I’ve been trying to get my thoughts appropriately in order on this one for a while, but every draft that I have been writing so far has ended up damning it with faint praise, when what I guess I’m really trying to do is praise it with faint damns. So I will go ahead and do that.
Let me start off by saying that this is a quality effort from Pratchett, which means that it’s going to be a reasonable read in any event. If I’d written this book I’d consider it a job well done. But considering his unfathomably large and deep catalog, he’s got a lot of competition from himself and I’d put this one in the “below average” category for him. I ended up reading it on an airplane which is probably about the best place for it, since it was about airplane ride length and it also blocked me from having any other reading options handy without retrieving my carry-on from the overhead bin. I realize that “better than fooling around with luggage on a packed flight” is not a ringing endorsement.
I’m not entirely sure on this point, but I think this book is probably meant for younger readers and it’s also not a Discworld book. However, it takes place in Victorian-era London, which is probably about as close to Ankh-Morpork as you’re going to get in something close to the real world. It’s not a sanitized version of London, there is a bunch of grinding poverty and casual daily horror that is usually elided from the setting. As to when it takes place . . . well, the book is a little cagey on that and explicitly notes that there’s a form of time compression going on to ensure the cast of characters (some real, some fictional) can all co-exist. Pratchett’s notes say that it’s somewhere between 1837 and 1853, with the caveat that Sir Robert Peel (playing the part of Sam Vimes this evening) didn’t have the job he’s holding in the novel at any point during those real years. None of that bothered me especially. In fact, the world building is absolutely first rate. I’d love to read Pratchett’s underground history of Victorian London, instead of the story that we end up with.
Anyway, we’re introduced to main character Dodger (his nom de guerre; his actual name is of course extremely embarrassing) as he goes about his business of toshing, which means he ambles around in the sewer system seeing if there’s anything worth picking up down there. Money’s good, objects are also okay as sometimes they’re worth having and sometimes they can be ransomed. It’s stated that Dodger is not above “finding” things in people’s pockets from time to time either. This is a storm sewer system, incidentally, not a septic system, although some people have begun using it as such, much to Dodger’s disgust. Dodger’s an old, experienced and crafty hand at this, having survived it a lot longer than most people do. He’s seventeen.
On this particular night he runs across two thugs beating up a young woman and leaps to her defense. The woman, who is going by the name Simplicity, turns out to have a few problems of her own. Namely she was persuaded to marry a prince from some German state, only it turns out that he didn’t consult his father the king beforehand and is expected to enter into an arranged marriage with someone else. Suddenly all the witnesses to the marriage have had unfortunate accidents and she decided that maybe returning to her ancestral homeland was a good move. The principality wants her back and is assuring the British government that no harm will come to her if she returns. Everyone acknowledges that “no harm” can still encompass a rather large and unfortunate range of treatment.
So, there’s the setup. If you are thinking, hey, streetwise urban petty criminal by the name of Dodger, that sounds a little familiar, I’d say you get a cookie but the Artful Dodger is wearing his trademark top hat right on the cover illustration so you’ll have to provide your own cookie. Yes, Charles Dickens is a character in this book and yes, Dodger manages to drop titles for many of Dickens’ novels throughout the story, usually being reminded to stop writing stuff down in case the reader missed it.
That maybe was a little harsh, but there are a couple problems I’ve got with this book which put it in the below average section.
The first one is that he’s got this really great setup and setting and then basically doesn’t do a whole lot with it. A lot of Pratchett’s heroes tend to be awesome, but in this case Dodger basically doesn’t even break a sweat. He starts off down there in the sewer and by the end of the month he’s got a Saville Row bespoke suit and is being received at Buckingham Palace. I never once got the sense that he was in physical danger, that his plans would fail, or that he was ever out of his depth in any way. There were several good opportunities for this but none was taken. Dodger can out-think, out-talk, and out-fight everyone right out of the gate. The Discworld novel this reminds me of most heavily is Soul Music, where the joke is supposed to be that the guy is named “Bud of the Holly”, but that doesn’t actually have much to do with anything. I’m saying that it’s cool to have Dickens in this book, but he doesn’t actually do anything that couldn’t have been done by someone who wasn’t Dickens, and he doesn’t really seem all that much like the real Dickens anyway.
In the same vein, the story lacks a proper heavy. The unseen prince and his father are the villains but they’re over on the Continent. Their agents first hire the aforementioned two thugs through a fixer. Later the agents discuss whether the fixer is any good and whether they should hire “The Outlander” instead. This sounds spooky, right? A good Pratchett psycho villain like Mr. Teatime or Carcer? Then Dodger is told to watch out – someone’s hired the Outlander. And then the Outlander is both introduced and dispatched in one scene. This is a shame, not least of which because what little we do find out about the Outlander means that this could have been a truly classic villain, and because the actual confrontation is the only time that Dodger ever really is at any of a disadvantage even a little bit (although salvation is not that far away).
One of the other problems I’ve got is perhaps specific to me, since I’m an Oliver Twist fan from way back and one played the Artful Dodger in yet another children’s theater production. If Dickens really did base Oliver Twist on his fictional-real-life meeting with Dodger then both Dodger and Solomon Cohen should have sued his drawers off for libel. I didn’t mention Cohen yet but he’s Dodger’s landlord/mentor and is as far from Fagin as humanly possible. In fact he’s not only as cool as Dodger but far more worldly. I sort of wish the book had been about him, but he’s been everywhere and seen everything and frankly would have probably had even less trouble overcoming adversity than Dodger did. So maybe that’s not a good idea. And also Cohen tries to discourage Dodger from pickpocketing. But anyway, although Oliver Twist is really enjoyable, that was Oliver’s show and there wasn’t really too much suggestion that the Artful Dodger or Fagin were admirable or aspirational in there. Like I said, maybe this is just me, but I was really bothered that Dodger was supposed to be the Artful Dodger when he really wasn’t, in any way.
