every sort (eagles, spiders, dragons) and is generally goofy. If you’re trying to adapt both into the same coherent universe then you have to make adjustments to one or the other, and they made LotR first, so there you go, that thematic problem isn’t the filmmakers’ necessarily. They also decided to throw in a bunch of other random crap from the Appendices of LotR and other ancillary Tolkien material, which I guess you have to do if the studio is making you add three hours of screen time, and that is self-inflicted, since most of that stuff is also serious and doesn’t mesh too well with The Hobbit necessarily.
There are also a lot of different levels of Tolkien fandom out there. You’ve got people who know that it was Gandalf who entered Dol Goldur, not Radagast, and that the corruption of Greenwood the Great began long before Bilbo Baggins ever left the Shire, and this stuff ruins their movie experience. Then you’ve got people like me who know those things but don’t care as long as the movie is coherent. And then you’ve got people like my wife who are only there because their spouse agreed to see Guilt Trip in exchange and don’t know what an orc is. Jackson basically ignores the first category, throws bones where possible to the second category and doesn’t dumb things down too much for the third, although there are occasional glitches.
Anyway, this movie starts with a frame story of Ian Holm as Old Bilbo narrating the story of his adventure shortly before the birthday party which will play an important role in Fellowship of the Ring. Or perhaps it really starts with the tale of how Smaug the dragon kicked the dwarves out from under the Lonely Mountain – a well done scene where you don’t see the dragon very much. And there are further flashbacks and forwards, covering stuff like the Battle of Azanulbizar and a pretty unnecessary cameo of Frodo dealing with party invitations. This is a long movie and it takes a while to get going. Somewhat surprisingly Jackson actually shortens the introduction of the dwarves, who show up in more separate groups in the book. Here you get Dwalin, then Balin, then Fili and Kili, and then the filmmakers figure you get the point after that. A little surprising that they actually cut something, but there you go. They do something similar with the three trolls, where the book version of the dwarves get caught in ones and twos over a surprisingly long period of time.
I think that Gandalf maybe mentions “goblins” one time in the whole movie, the rest of the time sticking to “orc” for the primary antagonists. This is consistent with LotR and makes sense, but that’s sort of emblematic of the tone. Orcs sound meaner than goblins. They’re also leather-clad dermatologically challenged assholes who ride around on hyenas. Somewhat surprisingly they openly ride around in broad daylight – they aren’t trolls of course, this wouldn’t turn them to stone or anything, but in all of Tolkien’s works your average garden-variety orc would only come aboveground at night or on overcast days if they had any say whatsoever about it. I don’t remember if this was addressed in Jackson’s previous movies or not, and it’s actually such a minor nitpick that I can’t believe I’m even mentioning it. Moving on.
Jackson gets good work out of the cast, with Ian McKellan once more turning in a bravura performance as Gandalf the wizard. Martin Freeman is a good Bilbo, even if he seemed as perplexed as I did why he actually decides to tag along on this adventure (Gandalf doesn’t trick him here, and he uses surprisingly good sense in deciding to initially decline). The dwarves are also surprisingly effective and there aren’t as many Bombur jokes as I feared. They’ve got good camaraderie. The riddle game with Gollum also steals the whole film, as you might expect.
Like I said above, I think most of the changes that were made were reasonable or at least justifiable in the film transition. For instance, here no one's seen the dragon in 60 years and due to some other signs the dwarves aren't even really sure Smaug is even still alive, making their quest slightly less foolhardy than it otherwise might be, and more dwarves actually escaped from Smaug here.
There was only one change that really bothered me, and it was at the very end of the film. In the book the protagonists are treed by wolves and Gandalf responds by flinging improvised incendiary grenades at them. This works, but then the goblins show up – they’re not afraid of fire and they’ve got the ability to use tools, so they redirect the fire towards the trees that our heroes are hiding in and just wait to see how they will choose to die. Even Gandalf is out of ideas at this point, and the goblins sit around and sing some mocking songs at them.
Obviously such a powerless situation is to be avoided in a major studio action picture these days, as we just got through a long scene of the protagonists hacking through ten thousand CGI monster dudes. Instead of the goblins whose leader was just killed chasing them, it’s a totally different group of orcs that catch up and the trees are also more spaced out, and there’s a dramatic cliff there too for some reason. Rather than sitting up in the tree waiting to burn up and being scared to come down, we end up with yet another fight scene on the ground where Bilbo finally finds his courage and fights some giant orc to the death. Now I’m sorry, these scene had really good cinematography and was suitably dramatic, but really? Bilbo did kill some giant spiders in the book, but that’s about it for battle prowess and he did it while invisible, at that. So I ended up being pretty disappointed at the very end after being reasonably entertained up till then. This may just be me, though.
So, classic book, reasonably entertaining movie, enough to get me to watch the sequels, at any rate. I can’t fathom how there’s extra footage in the directors extended cut, but apparently there is. The mind boggles.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Gilgamesh: A New English Version by Stephen Mitchell
I grew up with a set of Greek and Roman mythological compilations and I love them to this day; I have occasionally tried to branch out into other myths and legends throughout the world and I’m at least passing familiar with most mythological traditions. I’ve never really liked Sumerian myths that much, though. They’re pretty weird. Neal Stephenson once described them as the writings of a febrile toddler, and even from an era where gods weren't necessarily expected to have superior moral standing to humans the Sumerian pantheon is a pretty psychotic bunch, especially Inanna, goddess of screwing and ultra-violence.
I think a lot of this has to do with the passage of time between then and now. The Greek mythological heroes are not “heroic” in the modern sense of that word; they aren’t do-gooders so much as they are strong and/or cunning enough to take what they want and tough enough that they can prevent other people from stopping them from doing it, and of course Sumeria is far more removed from us even than that. I think the lack of material also hurts. The mythological canon from Greece is one thing, but we also have a bunch of contemporary stuff by playwrights like Euripides that shows that even the ancient Greeks thought the gods and heroes were a bunch of huge jerks. If we had a huge bunch of surviving work from ancient Sumeria we’d probably find that the average person on the street wasn’t really all that much different than us. However, we don’t.
Anyway, Gilgamesh. Oldest known story in the world, drawn from a couple of clay tablets dug up in the middle of nowhere, so it’s a little fragmentary and contradictory; probably it was a popular tale which came in different versions and variations. It’s also pretty dry and a literal translation (which I’ve read in the past) contains a bunch of those repetitions and redundancies that would allow some poet to keep his place or recover from forgetting his place like you’d see in other oral works of antiquity. They’re actually pretty tough going and I don’t think I’d ever managed to read one through before. For these reasons I really admire Mitchell’s “version” (as opposed to “translation”) in which he cheerfully admits that he can’t read the work in the original language; he simply takes other translations, cleans up all the repetitions, and tries to set the whole thing in some sort of readable modern English prose. It’s still kind of an odd story, but I found myself pretty into it this time.
