Friday, October 14, 2011

I'm not loving Alfred Duggan's The Cunning of the Dove. It's another one of these historical books where the main character is the least interesting of all the historical personages bouncing around. It's all about the grand sweep of events, seen through the eyes of the passive and uninvolved king's chamberlain. Even the saintly King doesn't seem like much of a hoot. Ah, well.

I really need a great new novel to read.

Labels: reading books

11:24 AM

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Tuesday, October 4, 2011

NPR crowdsourced people's 100 favorite SF&F books. SF Signal arranged them in a handy flowchart. Check it out.

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Thursday, September 15, 2011

I finished the LAST KINGDOM by Bernard Cornwell. I'm sort of two minds about it. It's a quick read. It catches the wild ride of one Northumbrian nobleman's son whose father is killed, and his lands taken, by the invading Danes. He's captured by a Danish nobleman and raised almost as a son, but destiny has other plans for him.

I liked the book as historical fiction. I liked the sense of who the Saxon English were, and who the Danes were, and what they valued. The reign of King Alfred of Wessex is another hinge point of English history, like the Saxon invasions themselves. In Alfred's time, the Saxon English, mostly Christian, were nearly conquered by the invading pagan Danes.

But the main character, Uhtred, is a bit of an enigma. His actions are those of a passionate man, but he talks dispassionately about them as he recounts them -- an old man telling the story of a young man's choices. Uhtred is motivated by the desire to get back his father's castle, but it's not always the driving force in his life. Sometimes sex is. Sometimes friendship is. Does that make him well-rounded as a character, or vague?

Alfred is a well-drawn nemesis, wise, fanatically religious, Puritanical and sly. And many of the other characters are well-drawn too. But there's a hole in the book, I feel, where the main character should be.

Your mileage may vary. To be fair, this is a book I ripped through in a few days. But I'm not strongly motivated to read the next one. I sort of wanted it all to add up to more. The book is a rollercoaster. I wish it held together as a coherent story, you know, with a theme and all.

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9:22 AM

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Monday, September 5, 2011

I've been reading Charles Mann's new book 1493, the sequel, natch, to his awesome historical book 1491. 1491 was about evidence that the pre-Columbian Native American societies were far richer, more populated, and complex than we think of them -- that what is now the Amazon jungle was heavily cultivated by millions of Indians who were wiped out by disease before any but the very first white travelers saw them. 1493 is about the huge changes in the world after the New and Old Worlds became linked: how the tons of silver from the Potosi mine in Bolivia bankrupted the Qinq Dynasty in China, how the potato changed Europe, how corn allowed the Chinese to move into the hill country.

Until ships crossed the Atlantic, according to Mann, there was no malaria in the New World, and the most advanced cultures were all in the warm, wet parts of North and South America; after malaria, those cultures took a serious beating while the colder, dryer areas jumped ahead. Mann makes a convincing case that malaria was a chief factor in African slavery. Malaria was deadly to whites and Indians, but Africans were partly immune to malaria, from living with it for thousands of years. In the American north, poor whites from Europe could be counted on to do the dirty work, but in the American South, and in South America, they died in huge numbers, while African slaves tended to survive.

I love looking back at the past through the lens of a book. Often when we think about the past, it's hard to understand why people did the things they did. Kings make what seem to be idiotic decisions, entire cultures destroy their own lands... didn't they know better? But as you get to know the past better, it becomes clear how people always did what seemed to make sense at the time. There are always factors you don't know about.

I guess that's one of the things that drew me to telling Morgan's story. The canonical story makes her out to be an evil witch. But what's her side of the story? Why did she behave the way she did? What makes someone so vengeful that they're willing to pull down their whole world around their heads? What wrongs would have to have been done to a young woman to make her behave the way we're told she did. I hope I came up with interesting answers in the book.

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10:27 AM

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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

I got my CueCat in the mail yesterday. It's a little barcode scanner in the shape of a cat, natch. (I guess to go with the mouse.) Run it along a barcode and it types the barcode into your computer. You can use it to scan your books into LibraryThing.

Why would you scan your books into LibraryThing? I guess so you can show your friends what books you have. Then you can see what books they have. And you can learn more about the authors. But most importantly, LibraryThing can find someone who has your taste in books, more or less, and then show you what books they have that you don't have. Chances are you'll find something good to read.

You can check out my books here. Not all of them, 'cause that would be a lot of scanning. And I keep donating them to the library when I'm done so they don't take over my house. But most of my favorite ones.

(I also have an author page there, with links. But I think the, uh, library thing is the most interesting part of the site.)