And my other major complaint is in the nature of personal relationships. In Discworld novels, the romantic leads tend toward the fourth-date marriage (Carrot and Angua excepted). I’ve always thought that this was sort of a throwback to the Victorian-esque setting of the novels. So here when it seems like Dodger and Simplicity may be getting together that’s not entirely unreasonable . . . except that this is supposedly the real world. Simplicity’s problems started with her horrible choice of romantic partners and she’s just coming off a physically abusive relationship, and Dodger is a seventeen year old street kid who frequents prostitutes on the bad side of town. I can foresee some strife in this potential relationship. Just saying. I wasn’t rooting for them to get together, although I won’t say whether or not they do.
So, there’s my list of faint damns. I don’t need those four hours back, exactly, and it’s not actively bad. Still, not his best, sad to say.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Friday, April 5, 2013
Takeshi Kovacs trilogy by Richard K. Morgan
I mentioned in my review of Neuromancer that it must be really frustrating to achieve your greatest success on your very first time out, because then no matter what you do, some jerk is always going to be comparing your later efforts to your first one and saying that it’s pretty good but . . . Today, I’m going to be that jerk in discussing the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, which is absolutely one of the best SF works of the past two decades, and at least arguably one of the all-time greats. Perhaps Morgan will surpass his own work someday, but so far I don’t think he has. But no one can take this achievement away from him, and in my mind it puts him right up there with anyone you care to name in the field.
These three books – Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies, deal with the adventures of Takeshi Kovacs (that’s the Slavic pronunciation, by the way, you uncultured lout). By any reasonable standard, Kovacs is a huge asshole, and even that is an understatement. He’s at best an antihero and only then because the people he’s up against are even worse than him. If you looked at a list of his many crimes you’d see just about everything on there except possibly sexual assaults, although in the second book he does engage in some dubious erotic healing techniques on a woman who’s really in no position to give enthusiastic consent (and in any event, this is probably more related to George MacDonald Fraser’s discovery in his first Flashman novel that rapists make worse protagonists than murderers, rather than Kovacs’ firm ethical standards.)
He’s introduced in the opening of the very first novel having just robbed a biotechnology firm on Harlan’s World, a Podunk colony planet out in the middle of nowhere, and as he and his girlfriend are post-coitally discussing how to dispose of the score they are raided by the police and shot to death. Incidentally, this was a righteous shoot since the girlfriend took down a few officers with a toxic flechette pistol and Kovacs really was reaching for his gun at the time.
Now generally being killed tends to interrupt one’s social schedule and make it difficult for you to star in an SF trilogy from that point, but in the 25th century as it turns out everyone has a “cortical stack” implanted which holds all memories and personality, and it’s of pretty solid construction. So while it’s by no means impossible to permanently get rid of somebody by destroying their stack, it’s not going to happen in your ordinary garden variety accident or gunfight. This technology also makes people somewhat casually dismissive of their bodies, or “sleeves”, as if the flesh wears out or gets destroyed you can always just get a new one from somewhere. The authorities also don’t bother putting physical bodies in prison, either; they just put your stack on a server somewhere and auction off your body, and when you get out you get whatever derelict they have available. It also means that it’s reasonable to expect Kovacs to serve every day of the 120 year sentence he draws.
Except that’s not what happens – his digital personality gets freighted to Earth, where he’s reawakened in a pretty nice body and told that he’s being hired out to an absurdly wealthy tycoon as a sort of parole. The tycoon, Bancroft, has recently been restored from backup after someone destroyed both his stack and his head. Official verdict: suicide. Bancroft doesn’t buy it and asked around to some of his friends, one of whom recommended Kovacs as a nasty dude who could look into the situation, with force if need be.
As it also turns out, Kovacs used to be a UN Envoy, one of an elite group of super soldiers who make even other hardened badasses piss themselves with fear. They are, essentially, weaponized sociopaths. Given that anyone can get put into a huge muscleman body grown out of a vat, what distinguishes the Envoys is their mental conditioning. This includes, but is not limited to: resection of normal human fight-or-flight responses, eidetic memory, language retention, disregard for social dominance rules, and general fearlessness. An Envoy has no scruples whatsoever when it comes to mission completion and thinks nothing of killing fellow humans. They also have whatever powers would be handy when Morgan needs it for the plot, which I’ll give a pass. Anyway, they’re so scary that upon leaving the Envoy Corps, they’re forbidden to run for political office or hold high corporate positions because of the threat they pose to the average Joe. Perhaps because of these restrictions, ex-Envoys account for a large portion of the violent crime in the Protectorate.
Like most really good SF, Altered Carbon and its sequels aren’t really so much about the technology itself as it is about making some point about people. The effect of cortical stack technology has had an alarming and constrictive effect on society. It’s all well and good to think that it would be great to be backed up in case you have some horrible accident, or get sick, or whatnot. But what about if Stalin had access to this technology, with off-site backups and an array of new clone bodies to get reincarnated into over and over again? Or Steve Jobs? Imagine if there wasn’t any way to climb the career ladder because the CEO and every middle manager on down was immortal. And imagine if these people were constantly afraid of what they had being taken away – like today, but even more so. This isn’t a dystopia, exactly, but the UN government is oppressive and heavily captive by powerful corporate interests. The people with money and power are planning to keep it forever.
Bancroft isn’t really all that bad as these things go, but he’s got Kovacs over a barrel in that if Bancroft is displeased then the parole gets revoked. The remainder of the novel is very reminiscent of a postwar noir detective story, only unlike in Raymond Chandler’s stories they don’t just knock him out, but actually can kill him in virtual interrogation rooms. There’s some loopiness, but it all ties together and it’s really great. Kovacs makes a good hard boiled detective and even the ultimate antagonist is a Chandler-esque figure of organized crime.
It was perhaps inevitable that a sequel got made, but what is really striking about the sequels is how little they have in common with the first novel. There’s a lot of throwaway details that come back into play (he mentions offhandedly another Harlan’s World Envoy who finally shows up in the third novel) but the genre is totally changed. If you were expecting another detective romp in the 25th century, Broken Angels is not it.