This version is split up into 11 chapters or “books”, which doesn’t really correspond to the original story but narratively works pretty well. In the beginning we’re introduced to Gilgamesh himself, the king of Uruk, being one-third human and two-thirds divine (however that’s supposed to work). At the moment he’s oppressing his subjects, forcing all the young women to sleep with him and working all the young men to exhaustion somehow (possibly with military training, possibly with building defensive walls around Uruk). He’s definitely a huge jerk but at the same time it’s also a case of him just being too awesome for his own good; his divine nature means he doesn’t ever sleep, so it’s not just a question of him simply terrorizing everybody, they can’t keep up with him. Nonetheless the people of Uruk petition the gods to give Gilgamesh something better to do – this being an ancient historical epic written by noblemen who hadn’t considered the notion of maybe just not having a jerkass king. Nonetheless.
The gods decide to create a friend for Gilgamesh and make the wild man Enkidu, who scares the trappers and peasants out in the boondocks of the kingdom until those people petition Gilgamesh to take care of this problem for them. You might think that he’d raise an army and go out there, but instead he sends one of the sacred prostitutes from the temple of Ishtar, Shamhat, to sort things out and then promptly forgets about the whole thing. Gilgamesh figures that this will tame the wild man, and after seven days of consecutive lovemaking he is proven correct. What he doesn’t figure is that Enkidu will subsequently hear about how awesome Gilgamesh is, come to Uruk to challenge him, followed by a knock-down brawl in the street that results in them becoming friends.
I guess Gilgamesh was used to subjects and hadn’t ever really had a friend before. At that point he decides that what they need is an adventure, so they decide to go kill the monster Humbaba, which is guarding a cedar forest at the behest of the gods. Humbaba is terrifying, I guess, but his job description is to stay in the forest and he doesn’t come out and harass the countryside or anything. Enkidu doesn’t really want to do this since he saw Humbaba once and thinks he’s not to be trifled with, but Gilgamesh is the king and so they do it anyway. Calling this a fight would be highly misleading, since basically once they get there Gilgamesh wants to give up, but then the gods magically grant them victory and Humbaba surrenders. Enkidu says they should kill him anyway and eventually persuades Gilgamesh to do it, although at this point Humbaba is no longer a threat to them and curses them with his dying breath. Then the impish duo manage to piss off the goddess Inanna by killing another supernatural monster, so the gods decree that Enkidu must die. Which he does.
At this point it’s worth pointing out that Sumerian mythology was sort of a bummer about the afterlife. Everyone went down to the underworld, ruled over by Erishkigal, and had to wear a suit of feathers and eat dust for eternity. I’ve also seen references that they weren’t able to talk. This was similar to the initial Greco/Roman conception of Hades, although by late antiquity they’d come up with the notion that especially good souls got rewards and especially bad ones got torments, but for a long time the afterlife was a very dreary and one-size-fits-all conception. Having been busy enjoying life, Gilgamesh hadn’t really given too much thought to this before, but losing his friend drives him sort of over the bend and he decides to seek the secret of eternal life. After a long series of quests which take up the actual majority of the saga, he fails. Nonetheless, the quests have taught him that he should just keep enjoying his life as long as he has it, and he then personally narrates the end of the tale, telling everyone how awesome Uruk is.
So, like I said, oldest story in the world. I can’t say that it’s enthralling exactly, but it’s a unique experience to know that anything contained in this story is almost as old as human civilization. Also interesting is the progression of the good life throughout mythology and how much it revolved around regular mealtimes. Forget money and possessions – they were doing all right with sufficient bread and beer, and regular visits to cult prostitutes of course. And although a lot of the motivations are sort of impenetrable to the modern reader, there are still some pretty funny scenes to be found here, particularly those involving the immortal Utnapishtim. He’s pretty cranky for an immortal guy and he thinks that Gilgamesh is full of crap for not wanting to die. In one sense he’s right, this is a stupid quest, but on the other hand it’s pretty easy for him to say that seeing as how the gods have exempted him from having to.
Having finished this I’m pretty much done with my desire to explore the Epic of Gilgamesh any further, so curiosity satisfied. Something a little more contemporary next time, I think.
I think a lot of this has to do with the passage of time between then and now. The Greek mythological heroes are not “heroic” in the modern sense of that word; they aren’t do-gooders so much as they are strong and/or cunning enough to take what they want and tough enough that they can prevent other people from stopping them from doing it, and of course Sumeria is far more removed from us even than that. I think the lack of material also hurts. The mythological canon from Greece is one thing, but we also have a bunch of contemporary stuff by playwrights like Euripides that shows that even the ancient Greeks thought the gods and heroes were a bunch of huge jerks. If we had a huge bunch of surviving work from ancient Sumeria we’d probably find that the average person on the street wasn’t really all that much different than us. However, we don’t.
Anyway, Gilgamesh. Oldest known story in the world, drawn from a couple of clay tablets dug up in the middle of nowhere, so it’s a little fragmentary and contradictory; probably it was a popular tale which came in different versions and variations. It’s also pretty dry and a literal translation (which I’ve read in the past) contains a bunch of those repetitions and redundancies that would allow some poet to keep his place or recover from forgetting his place like you’d see in other oral works of antiquity. They’re actually pretty tough going and I don’t think I’d ever managed to read one through before. For these reasons I really admire Mitchell’s “version” (as opposed to “translation”) in which he cheerfully admits that he can’t read the work in the original language; he simply takes other translations, cleans up all the repetitions, and tries to set the whole thing in some sort of readable modern English prose. It’s still kind of an odd story, but I found myself pretty into it this time.
This version is split up into 11 chapters or “books”, which doesn’t really correspond to the original story but narratively works pretty well. In the beginning we’re introduced to Gilgamesh himself, the king of Uruk, being one-third human and two-thirds divine (however that’s supposed to work). At the moment he’s oppressing his subjects, forcing all the young women to sleep with him and working all the young men to exhaustion somehow (possibly with military training, possibly with building defensive walls around Uruk). He’s definitely a huge jerk but at the same time it’s also a case of him just being too awesome for his own good; his divine nature means he doesn’t ever sleep, so it’s not just a question of him simply terrorizing everybody, they can’t keep up with him. Nonetheless the people of Uruk petition the gods to give Gilgamesh something better to do – this being an ancient historical epic written by noblemen who hadn’t considered the notion of maybe just not having a jerkass king. Nonetheless.
The gods decide to create a friend for Gilgamesh and make the wild man Enkidu, who scares the trappers and peasants out in the boondocks of the kingdom until those people petition Gilgamesh to take care of this problem for them. You might think that he’d raise an army and go out there, but instead he sends one of the sacred prostitutes from the temple of Ishtar, Shamhat, to sort things out and then promptly forgets about the whole thing. Gilgamesh figures that this will tame the wild man, and after seven days of consecutive lovemaking he is proven correct. What he doesn’t figure is that Enkidu will subsequently hear about how awesome Gilgamesh is, come to Uruk to challenge him, followed by a knock-down brawl in the street that results in them becoming friends.
