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.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
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.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Gilgamesh: A New English Version by Stephen Mitchell
I grew up with a set of Greek and Roman mythological compilations and I love them to this day; I have occasionally tried to branch out into other myths and legends throughout the world and I’m at least passing familiar with most mythological traditions. I’ve never really liked Sumerian myths that much, though. They’re pretty weird. Neal Stephenson once described them as the writings of a febrile toddler, and even from an era where gods weren't necessarily expected to have superior moral standing to humans the Sumerian pantheon is a pretty psychotic bunch, especially Inanna, goddess of screwing and ultra-violence.
I think a lot of this has to do with the passage of time between then and now. The Greek mythological heroes are not “heroic” in the modern sense of that word; they aren’t do-gooders so much as they are strong and/or cunning enough to take what they want and tough enough that they can prevent other people from stopping them from doing it, and of course Sumeria is far more removed from us even than that. I think the lack of material also hurts. The mythological canon from Greece is one thing, but we also have a bunch of contemporary stuff by playwrights like Euripides that shows that even the ancient Greeks thought the gods and heroes were a bunch of huge jerks. If we had a huge bunch of surviving work from ancient Sumeria we’d probably find that the average person on the street wasn’t really all that much different than us. However, we don’t.
Anyway, Gilgamesh. Oldest known story in the world, drawn from a couple of clay tablets dug up in the middle of nowhere, so it’s a little fragmentary and contradictory; probably it was a popular tale which came in different versions and variations. It’s also pretty dry and a literal translation (which I’ve read in the past) contains a bunch of those repetitions and redundancies that would allow some poet to keep his place or recover from forgetting his place like you’d see in other oral works of antiquity. They’re actually pretty tough going and I don’t think I’d ever managed to read one through before. For these reasons I really admire Mitchell’s “version” (as opposed to “translation”) in which he cheerfully admits that he can’t read the work in the original language; he simply takes other translations, cleans up all the repetitions, and tries to set the whole thing in some sort of readable modern English prose. It’s still kind of an odd story, but I found myself pretty into it this time.
This version is split up into 11 chapters or “books”, which doesn’t really correspond to the original story but narratively works pretty well. In the beginning we’re introduced to Gilgamesh himself, the king of Uruk, being one-third human and two-thirds divine (however that’s supposed to work). At the moment he’s oppressing his subjects, forcing all the young women to sleep with him and working all the young men to exhaustion somehow (possibly with military training, possibly with building defensive walls around Uruk). He’s definitely a huge jerk but at the same time it’s also a case of him just being too awesome for his own good; his divine nature means he doesn’t ever sleep, so it’s not just a question of him simply terrorizing everybody, they can’t keep up with him. Nonetheless the people of Uruk petition the gods to give Gilgamesh something better to do – this being an ancient historical epic written by noblemen who hadn’t considered the notion of maybe just not having a jerkass king. Nonetheless.
The gods decide to create a friend for Gilgamesh and make the wild man Enkidu, who scares the trappers and peasants out in the boondocks of the kingdom until those people petition Gilgamesh to take care of this problem for them. You might think that he’d raise an army and go out there, but instead he sends one of the sacred prostitutes from the temple of Ishtar, Shamhat, to sort things out and then promptly forgets about the whole thing. Gilgamesh figures that this will tame the wild man, and after seven days of consecutive lovemaking he is proven correct. What he doesn’t figure is that Enkidu will subsequently hear about how awesome Gilgamesh is, come to Uruk to challenge him, followed by a knock-down brawl in the street that results in them becoming friends.