Kovacs has gone back into military service of a sort, hiring himself out to a mercenary organization on the planet of Sanction IV, currently involved in a nasty civil war. As an ex-Envoy he’s a desirable recruit, but mentally he doesn’t seem to be that interested in the conflict. On one side is a corrupt group of UN affiliated, corporate backed status quo defenders, and on the other the rebel Joshua Kemp. The UN Protectorate isn’t heroic by any stretch of the imagination, but Kemp seems like a neo-Maoist who’s more interested in erecting statues of himself than any real reform and doesn’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons on civilian populations. Kovacs claims at one point that he just signed up with the mercenaries because that gave him the best chance at getting a new body if killed there, and given his numerous allegiance switches this may even be mostly true.
Perhaps I should amend that a little bit – in this book Kovacs is totally out for himself. He made a noble and selfless gesture at the end of Altered Carbon, but it would be hard to imagine him doing that here. It may be because he’s older and even more jaded than before, but when he finds that there’s a chance to obtain an alien artifact he immediately ditches his enlistment obligations and attempts to cash in on it. We already knew that he was a morally questionable individual, but in this book he slides very close into outright villainy, although in thinking about it he was pursuing a career in armed robbery prior to the events of the first novel. Maybe comic-book level super villainy, then. Anyway, I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that the actual hero of this book is mercenary chief Isaac Carrera, although it appears to be Morgan’s intent to portray everyone as a huge asshole.
Having made his score and escaped Sanction IV, the third book, Woken Furies, finds Kovacs back home on Harlan’s World engaging in a little recreational murder of some people who have annoyed him. This one takes a little while longer to get started, but also contains the most interesting antagonist – Kovacs himself. The ruling class of Harlan’s World surreptitiously took a backup copy of his mental state back when he was younger and still had some loyalty to the governing structure, and have sleeved this younger self in an attempt to get rid of the older Kovacs. (Double-sleeving yourself in this way is highly illegal, which doesn’t stop it from happening occasionally throughout the novels.) This one also features the possible return of revolutionary Quellcrist Falconer, who pioneered the concept of multi-generational civil conflict well before Kovacs himself was born. As it turns out, Kovacs was only on Sanction IV in the first place to provide assistance to Kemp’s revolution on behalf of a Quellist cell before deciding Kemp was a jerk and defecting.
This third book is probably the technically best written of the three, but also tries to get into waters a little too deep. Morgan writes really good action and suspense scenes but is not quite as good at philosophy and religion, both of which make up a large portion of this one. But even the characters admit that they’re not sure what they’re proposing is better than the status quo, just that they want to change the power structure to make sure it’s not always concentrating in the hands of those who already have it.
There’s a ton of good world building and detail with just enough handwaving to make it all work. The whole series is obviously a labor of love, and Morgan keeps it moving so quickly that you don’t have time to worry if any of it really makes sense.
At the end, when Kovacs is going along with a possible new revolution, he’s still not sold on whether it’ll work or whether it’s a good idea. He’s not an idealist or an ideologue, and most of his capacity for group loyalty ended in a viral strike on most of his squad on a planet called Innenin. As much as I like these novels, I also really respect Morgan’s decision to stop it here on the grounds that we’ve seen enough.
These three books – Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies, deal with the adventures of Takeshi Kovacs (that’s the Slavic pronunciation, by the way, you uncultured lout). By any reasonable standard, Kovacs is a huge asshole, and even that is an understatement. He’s at best an antihero and only then because the people he’s up against are even worse than him. If you looked at a list of his many crimes you’d see just about everything on there except possibly sexual assaults, although in the second book he does engage in some dubious erotic healing techniques on a woman who’s really in no position to give enthusiastic consent (and in any event, this is probably more related to George MacDonald Fraser’s discovery in his first Flashman novel that rapists make worse protagonists than murderers, rather than Kovacs’ firm ethical standards.)
He’s introduced in the opening of the very first novel having just robbed a biotechnology firm on Harlan’s World, a Podunk colony planet out in the middle of nowhere, and as he and his girlfriend are post-coitally discussing how to dispose of the score they are raided by the police and shot to death. Incidentally, this was a righteous shoot since the girlfriend took down a few officers with a toxic flechette pistol and Kovacs really was reaching for his gun at the time.
Now generally being killed tends to interrupt one’s social schedule and make it difficult for you to star in an SF trilogy from that point, but in the 25th century as it turns out everyone has a “cortical stack” implanted which holds all memories and personality, and it’s of pretty solid construction. So while it’s by no means impossible to permanently get rid of somebody by destroying their stack, it’s not going to happen in your ordinary garden variety accident or gunfight. This technology also makes people somewhat casually dismissive of their bodies, or “sleeves”, as if the flesh wears out or gets destroyed you can always just get a new one from somewhere. The authorities also don’t bother putting physical bodies in prison, either; they just put your stack on a server somewhere and auction off your body, and when you get out you get whatever derelict they have available. It also means that it’s reasonable to expect Kovacs to serve every day of the 120 year sentence he draws.
Except that’s not what happens – his digital personality gets freighted to Earth, where he’s reawakened in a pretty nice body and told that he’s being hired out to an absurdly wealthy tycoon as a sort of parole. The tycoon, Bancroft, has recently been restored from backup after someone destroyed both his stack and his head. Official verdict: suicide. Bancroft doesn’t buy it and asked around to some of his friends, one of whom recommended Kovacs as a nasty dude who could look into the situation, with force if need be.