I guess Gilgamesh was used to subjects and hadn’t ever really had a friend before. At that point he decides that what they need is an adventure, so they decide to go kill the monster Humbaba, which is guarding a cedar forest at the behest of the gods. Humbaba is terrifying, I guess, but his job description is to stay in the forest and he doesn’t come out and harass the countryside or anything. Enkidu doesn’t really want to do this since he saw Humbaba once and thinks he’s not to be trifled with, but Gilgamesh is the king and so they do it anyway. Calling this a fight would be highly misleading, since basically once they get there Gilgamesh wants to give up, but then the gods magically grant them victory and Humbaba surrenders. Enkidu says they should kill him anyway and eventually persuades Gilgamesh to do it, although at this point Humbaba is no longer a threat to them and curses them with his dying breath. Then the impish duo manage to piss off the goddess Inanna by killing another supernatural monster, so the gods decree that Enkidu must die. Which he does.
At this point it’s worth pointing out that Sumerian mythology was sort of a bummer about the afterlife. Everyone went down to the underworld, ruled over by Erishkigal, and had to wear a suit of feathers and eat dust for eternity. I’ve also seen references that they weren’t able to talk. This was similar to the initial Greco/Roman conception of Hades, although by late antiquity they’d come up with the notion that especially good souls got rewards and especially bad ones got torments, but for a long time the afterlife was a very dreary and one-size-fits-all conception. Having been busy enjoying life, Gilgamesh hadn’t really given too much thought to this before, but losing his friend drives him sort of over the bend and he decides to seek the secret of eternal life. After a long series of quests which take up the actual majority of the saga, he fails. Nonetheless, the quests have taught him that he should just keep enjoying his life as long as he has it, and he then personally narrates the end of the tale, telling everyone how awesome Uruk is.
So, like I said, oldest story in the world. I can’t say that it’s enthralling exactly, but it’s a unique experience to know that anything contained in this story is almost as old as human civilization. Also interesting is the progression of the good life throughout mythology and how much it revolved around regular mealtimes. Forget money and possessions – they were doing all right with sufficient bread and beer, and regular visits to cult prostitutes of course. And although a lot of the motivations are sort of impenetrable to the modern reader, there are still some pretty funny scenes to be found here, particularly those involving the immortal Utnapishtim. He’s pretty cranky for an immortal guy and he thinks that Gilgamesh is full of crap for not wanting to die. In one sense he’s right, this is a stupid quest, but on the other hand it’s pretty easy for him to say that seeing as how the gods have exempted him from having to.
Having finished this I’m pretty much done with my desire to explore the Epic of Gilgamesh any further, so curiosity satisfied. Something a little more contemporary next time, I think.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds
This isn’t the first time I’ve had Reynolds up here (I actually think it’s the third, but I don’t really feel like trawling the archives to look at the moment). I generally like his work, although as I believe I’ve said before, sometimes he writes some flat dialogue and occasionally his characters are simply horrible for the sake of being horrible. I’m happy to say that neither of those are especially the case in Century Rain, although as of yet I don’t know if he’s written a truly great novel, except possibly House of Suns.
This one is from 2004, so I’m a little late to the party here. As far as I’m aware, this work doesn’t tie in to any of the universes from his other novels, such as Revelation Space or House of Suns. In fact, I found large parts very refreshing, and something out of the ordinary for what I would have expected from a Reynolds work. A large portion of the novel takes place in 1960s-ish Europe, although it’s a different world than ours. In this particular universe, the German offensive through the Ardennes got blunted and thrown back in 1939, so World War II was over almost before it really began. As a result, the Nazis got overthrown in a military coup and many lives that ended in our world were saved. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. Without the ultimate discrediting of the war, there’s still rather a lot of virulent anti-Jewish and nationalist yahoos throughout Europe and they’re beginning to make their bids for power again. And whatever else the war destroyed, it also served as the impetus for a lot of technological change. This world doesn’t have electronic computers, a space program, or the atomic bomb. You might say that sounds all right if you don’t have to worry about ducking and covering, but as it happens it’s sort of a shadowy conspiracy to retard technological development so that it’s easier for a bunch of other humans to conquer it.
The other half of the book takes place in the ruins of the actual Earth we’re familiar with, where the humans that remain are split up into two spacegoing factions due to the accidental destruction of the Earth’s biosphere with rogue nanotechnology and subsequent corruption of most of the data archives of humanity’s history (whether that was also accidental or a deliberate attack is not clear). The Threshers live in near Earth orbit primarily and control access to what’s left of it; they’re more hidebound and avoid the use of nanotechnology. The Slashers live in the outer system and are more hedonistic and somewhat more advanced than the Threshers, made up for by the fact that they’re also more factional. The Slashers control access to the galaxy at large through a mysterious warp gate which was discovered out there, which was apparently made by alien(s) unknown at some point in the distant past. You’d be hard pressed to say that either side is the good guys or the bad guys, since they’ve got something of a nasty history of both hot and cold wars, often resorting to various sorts of doomsday weapons.
This is something of a departure for Reynolds, who often eschews the implausible or the impossible in his work. In this one you’ve got these alien artifacts that do stuff like allow FTL travel or contain entire planets, and although he does try to explain a little bit he mostly just lets them be. So this one is much softer than some of his other works right off the bat. Nonetheless, he does retain the concept that space is big, so the fact that the Slashers can get out into the universe doesn’t really help all that much since there’s not really much out there to do. At least not until they discover that the same mysterious aliens who created the warpgate networks also took a “snapshot” of Earth circa 1936 and put it somewhere out in the universe in a box.
And that’s how the two stories come together. Some of the Slashers think it would be a good idea to wipe out the existing humans on the copied world and then talk real estate with the Threshers. Of course there are a couple of problems with this plan, namely that the Threshers won’t approve of this, secondly that they can’t bring anything sophisticated through the warp gate that leads inside the box, and thirdly that they aren’t sure where exactly the box is. Nonetheless they think there may be ways around these obstacles.
I generally liked this, it was entertaining enough. There are a couple of chase scenes of course, that being something that Reynolds either really likes or just feels like he does well, possibly both, so I figured that would turn up at some point throughout the work. Even though these characters were reasonably well defined and not really at all horrible, I still found myself not quite able to connect with them. The villainous plot is pretty cool but, I don’t know, it didn’t entirely gel for me that a whole planet was really going to be scoured of human life. It seemed like there were much easier ways to do what they wanted to do aside from the mass genocide.
Nonetheless, not bad, some good action scenes and also contemplation. I can’t say that this is my favorite Reynolds work but it’s probably better than some and it didn’t put me off his work either, so definitely worth a look if you like his other stuff.