Labels: reading books

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Saturday, July 23, 2011

Fragments of Life interviews me about my favorite books from 2011, and what I've been reading, and what's in my library.

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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

The Fiction Enthusiast asked me what books I would recommend to 5 year old me, 11 year old me, 16 year old me, and 20 year old me. What do you think of my answers?

Labels: book tour, reading books

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Thursday, June 30, 2011

In the past few days (and especially since my computer died), I've been reading Tim Powers books. I really enjoy his mix of history and fantasy. The historical bits give a sense that he's done a tremendous amount of research into the times he's writing about, whether it's 1529 (THE DRAWING OF THE DARK) or 1987 (THREE DAYS TO NEVER). The fantasy bits feel right, too. Of course getting the history right helps the fantasy too. As he says in an interview in the Guardian:

One advantage of rooting his stories in the real is, he hopes, that readers will be more likely to suspend their disbelief. "It gives a lot of real-world lumber to support my crazy supernatural business. I'm always very aware of the risk that a reader will blink and say wait a minute this is all made up crap, isn't it?" he says. "But if I talk about carriages and shoe buckles and George III and commerce between London and Amsterdam, the reader will be a little more tilted towards thinking this is happening in the real world. If I wrote about the magical kingdom of Ding Dong and the lost prince and the dark lord, I would have ceded a whole lot of territory as far as plausibility goes. There is a speed bump to credulity, when you ask readers to take seriously things like ghosts and vampires, and I want to make it as low as possible. I want to be able to have them go over it without any kind of jolt."

Where he lost me on both books was the endings. Some novelists have a talent for weaving multiple threads that all come together at the finale. Not so much Tim Powers, not in these two books. The characters and the worlds are well wrought, and Powers' powers of invention is strong. But the endings fizzled a bit.

(I'll try not to spoil anything, and I won't tell you whether Harry Potter finally gets to hook up with someone, but if you're thinking of reading these very fine books in the next few months, go ahead and read them first.)

THE DRAWING OF THE DARK gives an occult reason for the 1529 assault on Vienna by the Turks. Vienna must hold out until October 31, or the West will fall to the East! Yet, for some reason, the finale occurs about two weeks earlier. It's sort of Plotting 101 that if you "set a clock" on the action, the finale should reach its climax just as the clock is about to strike. That's the moment everything should come together.

In THREE DAYS TO NEVER, two spy groups are trying to get their hands on a Device, while a father with a Past and a daughter with an Ability are caught in the middle. As you might expect from the title, the Device has apocalyptic powers. But you only find that out in the last five pages of the book, and then it isn't so much explained as nodded at. You don't know what the Big Bad was or what it would have done; and you don't know what the heroes did to stop it. C'mon. If the jeopardy is going to be The End of the World, then we should know that by midway through, don't you think? And at least one of the heroes ought to know it by what screenwriters would call the beginning of Act Three.

Damn it, where are his editors? Because surely he is not so famous a fantasy author that he no longer has to listen to his editors?

Now I'm not saying these are bad books or that I didn't enjoy reading them. I'm just a little disappointed in the endings. After all the world-building and mythology-construction that Powers is so good at, I hope for a better finale.

THE ANUBIS GATES didn't have this problem. DECLARE definitely didn't have this problem. I think I need to go read some more Tim Powers.

Labels: reading books

5:23 PM

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Friday, June 24, 2011

We're on vacation. Right now I'm in my parents' apartment overlooking the Hudson River. New Jersey is still shrouded in fog. I'm looking through the books I read this year for part of my upcoming blog tour. I'm struck how many times I read books by authors I love that were disappointing. I couldn't get through ANATHEM by Neal Stephenson, whose Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite books ever. Neil Gaiman's GRAVEYARD BOOK was fine, but I wouldn't rave about it, as I would rave about his SANDMAN graphic novels, or AMERICAN GODS, or NEVERWHERE. (Though I never get tired of reading BLUEBERRY GIRL to Jesse.) Charles Stross's FAMILY TRADE didn't even feel like the same author as ACCELERANDO or THE JENNIFER MORGUE.

Meanwhile, I'm on a Tim Powers rampage. I found LAST CALL hard to get through, but I loved ON STRANGER TIDES and I loved rereading THE ANUBIS GATES. I've got THE DRAWING OF THE DARK cued up. It's his Arthurian book. I'm psyched.

Labels: reading books

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Wednesday, June 15, 2011

I thought Tim Powers' biography on IMDB was pretty funny. I wonder who wrote it?