As it also turns out, Kovacs used to be a UN Envoy, one of an elite group of super soldiers who make even other hardened badasses piss themselves with fear. They are, essentially, weaponized sociopaths. Given that anyone can get put into a huge muscleman body grown out of a vat, what distinguishes the Envoys is their mental conditioning. This includes, but is not limited to: resection of normal human fight-or-flight responses, eidetic memory, language retention, disregard for social dominance rules, and general fearlessness. An Envoy has no scruples whatsoever when it comes to mission completion and thinks nothing of killing fellow humans. They also have whatever powers would be handy when Morgan needs it for the plot, which I’ll give a pass. Anyway, they’re so scary that upon leaving the Envoy Corps, they’re forbidden to run for political office or hold high corporate positions because of the threat they pose to the average Joe. Perhaps because of these restrictions, ex-Envoys account for a large portion of the violent crime in the Protectorate.
Like most really good SF, Altered Carbon and its sequels aren’t really so much about the technology itself as it is about making some point about people. The effect of cortical stack technology has had an alarming and constrictive effect on society. It’s all well and good to think that it would be great to be backed up in case you have some horrible accident, or get sick, or whatnot. But what about if Stalin had access to this technology, with off-site backups and an array of new clone bodies to get reincarnated into over and over again? Or Steve Jobs? Imagine if there wasn’t any way to climb the career ladder because the CEO and every middle manager on down was immortal. And imagine if these people were constantly afraid of what they had being taken away – like today, but even more so. This isn’t a dystopia, exactly, but the UN government is oppressive and heavily captive by powerful corporate interests. The people with money and power are planning to keep it forever.
Bancroft isn’t really all that bad as these things go, but he’s got Kovacs over a barrel in that if Bancroft is displeased then the parole gets revoked. The remainder of the novel is very reminiscent of a postwar noir detective story, only unlike in Raymond Chandler’s stories they don’t just knock him out, but actually can kill him in virtual interrogation rooms. There’s some loopiness, but it all ties together and it’s really great. Kovacs makes a good hard boiled detective and even the ultimate antagonist is a Chandler-esque figure of organized crime.
It was perhaps inevitable that a sequel got made, but what is really striking about the sequels is how little they have in common with the first novel. There’s a lot of throwaway details that come back into play (he mentions offhandedly another Harlan’s World Envoy who finally shows up in the third novel) but the genre is totally changed. If you were expecting another detective romp in the 25th century, Broken Angels is not it.
Kovacs has gone back into military service of a sort, hiring himself out to a mercenary organization on the planet of Sanction IV, currently involved in a nasty civil war. As an ex-Envoy he’s a desirable recruit, but mentally he doesn’t seem to be that interested in the conflict. On one side is a corrupt group of UN affiliated, corporate backed status quo defenders, and on the other the rebel Joshua Kemp. The UN Protectorate isn’t heroic by any stretch of the imagination, but Kemp seems like a neo-Maoist who’s more interested in erecting statues of himself than any real reform and doesn’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons on civilian populations. Kovacs claims at one point that he just signed up with the mercenaries because that gave him the best chance at getting a new body if killed there, and given his numerous allegiance switches this may even be mostly true.
Perhaps I should amend that a little bit – in this book Kovacs is totally out for himself. He made a noble and selfless gesture at the end of Altered Carbon, but it would be hard to imagine him doing that here. It may be because he’s older and even more jaded than before, but when he finds that there’s a chance to obtain an alien artifact he immediately ditches his enlistment obligations and attempts to cash in on it. We already knew that he was a morally questionable individual, but in this book he slides very close into outright villainy, although in thinking about it he was pursuing a career in armed robbery prior to the events of the first novel. Maybe comic-book level super villainy, then. Anyway, I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that the actual hero of this book is mercenary chief Isaac Carrera, although it appears to be Morgan’s intent to portray everyone as a huge asshole.
Having made his score and escaped Sanction IV, the third book, Woken Furies, finds Kovacs back home on Harlan’s World engaging in a little recreational murder of some people who have annoyed him. This one takes a little while longer to get started, but also contains the most interesting antagonist – Kovacs himself. The ruling class of Harlan’s World surreptitiously took a backup copy of his mental state back when he was younger and still had some loyalty to the governing structure, and have sleeved this younger self in an attempt to get rid of the older Kovacs. (Double-sleeving yourself in this way is highly illegal, which doesn’t stop it from happening occasionally throughout the novels.) This one also features the possible return of revolutionary Quellcrist Falconer, who pioneered the concept of multi-generational civil conflict well before Kovacs himself was born. As it turns out, Kovacs was only on Sanction IV in the first place to provide assistance to Kemp’s revolution on behalf of a Quellist cell before deciding Kemp was a jerk and defecting.
This third book is probably the technically best written of the three, but also tries to get into waters a little too deep. Morgan writes really good action and suspense scenes but is not quite as good at philosophy and religion, both of which make up a large portion of this one. But even the characters admit that they’re not sure what they’re proposing is better than the status quo, just that they want to change the power structure to make sure it’s not always concentrating in the hands of those who already have it.
There’s a ton of good world building and detail with just enough handwaving to make it all work. The whole series is obviously a labor of love, and Morgan keeps it moving so quickly that you don’t have time to worry if any of it really makes sense.
At the end, when Kovacs is going along with a possible new revolution, he’s still not sold on whether it’ll work or whether it’s a good idea. He’s not an idealist or an ideologue, and most of his capacity for group loyalty ended in a viral strike on most of his squad on a planet called Innenin. As much as I like these novels, I also really respect Morgan’s decision to stop it here on the grounds that we’ve seen enough.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Johannes Cabal the Detective by Jonathan L. Howard
Having read the first book in this series and thinking it had potential, I decided to take the plunge and give the sequel a shot. I’m certainly glad I did, because this proves that Howard’s world building wasn’t a fluke and my intuition that getting Cabal off that train would be the best thing for his character was right. This book was way fun, and in my opinion better than the first.