This one is from 2004, so I’m a little late to the party here. As far as I’m aware, this work doesn’t tie in to any of the universes from his other novels, such as Revelation Space or House of Suns. In fact, I found large parts very refreshing, and something out of the ordinary for what I would have expected from a Reynolds work. A large portion of the novel takes place in 1960s-ish Europe, although it’s a different world than ours. In this particular universe, the German offensive through the Ardennes got blunted and thrown back in 1939, so World War II was over almost before it really began. As a result, the Nazis got overthrown in a military coup and many lives that ended in our world were saved. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. Without the ultimate discrediting of the war, there’s still rather a lot of virulent anti-Jewish and nationalist yahoos throughout Europe and they’re beginning to make their bids for power again. And whatever else the war destroyed, it also served as the impetus for a lot of technological change. This world doesn’t have electronic computers, a space program, or the atomic bomb. You might say that sounds all right if you don’t have to worry about ducking and covering, but as it happens it’s sort of a shadowy conspiracy to retard technological development so that it’s easier for a bunch of other humans to conquer it.
The other half of the book takes place in the ruins of the actual Earth we’re familiar with, where the humans that remain are split up into two spacegoing factions due to the accidental destruction of the Earth’s biosphere with rogue nanotechnology and subsequent corruption of most of the data archives of humanity’s history (whether that was also accidental or a deliberate attack is not clear). The Threshers live in near Earth orbit primarily and control access to what’s left of it; they’re more hidebound and avoid the use of nanotechnology. The Slashers live in the outer system and are more hedonistic and somewhat more advanced than the Threshers, made up for by the fact that they’re also more factional. The Slashers control access to the galaxy at large through a mysterious warp gate which was discovered out there, which was apparently made by alien(s) unknown at some point in the distant past. You’d be hard pressed to say that either side is the good guys or the bad guys, since they’ve got something of a nasty history of both hot and cold wars, often resorting to various sorts of doomsday weapons.
This is something of a departure for Reynolds, who often eschews the implausible or the impossible in his work. In this one you’ve got these alien artifacts that do stuff like allow FTL travel or contain entire planets, and although he does try to explain a little bit he mostly just lets them be. So this one is much softer than some of his other works right off the bat. Nonetheless, he does retain the concept that space is big, so the fact that the Slashers can get out into the universe doesn’t really help all that much since there’s not really much out there to do. At least not until they discover that the same mysterious aliens who created the warpgate networks also took a “snapshot” of Earth circa 1936 and put it somewhere out in the universe in a box.
And that’s how the two stories come together. Some of the Slashers think it would be a good idea to wipe out the existing humans on the copied world and then talk real estate with the Threshers. Of course there are a couple of problems with this plan, namely that the Threshers won’t approve of this, secondly that they can’t bring anything sophisticated through the warp gate that leads inside the box, and thirdly that they aren’t sure where exactly the box is. Nonetheless they think there may be ways around these obstacles.
I generally liked this, it was entertaining enough. There are a couple of chase scenes of course, that being something that Reynolds either really likes or just feels like he does well, possibly both, so I figured that would turn up at some point throughout the work. Even though these characters were reasonably well defined and not really at all horrible, I still found myself not quite able to connect with them. The villainous plot is pretty cool but, I don’t know, it didn’t entirely gel for me that a whole planet was really going to be scoured of human life. It seemed like there were much easier ways to do what they wanted to do aside from the mass genocide.
Nonetheless, not bad, some good action scenes and also contemplation. I can’t say that this is my favorite Reynolds work but it’s probably better than some and it didn’t put me off his work either, so definitely worth a look if you like his other stuff.
Friday, October 26, 2012
John Dies at The End & This Book is Full of Spiders by David Wong
I’ve been meaning to read John Dies at the End for a while but finally got inspired when I found out that it had been optioned and made into a movie directed by Don Coscarelli. Now I’m not going to say that Coscarelli is a great director or anything, but he did direct The Beastmaster and Bubba Ho-Tep, so let’s give him high marks for material at least. (Actually I think Bubba Ho-Tep is a fantastic movie and if you don’t think so then there’s probably something wrong with you. At any rate I think anyone would concede it’s the best movie ever made about Elvis Presley fighting a mummy in an East Texas nursing home.) Also the movie has Paul Giamatti in it, which is pretty cool. I like Giamatti, since he’s in all these solid, award winning films and then he’ll take some role as a crazed gunman or hammy villain or something, it’s clear he just loves to do that stuff.
I guess that’s just tangential to the book itself, which is by David Wong and features David Wong as protagonist, or at least the fictional Wong, since that’s really the pen name of Jason Pargin. He chose the pen name to keep his online writing and personal life separate, but it says so right on the back cover, no breach of trust required. I was familiar with Wong’s writing from cracked.com, and generally consider him one of the stronger (and funnier) writers in the stable over there, one of the others being John Cheese, which isn’t his real name either but is the basis for the fictional John of this book. Anyhow, David Wong.
I had no idea he could write like this.
This is a fantastic debut novel and an excellent seasonal choice, being both silly and scary as hell. Again, I’m not going to say that this is great in every sense of that word, there are some pacing issues and spots where it’s maybe not as tight as it should be – but this is pretty solid. Well done, Wong.
Despite the fact that it is almost entirely unlike Illuminatus! in plot, theme, or structure, that was the comparison my mind kept throwing up while I was reading it. There’s some of the same neo-Lovecraft pastiche, and a lot of similar mind screws, plus stupid puns and low humor. Reading it also gives you the same impression that you’re reading something by some poor guy who has completely lost his mind. It’s immersive in the same way that Illuminatus! is; you’ve got the (perhaps) unreliable narrator who’s telling the story, and they keep going back and maybe what happened is just a little different than what he said the time before, and even though Wong keeps pulling that trick you think you’re on more solid ground than you are. No matter how many rugs he pulls, you figure you’re on the last one. And you never are. Even after I just said that.
There’s also extremely effective use of alternating comedy and horror. You’ve got this poor teenage kid who gets covered in demonic hell worms or something, and he’s shrieking and screaming as they burrow through his skin, and the description could be right out of Steven King. Then it’s over, he’s fine. Okay, he’s possessed by these demons or whatever, but he generally manifests this by going around punching people in the balls for a while, making him pretty low on the threat level and playing for laughs. And then when you’re used to the dick-punching he goes and does something really bad. That’s pretty good storytelling right there.
There’s also just some really effective horror elements throughout, and Wong puts you right in the middle of it. There’s a great part where the fictional Wong comes to in his room after work, but it looks like it’s been ransacked and someone stole his gun, but then it turns out he’s actually holding the gun and the barrel is a little warm and there aren’t as many bullets as there should be in there and if he just came in from the garage he shouldn’t feel like he’s been walking around in the snow outside for half an hour and he’s pretty sure that if he goes out in his tool shed there’s going to be a dead body there. Or when he’s with a guy and told not to look in the mirror, but he does anyway and there’s nobody there, and then the guy starts smiling and comes to choke him to death.
Stuff like that.