I guess Gilgamesh was used to subjects and hadn’t ever really had a friend before. At that point he decides that what they need is an adventure, so they decide to go kill the monster Humbaba, which is guarding a cedar forest at the behest of the gods. Humbaba is terrifying, I guess, but his job description is to stay in the forest and he doesn’t come out and harass the countryside or anything. Enkidu doesn’t really want to do this since he saw Humbaba once and thinks he’s not to be trifled with, but Gilgamesh is the king and so they do it anyway. Calling this a fight would be highly misleading, since basically once they get there Gilgamesh wants to give up, but then the gods magically grant them victory and Humbaba surrenders. Enkidu says they should kill him anyway and eventually persuades Gilgamesh to do it, although at this point Humbaba is no longer a threat to them and curses them with his dying breath. Then the impish duo manage to piss off the goddess Inanna by killing another supernatural monster, so the gods decree that Enkidu must die. Which he does.
At this point it’s worth pointing out that Sumerian mythology was sort of a bummer about the afterlife. Everyone went down to the underworld, ruled over by Erishkigal, and had to wear a suit of feathers and eat dust for eternity. I’ve also seen references that they weren’t able to talk. This was similar to the initial Greco/Roman conception of Hades, although by late antiquity they’d come up with the notion that especially good souls got rewards and especially bad ones got torments, but for a long time the afterlife was a very dreary and one-size-fits-all conception. Having been busy enjoying life, Gilgamesh hadn’t really given too much thought to this before, but losing his friend drives him sort of over the bend and he decides to seek the secret of eternal life. After a long series of quests which take up the actual majority of the saga, he fails. Nonetheless, the quests have taught him that he should just keep enjoying his life as long as he has it, and he then personally narrates the end of the tale, telling everyone how awesome Uruk is.
So, like I said, oldest story in the world. I can’t say that it’s enthralling exactly, but it’s a unique experience to know that anything contained in this story is almost as old as human civilization. Also interesting is the progression of the good life throughout mythology and how much it revolved around regular mealtimes. Forget money and possessions – they were doing all right with sufficient bread and beer, and regular visits to cult prostitutes of course. And although a lot of the motivations are sort of impenetrable to the modern reader, there are still some pretty funny scenes to be found here, particularly those involving the immortal Utnapishtim. He’s pretty cranky for an immortal guy and he thinks that Gilgamesh is full of crap for not wanting to die. In one sense he’s right, this is a stupid quest, but on the other hand it’s pretty easy for him to say that seeing as how the gods have exempted him from having to.
Having finished this I’m pretty much done with my desire to explore the Epic of Gilgamesh any further, so curiosity satisfied. Something a little more contemporary next time, I think.
I think a lot of this has to do with the passage of time between then and now. The Greek mythological heroes are not “heroic” in the modern sense of that word; they aren’t do-gooders so much as they are strong and/or cunning enough to take what they want and tough enough that they can prevent other people from stopping them from doing it, and of course Sumeria is far more removed from us even than that. I think the lack of material also hurts. The mythological canon from Greece is one thing, but we also have a bunch of contemporary stuff by playwrights like Euripides that shows that even the ancient Greeks thought the gods and heroes were a bunch of huge jerks. If we had a huge bunch of surviving work from ancient Sumeria we’d probably find that the average person on the street wasn’t really all that much different than us. However, we don’t.
Anyway, Gilgamesh. Oldest known story in the world, drawn from a couple of clay tablets dug up in the middle of nowhere, so it’s a little fragmentary and contradictory; probably it was a popular tale which came in different versions and variations. It’s also pretty dry and a literal translation (which I’ve read in the past) contains a bunch of those repetitions and redundancies that would allow some poet to keep his place or recover from forgetting his place like you’d see in other oral works of antiquity. They’re actually pretty tough going and I don’t think I’d ever managed to read one through before. For these reasons I really admire Mitchell’s “version” (as opposed to “translation”) in which he cheerfully admits that he can’t read the work in the original language; he simply takes other translations, cleans up all the repetitions, and tries to set the whole thing in some sort of readable modern English prose. It’s still kind of an odd story, but I found myself pretty into it this time.