Cabal starts off this book in a condemned cell in some made up Eastern European or Baltic state named Mirkavia (in a nice literary nod, Ruritania is said to be one of its close neighbors). He’s in the condemned cell because he got caught trying to steal a necromantical tome from a local library, and as it turns out, just being a necromancer is a capital offense in that part of this world. This does seem a little excessive on its face, but keeping in mind that he does actually have magical powers and did in fact originally sell his soul to Satan in order to obtain those powers, and for that matter we’re told that some of his necromantic experiments haven’t gone exactly 100% according to plan, it’s perhaps understandable why the authorities have that reaction. The account of his trial (he was not given a trial) is pretty funny. In fact, the whole thing is pretty funny. The omniscient narrator has broken free of some of the constraints of the first volume and feels free to tell the reader repeatedly what a dick Cabal is and outline his alien mental states, generally in a very entertaining manner.
Anyway, Cabal is approached by a sleazy nobleman with a proposition; the Mirkavian emperor was supposed to give a rousing speech but has unfortunately just died. Since the powers that be really need the speech given, and given Cabal’s specialty, they want to know if maybe Cabal can make the emperor less dead for a while. Although it gives him a stay of execution, neither he nor the noblemen really believe it’s a reprieve, although Cabal does manage to use his freedom to make his former jailers shave a large number of cats. It’s only a matter of time before he manages to outwit his ostensible captors and escape, of course.
We learned at the conclusion of the first novel that Cabal is doing all this stuff because his fiancée died and he wants to restore her to life. Not some shambling semblance of life, but the real thing. What the dead fiancée thinks about this proposition isn’t clear, and it’s also not clear whether she’d actually approve of everything he’s been up to in his quest. It’s symptomatic of Cabal’s character that he considers the death something of a personal affront to him, as opposed to a general tragedy. As the narrator points out, Cabal’s goals are sympathetic if you overlook the way he treats people, the things that he does, and his general methods. But he’s got style, and having secured the book he came to Mirkavia to obtain he’s now got to figure out how to get out of the country, which he does by drugging some civil servant who looks vaguely like him with a chemical that isn’t all that likely to kill him, and taking his place on a steampunk airship out of the country.
This is the longest section of the book and also where the “Detective” part comes in. Cabal is only moderately interested in legalities (he’s usually aware that he is breaking the law when he does it, but never lets that stop him if he feels that his activities will be unduly constrained) but has an extremely strong sense of self-preservation, so when there are a series of shady occurrences onboard, he’s got to see if he can get to the bottom of events. He’s certainly not out for truth or justice, he’s in it to save his own ass.
If the conceit of the first novel was to explore where exactly a diabolical carnival would come from in the first place, this one is a Victorian era locked room mystery where everyone involved has some sort of secret and they’re on a magitek airship, where the detective is an amoral sociopath. Cabal’s interests basically begin, end, and move through determining whether there’s a threat to him and, if so, removing it, while not letting slip that he’s an infamous necromancer and fugitive. Other passengers have their own agendas, from trying to get an army contract to sell pork rinds to smuggling to racking up sexual conquests. I tried to think of a passenger who didn’t have an ulterior motive or a secret identity and eventually came up with two. It’s that kind of story.
Also on board the airship is one Leonie Barrow, who (if you read the first novel) sold her soul to Cabal in order to save her father, but in the end didn’t have to go to Hell for various reasons, only very tangentially because Cabal felt somewhat bad about it and more because Cabal was one soul short anyway. Obviously Barrow could blow Cabal’s cover any time she wanted, and it would make some sense for Cabal to surreptitiously “remove” her. He doesn’t, and can’t for the life of him really explain why, although her resemblance to his dead love probably is a major factor in there somewhere. On her part, it would make sense to rat him out, and she can’t for the life of her really explain why she doesn’t. Not that this is a romance, mind you. It’s not that kind of story, and Cabal probably wouldn’t be interested, even if someone were to explain romance to him, which they don’t. It’s implied that having no soul, then being re-souled and having so long a period of obsessive devotion to his goals have done something to his ability to feel much of anything anymore, which makes some sense.
Howard really has a lot of fun playing with literary and genre conventions of a typical detective story, and manages at the same time to tell a really good one. He plays fair with clues and the astute reader might figure it out before Cabal does. (For the record and in all honesty, I whiffed big time.) I like detective stories generally, I like dry wit, and I found Cabal’s responses to all the indignities that life throws out him to be very funny indeed. I also admire sequels that have dramatic genre shifts while maintaining the same overall tone. So really, this one was hitting on all cylinders for me.
There’s a third book in the series, available currently only in the UK, and apparently a fourth on the way. With this level of quality and improvement, I’m looking forward to their trans-Atlantic appearances.
Cabal starts off this book in a condemned cell in some made up Eastern European or Baltic state named Mirkavia (in a nice literary nod, Ruritania is said to be one of its close neighbors). He’s in the condemned cell because he got caught trying to steal a necromantical tome from a local library, and as it turns out, just being a necromancer is a capital offense in that part of this world. This does seem a little excessive on its face, but keeping in mind that he does actually have magical powers and did in fact originally sell his soul to Satan in order to obtain those powers, and for that matter we’re told that some of his necromantic experiments haven’t gone exactly 100% according to plan, it’s perhaps understandable why the authorities have that reaction. The account of his trial (he was not given a trial) is pretty funny. In fact, the whole thing is pretty funny. The omniscient narrator has broken free of some of the constraints of the first volume and feels free to tell the reader repeatedly what a dick Cabal is and outline his alien mental states, generally in a very entertaining manner.
Anyway, Cabal is approached by a sleazy nobleman with a proposition; the Mirkavian emperor was supposed to give a rousing speech but has unfortunately just died. Since the powers that be really need the speech given, and given Cabal’s specialty, they want to know if maybe Cabal can make the emperor less dead for a while. Although it gives him a stay of execution, neither he nor the noblemen really believe it’s a reprieve, although Cabal does manage to use his freedom to make his former jailers shave a large number of cats. It’s only a matter of time before he manages to outwit his ostensible captors and escape, of course.