The frame story itself is not so great, I guess. Wong is meeting a journalist at a restaurant to tell him about all the crazy stuff he’s gotten mixed up in, which means that we end up hearing the origin story maybe a few more times than strictly necessary. Suffice to say that David and his friend John got the ability to see things Man Wasn’t Meant to See as the result of taking some drugs, or rather a drug, by a wacked-out Rastafarian who probably wasn’t really a Rastafarian, and maybe not even a person. They call the drug “soy sauce”. It isn’t soy sauce. Instead, it unlocks the secrets of the universe. Or kills you. Sometimes both, not necessarily in that order.
In short, I liked it. Funny, scary, well paced and surprisingly literate, it’s a great tale of the supernatural as narrated by a guy who sits around his house eating cheap burritos and playing video games.
I also got the sequel, This Book is Full of Spiders, and that one is head and shoulders better. Wong’s writing is more assured, the plot is tighter without as much screwing around, and it’s both more funny and much scarier. I don’t scare easy, but I actually found myself clenching up a couple of times.
Instead of the more freewheeling narrative of John Dies, this one is more of a coherent narrative about how the town gets infested by invisible, possibly extradimensional spiders that attack people, turn them into zombies and, you know, eat their soft parts and whatnot. I’ve mentioned before that everyone feels compelled to do a zombie story these days and that I’m pretty much sick of it, but this very well may be the best take on the genre that I’ve seen yet. For one thing, the scariest sequence isn’t actually about the zombies, but rather the one where Wong wakes up in a quarantine facility after losing a week of his memories, and then finds that the other inhabitants have been making use of his supernatural abilities to detect which other inmates are infected with the spiders. The prisoners also come into the quarantine in either a red or green jumpsuit and have segregated themselves accordingly, for very little good reason. One of the Reds has the only gun but the Greens have the best territory. Eventually you find out there's more going on than you might have initially imagined, but even then the issues are not necessarily cut and dried. As one of the characters points out, at any point past toddlerhood it's usually not that easy to know who to shoot at.
Like any good zombie story, the zombies aren’t really the issue. Wong wrote a very good article about the monkeysphere at one point; that’s what is going on here. And while the extradimensional parasitic infestation is certainly a problem, it’s really the forces demanding its eradication that get out of hand. It’s actually got a lot of seriously weighty stuff going on regarding social dynamics and the human condition, while still being laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely creepy.
I guess it’s a sequel in the sense that John and Dave are still in it and still basically assholes, but if you’d never read John Dies you’d simply pick the story right up. It’s less of a continuing adventure and more of a stand alone, with a better novel structure to boot. Also back is Dr. Marconi, who I’d say is something of Dave and John’s rival in the supernatural biz, except that he’s educated, poised, wealthy and somehow always wearing a tailored suit, even during the apocalypse. I bet Dave and John would hate him if he wasn’t so awesome. (In the movie I see they cast Clancy Brown in this part, which seems about right; or that guy from the Dos Equis commercials.)
These aren’t perfect, and they’re not for everyone, but I like this blend of low humor and research, so there you go. There aren’t many books that I’ve read that have both explanations for video game logic as well as velvet paintings of Jesus Christ, but here I’ve found one. If you just read one, read This Book is Full of Spiders, but both are worthwhile in their own way. Or if you have a kid that is sleeping excessively, you could try using either as a bedtime story. I guarantee that they won’t be sleeping much after that.
I guess that’s just tangential to the book itself, which is by David Wong and features David Wong as protagonist, or at least the fictional Wong, since that’s really the pen name of Jason Pargin. He chose the pen name to keep his online writing and personal life separate, but it says so right on the back cover, no breach of trust required. I was familiar with Wong’s writing from cracked.com, and generally consider him one of the stronger (and funnier) writers in the stable over there, one of the others being John Cheese, which isn’t his real name either but is the basis for the fictional John of this book. Anyhow, David Wong.
I had no idea he could write like this.
This is a fantastic debut novel and an excellent seasonal choice, being both silly and scary as hell. Again, I’m not going to say that this is great in every sense of that word, there are some pacing issues and spots where it’s maybe not as tight as it should be – but this is pretty solid. Well done, Wong.
Despite the fact that it is almost entirely unlike Illuminatus! in plot, theme, or structure, that was the comparison my mind kept throwing up while I was reading it. There’s some of the same neo-Lovecraft pastiche, and a lot of similar mind screws, plus stupid puns and low humor. Reading it also gives you the same impression that you’re reading something by some poor guy who has completely lost his mind. It’s immersive in the same way that Illuminatus! is; you’ve got the (perhaps) unreliable narrator who’s telling the story, and they keep going back and maybe what happened is just a little different than what he said the time before, and even though Wong keeps pulling that trick you think you’re on more solid ground than you are. No matter how many rugs he pulls, you figure you’re on the last one. And you never are. Even after I just said that.
There’s also extremely effective use of alternating comedy and horror. You’ve got this poor teenage kid who gets covered in demonic hell worms or something, and he’s shrieking and screaming as they burrow through his skin, and the description could be right out of Steven King. Then it’s over, he’s fine. Okay, he’s possessed by these demons or whatever, but he generally manifests this by going around punching people in the balls for a while, making him pretty low on the threat level and playing for laughs. And then when you’re used to the dick-punching he goes and does something really bad. That’s pretty good storytelling right there.
There’s also just some really effective horror elements throughout, and Wong puts you right in the middle of it. There’s a great part where the fictional Wong comes to in his room after work, but it looks like it’s been ransacked and someone stole his gun, but then it turns out he’s actually holding the gun and the barrel is a little warm and there aren’t as many bullets as there should be in there and if he just came in from the garage he shouldn’t feel like he’s been walking around in the snow outside for half an hour and he’s pretty sure that if he goes out in his tool shed there’s going to be a dead body there. Or when he’s with a guy and told not to look in the mirror, but he does anyway and there’s nobody there, and then the guy starts smiling and comes to choke him to death.
Stuff like that.
The frame story itself is not so great, I guess. Wong is meeting a journalist at a restaurant to tell him about all the crazy stuff he’s gotten mixed up in, which means that we end up hearing the origin story maybe a few more times than strictly necessary. Suffice to say that David and his friend John got the ability to see things Man Wasn’t Meant to See as the result of taking some drugs, or rather a drug, by a wacked-out Rastafarian who probably wasn’t really a Rastafarian, and maybe not even a person. They call the drug “soy sauce”. It isn’t soy sauce. Instead, it unlocks the secrets of the universe. Or kills you. Sometimes both, not necessarily in that order.
In short, I liked it. Funny, scary, well paced and surprisingly literate, it’s a great tale of the supernatural as narrated by a guy who sits around his house eating cheap burritos and playing video games.
I also got the sequel, This Book is Full of Spiders, and that one is head and shoulders better. Wong’s writing is more assured, the plot is tighter without as much screwing around, and it’s both more funny and much scarier. I don’t scare easy, but I actually found myself clenching up a couple of times.