This version is split up into 11 chapters or “books”, which doesn’t really correspond to the original story but narratively works pretty well. In the beginning we’re introduced to Gilgamesh himself, the king of Uruk, being one-third human and two-thirds divine (however that’s supposed to work). At the moment he’s oppressing his subjects, forcing all the young women to sleep with him and working all the young men to exhaustion somehow (possibly with military training, possibly with building defensive walls around Uruk). He’s definitely a huge jerk but at the same time it’s also a case of him just being too awesome for his own good; his divine nature means he doesn’t ever sleep, so it’s not just a question of him simply terrorizing everybody, they can’t keep up with him. Nonetheless the people of Uruk petition the gods to give Gilgamesh something better to do – this being an ancient historical epic written by noblemen who hadn’t considered the notion of maybe just not having a jerkass king. Nonetheless.
The gods decide to create a friend for Gilgamesh and make the wild man Enkidu, who scares the trappers and peasants out in the boondocks of the kingdom until those people petition Gilgamesh to take care of this problem for them. You might think that he’d raise an army and go out there, but instead he sends one of the sacred prostitutes from the temple of Ishtar, Shamhat, to sort things out and then promptly forgets about the whole thing. Gilgamesh figures that this will tame the wild man, and after seven days of consecutive lovemaking he is proven correct. What he doesn’t figure is that Enkidu will subsequently hear about how awesome Gilgamesh is, come to Uruk to challenge him, followed by a knock-down brawl in the street that results in them becoming friends.
I guess Gilgamesh was used to subjects and hadn’t ever really had a friend before. At that point he decides that what they need is an adventure, so they decide to go kill the monster Humbaba, which is guarding a cedar forest at the behest of the gods. Humbaba is terrifying, I guess, but his job description is to stay in the forest and he doesn’t come out and harass the countryside or anything. Enkidu doesn’t really want to do this since he saw Humbaba once and thinks he’s not to be trifled with, but Gilgamesh is the king and so they do it anyway. Calling this a fight would be highly misleading, since basically once they get there Gilgamesh wants to give up, but then the gods magically grant them victory and Humbaba surrenders. Enkidu says they should kill him anyway and eventually persuades Gilgamesh to do it, although at this point Humbaba is no longer a threat to them and curses them with his dying breath. Then the impish duo manage to piss off the goddess Inanna by killing another supernatural monster, so the gods decree that Enkidu must die. Which he does.
At this point it’s worth pointing out that Sumerian mythology was sort of a bummer about the afterlife. Everyone went down to the underworld, ruled over by Erishkigal, and had to wear a suit of feathers and eat dust for eternity. I’ve also seen references that they weren’t able to talk. This was similar to the initial Greco/Roman conception of Hades, although by late antiquity they’d come up with the notion that especially good souls got rewards and especially bad ones got torments, but for a long time the afterlife was a very dreary and one-size-fits-all conception. Having been busy enjoying life, Gilgamesh hadn’t really given too much thought to this before, but losing his friend drives him sort of over the bend and he decides to seek the secret of eternal life. After a long series of quests which take up the actual majority of the saga, he fails. Nonetheless, the quests have taught him that he should just keep enjoying his life as long as he has it, and he then personally narrates the end of the tale, telling everyone how awesome Uruk is.
So, like I said, oldest story in the world. I can’t say that it’s enthralling exactly, but it’s a unique experience to know that anything contained in this story is almost as old as human civilization. Also interesting is the progression of the good life throughout mythology and how much it revolved around regular mealtimes. Forget money and possessions – they were doing all right with sufficient bread and beer, and regular visits to cult prostitutes of course. And although a lot of the motivations are sort of impenetrable to the modern reader, there are still some pretty funny scenes to be found here, particularly those involving the immortal Utnapishtim. He’s pretty cranky for an immortal guy and he thinks that Gilgamesh is full of crap for not wanting to die. In one sense he’s right, this is a stupid quest, but on the other hand it’s pretty easy for him to say that seeing as how the gods have exempted him from having to.