We learned at the conclusion of the first novel that Cabal is doing all this stuff because his fiancée died and he wants to restore her to life. Not some shambling semblance of life, but the real thing. What the dead fiancée thinks about this proposition isn’t clear, and it’s also not clear whether she’d actually approve of everything he’s been up to in his quest. It’s symptomatic of Cabal’s character that he considers the death something of a personal affront to him, as opposed to a general tragedy. As the narrator points out, Cabal’s goals are sympathetic if you overlook the way he treats people, the things that he does, and his general methods. But he’s got style, and having secured the book he came to Mirkavia to obtain he’s now got to figure out how to get out of the country, which he does by drugging some civil servant who looks vaguely like him with a chemical that isn’t all that likely to kill him, and taking his place on a steampunk airship out of the country.
This is the longest section of the book and also where the “Detective” part comes in. Cabal is only moderately interested in legalities (he’s usually aware that he is breaking the law when he does it, but never lets that stop him if he feels that his activities will be unduly constrained) but has an extremely strong sense of self-preservation, so when there are a series of shady occurrences onboard, he’s got to see if he can get to the bottom of events. He’s certainly not out for truth or justice, he’s in it to save his own ass.
If the conceit of the first novel was to explore where exactly a diabolical carnival would come from in the first place, this one is a Victorian era locked room mystery where everyone involved has some sort of secret and they’re on a magitek airship, where the detective is an amoral sociopath. Cabal’s interests basically begin, end, and move through determining whether there’s a threat to him and, if so, removing it, while not letting slip that he’s an infamous necromancer and fugitive. Other passengers have their own agendas, from trying to get an army contract to sell pork rinds to smuggling to racking up sexual conquests. I tried to think of a passenger who didn’t have an ulterior motive or a secret identity and eventually came up with two. It’s that kind of story.
Also on board the airship is one Leonie Barrow, who (if you read the first novel) sold her soul to Cabal in order to save her father, but in the end didn’t have to go to Hell for various reasons, only very tangentially because Cabal felt somewhat bad about it and more because Cabal was one soul short anyway. Obviously Barrow could blow Cabal’s cover any time she wanted, and it would make some sense for Cabal to surreptitiously “remove” her. He doesn’t, and can’t for the life of him really explain why, although her resemblance to his dead love probably is a major factor in there somewhere. On her part, it would make sense to rat him out, and she can’t for the life of her really explain why she doesn’t. Not that this is a romance, mind you. It’s not that kind of story, and Cabal probably wouldn’t be interested, even if someone were to explain romance to him, which they don’t. It’s implied that having no soul, then being re-souled and having so long a period of obsessive devotion to his goals have done something to his ability to feel much of anything anymore, which makes some sense.
Howard really has a lot of fun playing with literary and genre conventions of a typical detective story, and manages at the same time to tell a really good one. He plays fair with clues and the astute reader might figure it out before Cabal does. (For the record and in all honesty, I whiffed big time.) I like detective stories generally, I like dry wit, and I found Cabal’s responses to all the indignities that life throws out him to be very funny indeed. I also admire sequels that have dramatic genre shifts while maintaining the same overall tone. So really, this one was hitting on all cylinders for me.
There’s a third book in the series, available currently only in the UK, and apparently a fourth on the way. With this level of quality and improvement, I’m looking forward to their trans-Atlantic appearances.
Friday, February 22, 2013
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard
Jonathan L. Howard is an experienced hand in the video game industry who I was not previously aware of and whose previous literary output consisted of a couple of short stories which I’ve never read and had also never heard of. Thus it is perhaps surprising that this novel is so good; it also doesn’t overstay its welcome, thereby hitting two for two. Perfection? Not really, read on.
Let’s start out by noting that Johannes Cabal is a complete dick right from the very first page, where he’s introduced entering Hell in order to make a deal with Satan. This is of course a somewhat clichéd scenario and requires something a little different to make it in any way interesting, but Howard provides this by quickly establishing that Cabal is actually trying to get his soul back, as he sold it to Satan already some years ago. This introduces the character as someone who’s got the sort of brass stones to demand his soul back from the devil, but oblivious and entitled enough to expect to actually get it. In fact he’s downright churlish at Satan’s obstinacy in refusing to turn it back over right away, especially since he doesn’t propose to return the necromantic powers he obtained for selling it in the first place. Apparently the soul was actually removed from Cabal’s body at the time of the original deal and has been in Hell this whole time; how exactly this works is not really explained, nor should it be in my opinion. Johannes wants the soul back because its absence is rendering his experiments unreliable, and as a man of science this will never do.
Anyhow, Satan does always like a challenge, so he makes a second deal with Cabal. He’s got to get 100 suckers to sell their souls within the next year, and then he’ll get his own back. If he fails, Satan gets to kill him. Satan also gives him a certain amount of evil mojo and access to a demonic carnival train to use as an attraction, since Johannes isn’t very good at using persuasion. Well, non-lethal persuasion.
I don’t really need to point out that someone who would even consider getting 100 people to accept damnation to save their own ass is a pretty horrible, but Johannes doesn’t really seem to understand why anyone would consider it, you know, a thing. He’s not like those other people, he’s important, he’s got some stuff he wants to do. And by the end of the book you can at least see where he’s coming from, even if he is still totally unjustified in pretty much every action he takes. Making a protagonist this loathsome and unlikable still worth reading about would be a challenge for anyone, and Howard steps right up to it, mostly by contrasting him with his brother Horst, currently suffering from a case of vampirism that is also Johannes’ fault.
In case it’s not clear, this is actually a very funny book, punctuated with the darkest of dark comedy. Johannes’ sociopathy and his aura of assholism is played for laughs early and often, and you laugh at him more than with him (seeing as how he probably doesn’t ever laugh, this isn’t too hard). Of course you wouldn’t want to laugh at him to his face because he’d kill you with his revolver and animate your corpse. Well, maybe not on the first offence, but he’d certainly think about it.
Despite being almost totally distinct from it in every way, reading this book reminded me of nothing more than one of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker novels. The protagonist is a total self-serving bastard with no traditional redeeming qualities whatsoever, and furthermore he doesn’t care what you think about it. Therefore, you’re just reading it to admire their personal style and maybe see them foil someone even worse than they are, in Parker’s case other horrible criminals, in this case, Satan. And whatever else you might say about him, Johannes Cabal has style. Insufferable, annoying, highly threatening and morally dubious style to be sure, but style it is.