Instead of the more freewheeling narrative of John Dies, this one is more of a coherent narrative about how the town gets infested by invisible, possibly extradimensional spiders that attack people, turn them into zombies and, you know, eat their soft parts and whatnot. I’ve mentioned before that everyone feels compelled to do a zombie story these days and that I’m pretty much sick of it, but this very well may be the best take on the genre that I’ve seen yet. For one thing, the scariest sequence isn’t actually about the zombies, but rather the one where Wong wakes up in a quarantine facility after losing a week of his memories, and then finds that the other inhabitants have been making use of his supernatural abilities to detect which other inmates are infected with the spiders. The prisoners also come into the quarantine in either a red or green jumpsuit and have segregated themselves accordingly, for very little good reason. One of the Reds has the only gun but the Greens have the best territory. Eventually you find out there's more going on than you might have initially imagined, but even then the issues are not necessarily cut and dried. As one of the characters points out, at any point past toddlerhood it's usually not that easy to know who to shoot at.
Like any good zombie story, the zombies aren’t really the issue. Wong wrote a very good article about the monkeysphere at one point; that’s what is going on here. And while the extradimensional parasitic infestation is certainly a problem, it’s really the forces demanding its eradication that get out of hand. It’s actually got a lot of seriously weighty stuff going on regarding social dynamics and the human condition, while still being laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely creepy.
I guess it’s a sequel in the sense that John and Dave are still in it and still basically assholes, but if you’d never read John Dies you’d simply pick the story right up. It’s less of a continuing adventure and more of a stand alone, with a better novel structure to boot. Also back is Dr. Marconi, who I’d say is something of Dave and John’s rival in the supernatural biz, except that he’s educated, poised, wealthy and somehow always wearing a tailored suit, even during the apocalypse. I bet Dave and John would hate him if he wasn’t so awesome. (In the movie I see they cast Clancy Brown in this part, which seems about right; or that guy from the Dos Equis commercials.)
These aren’t perfect, and they’re not for everyone, but I like this blend of low humor and research, so there you go. There aren’t many books that I’ve read that have both explanations for video game logic as well as velvet paintings of Jesus Christ, but here I’ve found one. If you just read one, read This Book is Full of Spiders, but both are worthwhile in their own way. Or if you have a kid that is sleeping excessively, you could try using either as a bedtime story. I guarantee that they won’t be sleeping much after that.
Monday, October 22, 2012
The First Emancipator by Andrew Levy
Robert Carter III played in a band with Thomas Jefferson (and sent bill collectors after him a few times too), was active as a patriot during the American Revolution and may very well have been the richest man in Virginia, which would have made him one of the wealthiest men in the newly-fledged United States. He corresponded with a bunch of folks you’ve heard of from history class and would have been widely known by his contemporaries. He also decided to free his nearly five hundred slaves during his lifetime, an event which was the single largest act of manumission in the United States until the Civil War ended slavery in the United States altogether.
So why hasn’t anyone ever heard of him?
Andrew Levy’s analysis of Carter and his times is a fairly masterful work that tries to figure out why he’s a forgotten figure. Levy’s conclusion is that he simply doesn’t fit anyone’s narrative and therefore everyone just sort of nervously shies away from talking about him.
At the risk of painting with a broad brush, let me . . . actually, let’s just get out the broad brush here. You’ve basically got two different pictures of antebellum slavery. One side (the apologetic) portrays it as bad but not too bad; slaves were valuable property after all and the owners had incentive to look after them, slaveholders would have really liked to let their slaves go but just economically couldn’t manage to, and the social mores of the day were different. On the other side (the abolitional) you’ve got a wicked institution that separated families, embraced authoritarianism and cruelty, and was overseen by moral monsters who were perfectly capable of telling right from wrong. Personally, I’d lean more towards the second viewpoint, but the fact is very little that humans do is perfectly crystal clear. (I would also state that given the lack of volunteers to become slaves, this particular area is clearer than most.)
Carter actually wasn’t too likeable, being insulated by his immense wealth from practical concerns and thereby not especially being able to relate to other people, even his peers. This paradoxically helped him out in his later endeavors when he basically didn’t care what his neighbors thought of him, although he did try to space out the manumissions to not cause undue concern. He really loved his wife and they had seventeen children, although many of them didn’t survive. He had a series of religious epiphanies throughout his life, including at least one near-death experience, which caused him to join up with non-established churches like the Baptists at a time where there was an established church in Virginia and such things were Not Done.
In fact, some of the best things in this book simply deal with the sort of everyday life in colonial and immediately post-colonial Virginia that tend to get elided from the history books. Baptist preachers got thrown in jail and beat up but kept on drawing crowds anyway; men and women spent their nights drinking hard and partying harder every single day until the scandals couldn’t be contained. Everyone was suing each other and taking offense at everything all the time.
Anyway, Carter himself was a pretty paradoxical figure. His religious leanings may have made him believe that he was theoretically equal to his slaves, but he never really acted like anyone at all was his equal. Carter may have allowed his slaves to have more autonomy than most other slaveholders did, but he also didn’t really discipline his sons too much for sleeping with the house slaves (although he apparently never did so himself). At some point he did send some of his sons out of Virginia so they wouldn’t be exposed to all the immorality around, and toward the end of his life he ended up leaving himself, eventually being buried in an unmarked grave.
At the same time you really want to commend Carter for what he was doing in deciding to free all his slaves, he never really gave a good explanation for it, treating it more like some task he had to complete rather than a moral crusade. And he was still really, truly rich. It’s not like he gave away everything he owned to end up in penury and he seemed to be personally offended when slaves he freed decided that they would really rather not work for him as freemen any more. This strikes at the heart of why no one really likes to talk about him. To the apologists, he’s a living counterexample to the notion that slaveholders didn’t know better and/or simply couldn’t make it without slavery. To the abolitionists, he never gave any good justifications for his behavior and it didn’t exact a huge personal toll on him, plus he still seemed to have pretty reactionary attitudes.
Shortly after his death, the rules were changed so that manumissions of this sort wouldn’t have been possible any longer. It doesn’t seem that it was a response to him as such, although his contemporaries would have certainly known about it and didn’t exactly approve. There was just a general retrenchment in the slaveholding societies that eventually culminated in the Civil War. It may seem strange to describe a system of slavery as a more gentle time, but Carter hit a particular window where he was able to do some good in an unusual way.
For students of colonial history, this is an engaging story that really humanizes some figures that could use some of that treatment. It raises some bigger questions about modern society that I don’t think it necessarily addresses that well, and some parts do drag a little, but this is one of my favorite non-fiction books of the year.
So why hasn’t anyone ever heard of him?
Andrew Levy’s analysis of Carter and his times is a fairly masterful work that tries to figure out why he’s a forgotten figure. Levy’s conclusion is that he simply doesn’t fit anyone’s narrative and therefore everyone just sort of nervously shies away from talking about him.