Having finished this I’m pretty much done with my desire to explore the Epic of Gilgamesh any further, so curiosity satisfied. Something a little more contemporary next time, I think.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds
This isn’t the first time I’ve had Reynolds up here (I actually think it’s the third, but I don’t really feel like trawling the archives to look at the moment). I generally like his work, although as I believe I’ve said before, sometimes he writes some flat dialogue and occasionally his characters are simply horrible for the sake of being horrible. I’m happy to say that neither of those are especially the case in Century Rain, although as of yet I don’t know if he’s written a truly great novel, except possibly House of Suns.
This one is from 2004, so I’m a little late to the party here. As far as I’m aware, this work doesn’t tie in to any of the universes from his other novels, such as Revelation Space or House of Suns. In fact, I found large parts very refreshing, and something out of the ordinary for what I would have expected from a Reynolds work. A large portion of the novel takes place in 1960s-ish Europe, although it’s a different world than ours. In this particular universe, the German offensive through the Ardennes got blunted and thrown back in 1939, so World War II was over almost before it really began. As a result, the Nazis got overthrown in a military coup and many lives that ended in our world were saved. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. Without the ultimate discrediting of the war, there’s still rather a lot of virulent anti-Jewish and nationalist yahoos throughout Europe and they’re beginning to make their bids for power again. And whatever else the war destroyed, it also served as the impetus for a lot of technological change. This world doesn’t have electronic computers, a space program, or the atomic bomb. You might say that sounds all right if you don’t have to worry about ducking and covering, but as it happens it’s sort of a shadowy conspiracy to retard technological development so that it’s easier for a bunch of other humans to conquer it.
The other half of the book takes place in the ruins of the actual Earth we’re familiar with, where the humans that remain are split up into two spacegoing factions due to the accidental destruction of the Earth’s biosphere with rogue nanotechnology and subsequent corruption of most of the data archives of humanity’s history (whether that was also accidental or a deliberate attack is not clear). The Threshers live in near Earth orbit primarily and control access to what’s left of it; they’re more hidebound and avoid the use of nanotechnology. The Slashers live in the outer system and are more hedonistic and somewhat more advanced than the Threshers, made up for by the fact that they’re also more factional. The Slashers control access to the galaxy at large through a mysterious warp gate which was discovered out there, which was apparently made by alien(s) unknown at some point in the distant past. You’d be hard pressed to say that either side is the good guys or the bad guys, since they’ve got something of a nasty history of both hot and cold wars, often resorting to various sorts of doomsday weapons.
This is something of a departure for Reynolds, who often eschews the implausible or the impossible in his work. In this one you’ve got these alien artifacts that do stuff like allow FTL travel or contain entire planets, and although he does try to explain a little bit he mostly just lets them be. So this one is much softer than some of his other works right off the bat. Nonetheless, he does retain the concept that space is big, so the fact that the Slashers can get out into the universe doesn’t really help all that much since there’s not really much out there to do. At least not until they discover that the same mysterious aliens who created the warpgate networks also took a “snapshot” of Earth circa 1936 and put it somewhere out in the universe in a box.
And that’s how the two stories come together. Some of the Slashers think it would be a good idea to wipe out the existing humans on the copied world and then talk real estate with the Threshers. Of course there are a couple of problems with this plan, namely that the Threshers won’t approve of this, secondly that they can’t bring anything sophisticated through the warp gate that leads inside the box, and thirdly that they aren’t sure where exactly the box is. Nonetheless they think there may be ways around these obstacles.
I generally liked this, it was entertaining enough. There are a couple of chase scenes of course, that being something that Reynolds either really likes or just feels like he does well, possibly both, so I figured that would turn up at some point throughout the work. Even though these characters were reasonably well defined and not really at all horrible, I still found myself not quite able to connect with them. The villainous plot is pretty cool but, I don’t know, it didn’t entirely gel for me that a whole planet was really going to be scoured of human life. It seemed like there were much easier ways to do what they wanted to do aside from the mass genocide.