Now all that said, even with the book being quite reasonable in length, I at least was ready for it to be over with, as I felt that the premise had quite exhausted its lease. In the afterward, Howard mentioned that he basically got the idea for this book by wondering where the demonic carnival in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked this Way Comes could have originated. Johannes Cabal, however, is almost too awesome to have confined him to this train. At the same time, he’s also such a repulsive person that you don’t really care if he does lose his bet. He might have made a better recurring unbeatable foil in a book series starring Horst, actually. Nonetheless, this has a lot of potential, and I’d give it a recommend to the non-squeamish who love some dry British humor.
Let’s start out by noting that Johannes Cabal is a complete dick right from the very first page, where he’s introduced entering Hell in order to make a deal with Satan. This is of course a somewhat clichéd scenario and requires something a little different to make it in any way interesting, but Howard provides this by quickly establishing that Cabal is actually trying to get his soul back, as he sold it to Satan already some years ago. This introduces the character as someone who’s got the sort of brass stones to demand his soul back from the devil, but oblivious and entitled enough to expect to actually get it. In fact he’s downright churlish at Satan’s obstinacy in refusing to turn it back over right away, especially since he doesn’t propose to return the necromantic powers he obtained for selling it in the first place. Apparently the soul was actually removed from Cabal’s body at the time of the original deal and has been in Hell this whole time; how exactly this works is not really explained, nor should it be in my opinion. Johannes wants the soul back because its absence is rendering his experiments unreliable, and as a man of science this will never do.
Anyhow, Satan does always like a challenge, so he makes a second deal with Cabal. He’s got to get 100 suckers to sell their souls within the next year, and then he’ll get his own back. If he fails, Satan gets to kill him. Satan also gives him a certain amount of evil mojo and access to a demonic carnival train to use as an attraction, since Johannes isn’t very good at using persuasion. Well, non-lethal persuasion.
I don’t really need to point out that someone who would even consider getting 100 people to accept damnation to save their own ass is a pretty horrible, but Johannes doesn’t really seem to understand why anyone would consider it, you know, a thing. He’s not like those other people, he’s important, he’s got some stuff he wants to do. And by the end of the book you can at least see where he’s coming from, even if he is still totally unjustified in pretty much every action he takes. Making a protagonist this loathsome and unlikable still worth reading about would be a challenge for anyone, and Howard steps right up to it, mostly by contrasting him with his brother Horst, currently suffering from a case of vampirism that is also Johannes’ fault.
In case it’s not clear, this is actually a very funny book, punctuated with the darkest of dark comedy. Johannes’ sociopathy and his aura of assholism is played for laughs early and often, and you laugh at him more than with him (seeing as how he probably doesn’t ever laugh, this isn’t too hard). Of course you wouldn’t want to laugh at him to his face because he’d kill you with his revolver and animate your corpse. Well, maybe not on the first offence, but he’d certainly think about it.
Despite being almost totally distinct from it in every way, reading this book reminded me of nothing more than one of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker novels. The protagonist is a total self-serving bastard with no traditional redeeming qualities whatsoever, and furthermore he doesn’t care what you think about it. Therefore, you’re just reading it to admire their personal style and maybe see them foil someone even worse than they are, in Parker’s case other horrible criminals, in this case, Satan. And whatever else you might say about him, Johannes Cabal has style. Insufferable, annoying, highly threatening and morally dubious style to be sure, but style it is.
Now all that said, even with the book being quite reasonable in length, I at least was ready for it to be over with, as I felt that the premise had quite exhausted its lease. In the afterward, Howard mentioned that he basically got the idea for this book by wondering where the demonic carnival in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked this Way Comes could have originated. Johannes Cabal, however, is almost too awesome to have confined him to this train. At the same time, he’s also such a repulsive person that you don’t really care if he does lose his bet. He might have made a better recurring unbeatable foil in a book series starring Horst, actually. Nonetheless, this has a lot of potential, and I’d give it a recommend to the non-squeamish who love some dry British humor.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Jam by Yahtzee Croshaw
Imagine the invention of the printing press. There must have been a time and a person – although I don’t know when it was or who it was, though this would be interesting to know – who began making a living by writing about other books. The first literary critic, if you will. And this paradigm has continued on through the ages with new media, up until the present point where I write my personal thoughts about books on my blog. Not professionally, of course, although the world supports professional book critics, movie critics, television critics, and now video game critics.
As a relatively new form of entertainment, the video game industry has only recently started to support what I’d call truly professional reviewers, as distinguished from sycophantic hacks or industry created material (Nintendo Power of my youth, I’m looking at you). For a while playing video games marked you as an eleven year old boy or a cheeto-encrusted basement denizen, and while these stereotypes probably actually do have some basis in reality even today, there’s a lot of us that grew up around gaming and are essentially respectable citizens of adult age who still like to play a little bit. All of this is by way of introducing Croshaw, who has been reviewing a game every Wednesday over at The Escapist since 2007 and is also a game designer and author in his own right. He’s not the 800-pound gorilla of the industry (that would be the Penny Arcade guys) but he’s funny and creative and he’s got his own niche.
This is his sophomore novel, following up on his 2010 work Mogworld. I didn’t have really strong feelings about Mogworld but I did generally enjoy it; there was quite a lot of good humor in there, but it was somewhat weak in characterization. Strangely enough, Jam has nothing whatsoever to do with Mogworld or video games in general except for one of the characters who works in the industry and is trying to retrieve one of his latest builds.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m tired of zombie apocalypses. So this is at least a nice change of pace in that regard, as the city of Brisbane has gone through a . . . blob-ocolypse, I guess. The title is Jam and that’s what the characters call it too, but I kept thinking of The Blob when reading it. There’s a reddish, fruity smelling layer of gelatinous goop on the ground. It also dissolves all organic material on contact. Since it swept through town during morning rush hour, pretty much everyone with a regular job is now gone, and the novel opens with it already there. The protagonist, Travis, finds out about the unpleasant properties of the jam when it almost immediately dissolves one of his flatmates, who is just trying to get to the gym, poor bastard.