At the risk of painting with a broad brush, let me . . . actually, let’s just get out the broad brush here. You’ve basically got two different pictures of antebellum slavery. One side (the apologetic) portrays it as bad but not too bad; slaves were valuable property after all and the owners had incentive to look after them, slaveholders would have really liked to let their slaves go but just economically couldn’t manage to, and the social mores of the day were different. On the other side (the abolitional) you’ve got a wicked institution that separated families, embraced authoritarianism and cruelty, and was overseen by moral monsters who were perfectly capable of telling right from wrong. Personally, I’d lean more towards the second viewpoint, but the fact is very little that humans do is perfectly crystal clear. (I would also state that given the lack of volunteers to become slaves, this particular area is clearer than most.)
Carter actually wasn’t too likeable, being insulated by his immense wealth from practical concerns and thereby not especially being able to relate to other people, even his peers. This paradoxically helped him out in his later endeavors when he basically didn’t care what his neighbors thought of him, although he did try to space out the manumissions to not cause undue concern. He really loved his wife and they had seventeen children, although many of them didn’t survive. He had a series of religious epiphanies throughout his life, including at least one near-death experience, which caused him to join up with non-established churches like the Baptists at a time where there was an established church in Virginia and such things were Not Done.
In fact, some of the best things in this book simply deal with the sort of everyday life in colonial and immediately post-colonial Virginia that tend to get elided from the history books. Baptist preachers got thrown in jail and beat up but kept on drawing crowds anyway; men and women spent their nights drinking hard and partying harder every single day until the scandals couldn’t be contained. Everyone was suing each other and taking offense at everything all the time.
Anyway, Carter himself was a pretty paradoxical figure. His religious leanings may have made him believe that he was theoretically equal to his slaves, but he never really acted like anyone at all was his equal. Carter may have allowed his slaves to have more autonomy than most other slaveholders did, but he also didn’t really discipline his sons too much for sleeping with the house slaves (although he apparently never did so himself). At some point he did send some of his sons out of Virginia so they wouldn’t be exposed to all the immorality around, and toward the end of his life he ended up leaving himself, eventually being buried in an unmarked grave.
At the same time you really want to commend Carter for what he was doing in deciding to free all his slaves, he never really gave a good explanation for it, treating it more like some task he had to complete rather than a moral crusade. And he was still really, truly rich. It’s not like he gave away everything he owned to end up in penury and he seemed to be personally offended when slaves he freed decided that they would really rather not work for him as freemen any more. This strikes at the heart of why no one really likes to talk about him. To the apologists, he’s a living counterexample to the notion that slaveholders didn’t know better and/or simply couldn’t make it without slavery. To the abolitionists, he never gave any good justifications for his behavior and it didn’t exact a huge personal toll on him, plus he still seemed to have pretty reactionary attitudes.
Shortly after his death, the rules were changed so that manumissions of this sort wouldn’t have been possible any longer. It doesn’t seem that it was a response to him as such, although his contemporaries would have certainly known about it and didn’t exactly approve. There was just a general retrenchment in the slaveholding societies that eventually culminated in the Civil War. It may seem strange to describe a system of slavery as a more gentle time, but Carter hit a particular window where he was able to do some good in an unusual way.
For students of colonial history, this is an engaging story that really humanizes some figures that could use some of that treatment. It raises some bigger questions about modern society that I don’t think it necessarily addresses that well, and some parts do drag a little, but this is one of my favorite non-fiction books of the year.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks
T.C. Vilabier’s 26-th String Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented, catalog number MW1211 (a.k.a. "The Hydrogen Sonata"), is best played on an instrument informally called the antagonistic elevenstring, which ideally requires the player to have four arms and sit inside the cavity of the instrument itself. One of the protagonists of this novel has had the extra arms fitted so that she can try to get through the piece, which is notorious for its complexity and also for being thoroughly unpleasant to actually listen to. Incidentially, the elevenstring has more than eleven strings. So that’s the sort of thing we’re dealing with here.
If you’re not familiar with the Culture series by Banks, then this being the tenth volume in said series may not be the best place to start. If you are familiar with it, then this one will probably be pleasant enough, but somewhat more insubstantial than some of his other works.
The Culture novels have always been somewhat unique in their actual epic scale. A lot of ostensible galaxy-spanning empires in fiction seem to have a relatively small cast of characters which actually accomplish everything which needs doing. In contrast, the Culture is so vast that even if events are referenced from earlier novels, there tends not to be any overlap in personnel. In fact the galaxy is so big that not even the alien species show up more than once or twice, so it’s not a Federation vs. Klingons kind of thing – each book can introduce whole new problems that you’ve never even heard of before since there’s just so much there. In terms of continuity, this one takes place sometime after Excession and probably sometime before Surface Detail (they mention needing a Contact section which is actually in existence in Surface Detail).
The focus of this novel is on Sublimation, the ultimate end state of most advanced civilizations in Banks’ work, wherein they withdraw from the physical universe we’re familiar with and hang out in higher order dimensions. For all intents and purposes it’s a one way trip. The very, very few entities that do come back find themselves somewhat limited in what they are able to convey about it, but apparently no one ever suggests that it’s a bad idea to go. The Culture is highly suspicious about the whole thing, and it’s not them talking about taking this trip; in this case it is the Gzilt, a humanoid civilization that was actually one of the founding members of the Culture but didn’t join in at the last minute. The reason that the Culture has been down on the idea is that it smacks of coercion; as we discover in this one when a species decides to Sublime it's all over in about an hour after the process begins. The Gzilt have set a time to departure, and they're wrapping up what matters they have left to tend to in the span they have remaining (about three weeks).
In terms of plot structure, this one reminded me a lot of Excession. There’s the cabal of Minds that comes together as an ad-hoc committee to try and solve a potentially high-profile problem (although this cabal is not quite as aggressive or murderous). And let me say that the reason I can’t entirely get behind this book is because of the fact that I considered this story, somewhat like Excession, to be kind of a shaggy dog tale.
I won’t spoil the secret, because that would be unfair. Suffice to say that there is a bit of information out there related to the Gzilt that some of their high-ranking members don’t want known, and will go to pretty extreme lengths to conceal, especially just before the Sublimation. Nonetheless, both the reader and most of the Culture characters have a pretty good idea what the secret is right from the very beginning. When the wild goose chase gets especially frustrating about halfway through, the Minds that are working on the problem actually have a vote as to whether it’s actually worth even trying to figure out the mystery anymore, or if they should just assume they know the score and go back to what they were doing beforehand. The vote comes pretty close to passing. Towards the very end they have another vote regarding whether they should actually make use of what they’d learned or not, and that one sort of sums up what they actually accomplished here. When even the characters are openly questioning whether what they’re doing is actually worth their time, you’ve got to wonder if the story is really going anywhere.
There’s also a fair bit of plot digression, as in Banks’ last couple of Culture novels. You get characters set up, asked to help out in doing something or other, and then their participation abruptly ceases or just sort of peters out without resolution. This can be somewhere between irritating and soul-crushing, depending.