Nonetheless, not bad, some good action scenes and also contemplation. I can’t say that this is my favorite Reynolds work but it’s probably better than some and it didn’t put me off his work either, so definitely worth a look if you like his other stuff.
This one is from 2004, so I’m a little late to the party here. As far as I’m aware, this work doesn’t tie in to any of the universes from his other novels, such as Revelation Space or House of Suns. In fact, I found large parts very refreshing, and something out of the ordinary for what I would have expected from a Reynolds work. A large portion of the novel takes place in 1960s-ish Europe, although it’s a different world than ours. In this particular universe, the German offensive through the Ardennes got blunted and thrown back in 1939, so World War II was over almost before it really began. As a result, the Nazis got overthrown in a military coup and many lives that ended in our world were saved. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. Without the ultimate discrediting of the war, there’s still rather a lot of virulent anti-Jewish and nationalist yahoos throughout Europe and they’re beginning to make their bids for power again. And whatever else the war destroyed, it also served as the impetus for a lot of technological change. This world doesn’t have electronic computers, a space program, or the atomic bomb. You might say that sounds all right if you don’t have to worry about ducking and covering, but as it happens it’s sort of a shadowy conspiracy to retard technological development so that it’s easier for a bunch of other humans to conquer it.
The other half of the book takes place in the ruins of the actual Earth we’re familiar with, where the humans that remain are split up into two spacegoing factions due to the accidental destruction of the Earth’s biosphere with rogue nanotechnology and subsequent corruption of most of the data archives of humanity’s history (whether that was also accidental or a deliberate attack is not clear). The Threshers live in near Earth orbit primarily and control access to what’s left of it; they’re more hidebound and avoid the use of nanotechnology. The Slashers live in the outer system and are more hedonistic and somewhat more advanced than the Threshers, made up for by the fact that they’re also more factional. The Slashers control access to the galaxy at large through a mysterious warp gate which was discovered out there, which was apparently made by alien(s) unknown at some point in the distant past. You’d be hard pressed to say that either side is the good guys or the bad guys, since they’ve got something of a nasty history of both hot and cold wars, often resorting to various sorts of doomsday weapons.
This is something of a departure for Reynolds, who often eschews the implausible or the impossible in his work. In this one you’ve got these alien artifacts that do stuff like allow FTL travel or contain entire planets, and although he does try to explain a little bit he mostly just lets them be. So this one is much softer than some of his other works right off the bat. Nonetheless, he does retain the concept that space is big, so the fact that the Slashers can get out into the universe doesn’t really help all that much since there’s not really much out there to do. At least not until they discover that the same mysterious aliens who created the warpgate networks also took a “snapshot” of Earth circa 1936 and put it somewhere out in the universe in a box.
And that’s how the two stories come together. Some of the Slashers think it would be a good idea to wipe out the existing humans on the copied world and then talk real estate with the Threshers. Of course there are a couple of problems with this plan, namely that the Threshers won’t approve of this, secondly that they can’t bring anything sophisticated through the warp gate that leads inside the box, and thirdly that they aren’t sure where exactly the box is. Nonetheless they think there may be ways around these obstacles.
I generally liked this, it was entertaining enough. There are a couple of chase scenes of course, that being something that Reynolds either really likes or just feels like he does well, possibly both, so I figured that would turn up at some point throughout the work. Even though these characters were reasonably well defined and not really at all horrible, I still found myself not quite able to connect with them. The villainous plot is pretty cool but, I don’t know, it didn’t entirely gel for me that a whole planet was really going to be scoured of human life. It seemed like there were much easier ways to do what they wanted to do aside from the mass genocide.
Nonetheless, not bad, some good action scenes and also contemplation. I can’t say that this is my favorite Reynolds work but it’s probably better than some and it didn’t put me off his work either, so definitely worth a look if you like his other stuff.
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