Most of the book deals with humorous vignettes as we assemble the usual rag-tag bunch of survivors along with the world’s most sociable Goliath bird-eating tarantula (read: not at all sociable in any way), which Travis picks up early on and carries with him. Also included are American agents X and Y, who are possibly the world’s worst liars and provide useful exposition by their suspiciously accurate denials. Are they responsible for the apocalypse? If so, was it on orders? Is it just Brisbane that is afflicted, or the whole world? All these questions and more are eventually answered.
Like most of us, the survivors here have no particular survival skills, and furthermore their inability to reach the ground makes their future survival tenuous at best. There’s a lot of examination here about how really unfit most of these people really are for post-apocalyptic survival, and much of it is pretty funny. At the same time, there’s also a lot of, you know, people getting horribly dissolved. I guess that could be funny, but at least in my opinion that’s actually pretty horrifying. At least I think I’d be horrified if this was going on around me (at least it is mercifully quick – over in seconds and not hours-or-days long Troma-style horrorshow stuff). I know that I can really enjoy horror comedy – This Book is Full of Spiders may have been my favorite book of 2012 – but for some reason it didn’t quite gel for me here.
In trying to organize my thoughts here, I realize that, again, I don’t have super strong feelings about this one either good or bad. There are a lot of quotable and amusing parts here, and some really squirmworthy parts as well. So, that’s good. But he’s also got a layer of ironic detachment about a mile wide, and that prevents the reader from really caring about Travis or anyone else for that matter. If the author doesn’t really care if the characters make it then it’s certainly hard for me to get worked up about it. I'm not sure if he just isn't very good at characterization, or if he feels that someone will make fun of him if it looks like he's actually caring about his characters. In either case, that was something I didn't like about Mogworld and I didn't like it here either.
In my opinion, Yahtzee has a great book in him somewhere – he’s certainly got the chops for it – but this one isn’t it. At the same time, if you only read one book about carnivorous jam this year, this should probably be the one.
As a relatively new form of entertainment, the video game industry has only recently started to support what I’d call truly professional reviewers, as distinguished from sycophantic hacks or industry created material (Nintendo Power of my youth, I’m looking at you). For a while playing video games marked you as an eleven year old boy or a cheeto-encrusted basement denizen, and while these stereotypes probably actually do have some basis in reality even today, there’s a lot of us that grew up around gaming and are essentially respectable citizens of adult age who still like to play a little bit. All of this is by way of introducing Croshaw, who has been reviewing a game every Wednesday over at The Escapist since 2007 and is also a game designer and author in his own right. He’s not the 800-pound gorilla of the industry (that would be the Penny Arcade guys) but he’s funny and creative and he’s got his own niche.
This is his sophomore novel, following up on his 2010 work Mogworld. I didn’t have really strong feelings about Mogworld but I did generally enjoy it; there was quite a lot of good humor in there, but it was somewhat weak in characterization. Strangely enough, Jam has nothing whatsoever to do with Mogworld or video games in general except for one of the characters who works in the industry and is trying to retrieve one of his latest builds.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m tired of zombie apocalypses. So this is at least a nice change of pace in that regard, as the city of Brisbane has gone through a . . . blob-ocolypse, I guess. The title is Jam and that’s what the characters call it too, but I kept thinking of The Blob when reading it. There’s a reddish, fruity smelling layer of gelatinous goop on the ground. It also dissolves all organic material on contact. Since it swept through town during morning rush hour, pretty much everyone with a regular job is now gone, and the novel opens with it already there. The protagonist, Travis, finds out about the unpleasant properties of the jam when it almost immediately dissolves one of his flatmates, who is just trying to get to the gym, poor bastard.
Most of the book deals with humorous vignettes as we assemble the usual rag-tag bunch of survivors along with the world’s most sociable Goliath bird-eating tarantula (read: not at all sociable in any way), which Travis picks up early on and carries with him. Also included are American agents X and Y, who are possibly the world’s worst liars and provide useful exposition by their suspiciously accurate denials. Are they responsible for the apocalypse? If so, was it on orders? Is it just Brisbane that is afflicted, or the whole world? All these questions and more are eventually answered.
Like most of us, the survivors here have no particular survival skills, and furthermore their inability to reach the ground makes their future survival tenuous at best. There’s a lot of examination here about how really unfit most of these people really are for post-apocalyptic survival, and much of it is pretty funny. At the same time, there’s also a lot of, you know, people getting horribly dissolved. I guess that could be funny, but at least in my opinion that’s actually pretty horrifying. At least I think I’d be horrified if this was going on around me (at least it is mercifully quick – over in seconds and not hours-or-days long Troma-style horrorshow stuff). I know that I can really enjoy horror comedy – This Book is Full of Spiders may have been my favorite book of 2012 – but for some reason it didn’t quite gel for me here.
In trying to organize my thoughts here, I realize that, again, I don’t have super strong feelings about this one either good or bad. There are a lot of quotable and amusing parts here, and some really squirmworthy parts as well. So, that’s good. But he’s also got a layer of ironic detachment about a mile wide, and that prevents the reader from really caring about Travis or anyone else for that matter. If the author doesn’t really care if the characters make it then it’s certainly hard for me to get worked up about it. I'm not sure if he just isn't very good at characterization, or if he feels that someone will make fun of him if it looks like he's actually caring about his characters. In either case, that was something I didn't like about Mogworld and I didn't like it here either.
In my opinion, Yahtzee has a great book in him somewhere – he’s certainly got the chops for it – but this one isn’t it. At the same time, if you only read one book about carnivorous jam this year, this should probably be the one.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Breakout by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake)
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.
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.
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.
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