The greatest fantasy writer of his generation, Powers has lived in southern California since 1959. ... Powers, who takes more time and care writing novels than his fans would like, went on to sell "The Drawing of the Dark" (1979, a supernatural fantasy about King Arthur and beer-drinking) ... A very accessible writer, he has often taught the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop at Michigan State University and the Writers of the Future Workshop, and chats regularly with his fans on the Tim Powers discussion list on yahoogroups.

I've just started ON STRANGER TIDES, which is apparently the basis for the new PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie, though I doubt the two have much to do with each other except for a fascination with Voodoo.

In a less fantastical vein, I just finished EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON, a beautiful history of the rise and fall of the Comanche nation. For some generations they were the most powerful of the horse tribes in the southern Great Plains, and actually rolled back the frontier for a while, until they succumbed to six-shooters and buffalo hunters. The book feels fair: both the settlers and the Comanches have their moments of glory and brutality. It's always hard to read about how the Native Americans got crushed, but the Comanches gave as good as they got for a fair long while.

Labels: reading books

1:39 PM

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Friday, May 13, 2011

At the used bookstore, I picked up Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time, which I remember liking as a kid, and the nice old lady there said, "When you read it as an adult, it's so much better."

Mmmmm, well, no, that was not my experience.

The main character, Meg, is a good YA heroine. She gets picked on for being smart. She acts out. She's impatient. I can dig it. I spent most of junior high not living up to my potential.

But she never gets to do anything with that personality. In fact, she barely gets to do anything at all. The real hero is her telepathic savant five year old brother, Charles Wallace, and possibly a guy from her school, Calvin, who she essentially bumps into. Charles Wallace has been in touch with three supernatural entities, who know where her missing father is.

And when the entities whisk Charles Wallace off, she's along for the ride. I don't think she makes a single decision other than "hold on!" until 80% through the story, when she decides to risk her life to save her kid brother.

Which, granted, is pretty important. But pretty late, too. You couldn't write a YA novel like that these days. Your publisher would say, "But your heroine is passive!"

I guess there weren't a lot of kickass young female heroines in 1962. The book won the Newbery Award and a slew of others.

I'd like to say, "And yet it has something." But it disappointed me. It has a typical 1962-ish equation of evil with conformity. (After I grew up, I discovered that the 1960's lied to us about conformity. It's sort of important.) It has a Big Bad that amounts to a Big Black Cloud.

I sort of felt that it was the kind of science fantasy that someone writes when they don't actually like speculative fiction. I'm told Madeleine L'Engle's favorite book is Anna Karenina. Beware of speculative fiction authors whose favorite books aren't spec fiction. Personally, much as I enjoyed War and Peace, my favorite books -- the ones I would most like to read again for the first time, if I could, and the ones I reread when I can -- are all spec fiction, by Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson.

What books have you read that didn't hold up?

Labels: reading books

2:18 PM

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Saturday, April 30, 2011

I know that Game of Thrones is a big deal to a lot of people. And I have to admit that I only read the free Kindle sample, and watched the first two episodes of the miniseries (which seemed to follow the sample fairly faithfully). After all, there are people who've read all of the GoT books ten times.

But I'm not falling in love with it. Is it because everyone is so sad, and mean? Is it because I feel betrayed that after a promising start with "the white walkers," magic doesn't show up again, and therefore it's just sort of vaguely medieval without being historical? Is it because there is a great deal of talking and little action, and the talking isn't exceptionally clever or interesting? Is it because Sean Bean walks around with a single, pained expression on his face -- more or less the pained expression that young Emilia Clarke has?

Oh, well, I suppose I'll keep watching for a bit.

UPDATE: Just couldn't get through episode 3.

Labels: reading books, watching TV

9:01 AM

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Sunday, April 3, 2011

I really enjoyed Tim Powers' DECLARE so much I went to library to grab a couple more. LAST CALL and THE ANUBIS GATES looked good.

I was a few pages into THE ANUBIS GATES when I realized I had read it a few years ago.

But it was so good, I read it again. Just finished. Yep, just as good as I remember.

I am beginning to get a handle on Tim Powers, I think. I have a feeling he does an awful lot of historical research, and then works his stories around the historical facts of the time. In DECLARE, he created a story that would wrap around the facts known about the famous traitor spy Kim Philby, yet leave room for the existence of djinns.

The Anubis Gates is a fantasy story about a scholar who gets sucked into a plot to restore the Egyptian gods, set in 1983, 1802 and 1685. It's got the massacre of the Mamelukes, and the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion, and Coleridge giving lectures on Milton, and the St. Giles rookery.