I also have to say that there’s a little bit of a missed opportunity in the subject matter. One of the plot threads centers around an individual who claims that he was actually there at the negotiations which resulted in the formation of the Culture about ten thousand years prior to the events of the novel, a claim which, if true, would make him older than any other Culture citizen (even drones or Minds). I thought we might get some insight around how the Culture actually came together. There have been hints here and there throughout the series about the heartless steel behind the Culture’s space-hippie veneer - even over and beyond the obvious retaliations that they make against those who interfere with them. I've always felt that there was more skullduggery and outright violence behind the Culture’s founding than anyone lets on, and possibly even quite a bit more unpleasantness going behind the scenes in the current Culture era than even Special Circumstances wants to acknowledge. That’s still maybe true, but if so, we don’t find out here. It’s not the Culture’s secret that is at stake, at least this time.
Reviewing the previous paragraphs, I realize that this is all pretty negative stuff, and that’s maybe unfair. I tore right through the book, and generally enjoyed it anyway. Banks is on form here, and there’s a lot of outright humor. This is possibly the outright funniest Culture novel to date, at least in parts. In addition, while there is some occasional grimness, on the whole the work doesn’t dip into the darkness of some of his Culture works where everyone is suffering from ennui and existential despair. Sure, nothing of much consequence happens, but at the same time it’s a pretty entertaining romp. And aside from a cranky old drone and a couple of humans, most of the Culture characters are Minds, who are always more interesting to hear about. There aren’t any characters quite as memorable as the Falling Outside the Usual Moral Constraints from the last one, though the Mistake Not . . . has its moments.
So, summing up, my frustrations with this one are mostly based around the fact that this could have been a great book, but ended up being just okay. Banks is such a good writer that he can get away with a mess of a plot and still have something worth reading. But although I’m happy to see him writing Culture novels again in fairly rapid succession, I do have to wonder if he’s ever going to give his universe a proper challenge. I know it’s hard to surprise the Minds, but still.
If you’re not familiar with the Culture series by Banks, then this being the tenth volume in said series may not be the best place to start. If you are familiar with it, then this one will probably be pleasant enough, but somewhat more insubstantial than some of his other works.
The Culture novels have always been somewhat unique in their actual epic scale. A lot of ostensible galaxy-spanning empires in fiction seem to have a relatively small cast of characters which actually accomplish everything which needs doing. In contrast, the Culture is so vast that even if events are referenced from earlier novels, there tends not to be any overlap in personnel. In fact the galaxy is so big that not even the alien species show up more than once or twice, so it’s not a Federation vs. Klingons kind of thing – each book can introduce whole new problems that you’ve never even heard of before since there’s just so much there. In terms of continuity, this one takes place sometime after Excession and probably sometime before Surface Detail (they mention needing a Contact section which is actually in existence in Surface Detail).
The focus of this novel is on Sublimation, the ultimate end state of most advanced civilizations in Banks’ work, wherein they withdraw from the physical universe we’re familiar with and hang out in higher order dimensions. For all intents and purposes it’s a one way trip. The very, very few entities that do come back find themselves somewhat limited in what they are able to convey about it, but apparently no one ever suggests that it’s a bad idea to go. The Culture is highly suspicious about the whole thing, and it’s not them talking about taking this trip; in this case it is the Gzilt, a humanoid civilization that was actually one of the founding members of the Culture but didn’t join in at the last minute. The reason that the Culture has been down on the idea is that it smacks of coercion; as we discover in this one when a species decides to Sublime it's all over in about an hour after the process begins. The Gzilt have set a time to departure, and they're wrapping up what matters they have left to tend to in the span they have remaining (about three weeks).
In terms of plot structure, this one reminded me a lot of Excession. There’s the cabal of Minds that comes together as an ad-hoc committee to try and solve a potentially high-profile problem (although this cabal is not quite as aggressive or murderous). And let me say that the reason I can’t entirely get behind this book is because of the fact that I considered this story, somewhat like Excession, to be kind of a shaggy dog tale.
I won’t spoil the secret, because that would be unfair. Suffice to say that there is a bit of information out there related to the Gzilt that some of their high-ranking members don’t want known, and will go to pretty extreme lengths to conceal, especially just before the Sublimation. Nonetheless, both the reader and most of the Culture characters have a pretty good idea what the secret is right from the very beginning. When the wild goose chase gets especially frustrating about halfway through, the Minds that are working on the problem actually have a vote as to whether it’s actually worth even trying to figure out the mystery anymore, or if they should just assume they know the score and go back to what they were doing beforehand. The vote comes pretty close to passing. Towards the very end they have another vote regarding whether they should actually make use of what they’d learned or not, and that one sort of sums up what they actually accomplished here. When even the characters are openly questioning whether what they’re doing is actually worth their time, you’ve got to wonder if the story is really going anywhere.
There’s also a fair bit of plot digression, as in Banks’ last couple of Culture novels. You get characters set up, asked to help out in doing something or other, and then their participation abruptly ceases or just sort of peters out without resolution. This can be somewhere between irritating and soul-crushing, depending.
I also have to say that there’s a little bit of a missed opportunity in the subject matter. One of the plot threads centers around an individual who claims that he was actually there at the negotiations which resulted in the formation of the Culture about ten thousand years prior to the events of the novel, a claim which, if true, would make him older than any other Culture citizen (even drones or Minds). I thought we might get some insight around how the Culture actually came together. There have been hints here and there throughout the series about the heartless steel behind the Culture’s space-hippie veneer - even over and beyond the obvious retaliations that they make against those who interfere with them. I've always felt that there was more skullduggery and outright violence behind the Culture’s founding than anyone lets on, and possibly even quite a bit more unpleasantness going behind the scenes in the current Culture era than even Special Circumstances wants to acknowledge. That’s still maybe true, but if so, we don’t find out here. It’s not the Culture’s secret that is at stake, at least this time.
Reviewing the previous paragraphs, I realize that this is all pretty negative stuff, and that’s maybe unfair. I tore right through the book, and generally enjoyed it anyway. Banks is on form here, and there’s a lot of outright humor. This is possibly the outright funniest Culture novel to date, at least in parts. In addition, while there is some occasional grimness, on the whole the work doesn’t dip into the darkness of some of his Culture works where everyone is suffering from ennui and existential despair. Sure, nothing of much consequence happens, but at the same time it’s a pretty entertaining romp. And aside from a cranky old drone and a couple of humans, most of the Culture characters are Minds, who are always more interesting to hear about. There aren’t any characters quite as memorable as the Falling Outside the Usual Moral Constraints from the last one, though the Mistake Not . . . has its moments.
So, summing up, my frustrations with this one are mostly based around the fact that this could have been a great book, but ended up being just okay. Banks is such a good writer that he can get away with a mess of a plot and still have something worth reading. But although I’m happy to see him writing Culture novels again in fairly rapid succession, I do have to wonder if he’s ever going to give his universe a proper challenge. I know it’s hard to surprise the Minds, but still.
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