I don't start with historical research, myself. I started THE CIRCLE CAST with the traditional, medieval King Arthur. My first wife did her Ph. D. dissertation on the Morrígan, so I learned a lot about Cúchulainn and the Tuatha Dé Danaan. I ran across a book by Geoffrey Ashe that made a convincing case for the historical King Arthur living in 500 AD or so. I wound up doing a lot of research, but the research came later.

I sort of wonder if Tim Powers reads up on interesting times and places to write about, and then comes up with a novel plot that will allow him to justify the research.

Anyway, it's on to LAST CALL now. So far it's only about Las Vegas in 1948, but I'm sure that will change.

Labels: reading books

2:26 PM

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Wednesday, January 5, 2011

I read the first book in Charles Stross's MERCHANT PRINCES saga, THE FAMILY TRADE. It's about an ordinary gal who works in a hi-tech magazine until -- surprise -- her mum's family medallion whisks her away to another universe, where she is the heir to a vast fortune. Catch: it's a medieval society, and her fortune is made on the backs of the peasants. Oh, and heroin smuggling between the universes.

I'm a big fan of Chuck Stross's science fiction -- SINGULARITY SKY, ACCELERANDO. But this one left me cold. Why?

For one thing, the conceit is heavily purloined from Narnia: the hero is a boring person here, but a crucial person Over (or Under) There. Neil

Gaiman found a way to take the curse off it in NEVERWHERE: his restless, mundane hero makes the mistake of helping a runaway girl from Under There, and soon starts to become a nonentity Over Here. Stross goes another way: his heroine simply makes a series of logical decisions that she is in more danger Over Here and therefore ought to scamper Over There. You hardly want to be transported to a land of magic and wonder because it is the most sensible thing to do.

I wonder if the problem is the great yawning divide between SF and F. Star Wars is Fantasy; the Force is magic. Star Trek is Science Fiction: the science is balderdash but it is still science. When Star Wars tried to explain Annakin Skywalker's talent for the Force -- he had a high midichlorian count? -- it felt like a betrayal of the genre. Stross has created a fantasy premise - magic locket transports those of the Blood -- but then approaches the story rationally, like an SF author. What sort of things would you do if you could walk between the worlds? Open a courier service, natch. You can Fedex things in this world that would take a long tme to travel in that world. You can smuggle huge quantities of drugs, slowly but surely, across the Other World.

Who cares?

This, I think, was my big problem. I felt there was no real emotional issue. Nothing that could only be solved by the heart; nothing without whose solving the heart would remain forever restless.

Dorothy wants to get home.

THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE was about kids who were unimportant in this world feeling terribly important in this world. (Oh, and it's an allegory for the last days of Jesus Christ. Sorry.)

I did not know what the main character wanted. Or rather, she wanted too many sensible things. She wants safety. She wants a guy. She wants to liberate the peasants.

Yes, yes, I know.

Give me a heroine who wants one thing. One Big Irrational Thing. Juliet wants Romeo more than life itself. Medea wants revenge. Elizabeth Bennet wants to keep her Pride. (I think. Or is it her Prejudice? I can't remember.)

Guess what Morgan wants?

Labels: reading books

10:10 AM

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Saturday, November 13, 2010

Apparently, the old lady who swallowed a fly is no longer in danger of dying, because that would be scary to kids.

But some classic children's books are kind of alarming. Take GOODNIGHT MOON, which Jesse can't stand.

When you think about it, there is something disturbing about the pictures. Has anyone else noticed the following odd things in the child bunny's bedroom:

a. a fireplace
b. a telephone
c. an expensive clock
d. a bookshelf full of hardbound books of various editions

Who puts a telephone in a child's bedroom? It would just wake him up. Who gives a child a room this large? With a fireplace? With burning logs? And two clocks?

There's another clue: the "quiet old lady ... whispering hush."

What I get out of this setup is that she is the child's grandmother. And she is putting up the child bunny in a bedroom meant for adults because those adults are not there.

The parents are not there. And the child is terrified of everything. "Goodnight nobody... goodnight noises everywhere."

The child bunny isn't just visiting. The room has been turned into a child's bedroom. There are now paintings of the cow jumping over the moon and the three little bears. There's a red balloon and a doll's house (with, curiously, the lights on inside.)

I don't think the parents are coming back.

Yikes.

And then, of course, there's the deeply abusive relationship in Shel Silverstein's THE GIVING TREE. Fortunately, Sassy Gay Friend has some dating advice for the tree:



I'll go with Neil Gaiman's BLUEBERRY GIRL, even if the language is far beyond kids. Jesse loves it.

Labels: reading books

9:55 AM

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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Having finished Tim Powers' DECLARE: it's worth it. The book delivers on its mystery.

There's a fascinating epilog, too. The book creates a whole mythology around the British spy turncoat Kim Philby. It was interesting to read how Powers came up with the story. He was reading biographies of Philby, and kept running across events that suggested a much more interesting story hidden just behind what was written. Why did Philby weep for two days when his pet fox died -- when he had only wept so much for the death of his father? Why did a Saudi sheik give Philby, as a child, a twenty carat diamond? And what was the real meaning between Solomon's offer to split the baby in two?

Powers set himself a rule, as he constructed the story of DECLARE, to abide by all the historical facts, and only conjure up what was behind them.

Fascinating. Worth a read.

Labels: reading books

5:30 AM

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Friday, November 5, 2010

I'm reading Tim Powers' DECLARE, a strange fantasy novel about shifting alliances among spies in a world where supernatural entities exist. It's interesting to think about because it's generally hard to figure out what the hero wants. There's a love story. And he's a dedicated spy trying to infiltrate ... something ... but the story unfolds in back-and-forth time -- 1948, then 1963, then 1941, then 1945, then 1963 again. And it changes main characters halfway through. I don't know what the stakes are.The hero is a bit of cipher, as spies sometimes are. What am I rooting for?

In other words it bends all sorts of narrative rules and even arguably breaks some.

Somehow it gets away with it. I'm not sure why I keep reading it, but I do. Maybe because I want to find out what the supernatural powers are, and what exactly happened on Mount Ararat in 1948.

I want to get to the bottom of the mystery. That must be it.

I started Charles Stross's MERCHANT PRINCES series but got bored halfway through book one. I'm a big fan of his SF work, but this was cheesy fantasy. Not for lack of story elements. The heroine was clearly drawn. I knew what she wanted. I knew what danger she was in. There was an interesting parallel universe story going. But there was nothing mysterious about it; unlike in Roger Zelazny's AMBER series, by which the Merchant Princes series is loosely inspired. So I didn't care.

I tries to give THE CIRCLE CAST both: a coherent story, and a mystery. You may judge how well I did.

Labels: reading books

8:44 AM

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Thursday, December 24, 2009

I've been a fan of Guillermo del Toro since his elegant, low key vampire movie Cronos. So naturally I picked up his and Chuck Hogan's vampire apocalypse novel THE STRAIN.

Del Toro and Hogan have gone and written them a bestseller. I'm sure the sales are great, but I mean the genre. There's a certain kind of book that you just know was written to sell a million copies, and then to be adapted into a spectacular feature film with a cast of stars and familiar faces.

My family has a friend, Arthur Herzog, who was writing unsuccessful literary novels in the 70's. He finally went to his agent and said, "I want to make some money." His agent said, "Take the New York Times Best Seller list, and read the top ten books."

He did, and then proceeded to bang out THE SWARM, a novel about a plague of killer bees.

So you have: the scary precipitating incident. The cast of initially unconnected heros. Minor, foreshadowing incidents. Then the badness kicks in. The good guys realize their predicament, meet each other, and start to fight it.

I like that THE STRAIN's vampires are not Edward Cullen-style sparkly ponies. They are a scary perversion of nature. They are human beings taken over by a virus and a parasitic worm, driven mad by lust for blood, and they spread by feeding. Fast.

Del Toro and Hogan have thought out the science fiction, so it feels convincing. These aren't mystical vamps, they're realistic vamps.

What I don't like is the book starts to feel formulaic. Of course the hero is a top expert from the Center for Disease Control. Of course he's estranged from his wife and kid. Of course they're in danger. Of course the other hero is an old man from Europe who knows all the folkore about vampires, and has been fighting them on his own. Of course there's a girl expert, too. Of course the forces of evil insidiously contrive to make them have to go on the run, and fight the vamps on their own.

I'm 60% into the novel, and I can't say that anything that's happened really surprised me. It's all fun and a little scary to read. But the plot unfolds just about how you would unfold it if you hired any competent write to construct a novel about a vampire apocalypse. The heroes aren't surprising. They're good people, without big flaws or complicated passions that would make them do the wrong (and surprising, and distinctive) thing. They're just generic smart people caught in an extraordinary situation.

The plot feels like it's built to support the eventual movie adaptation. You want to keep the plot focused on the motley band of heroes who are the sole hope of the human race, because those are your stars. That's why you have to put them on the run. It wouldn't do to have the heroes notify the White House, and then sit by while the Army and CDC and NYPD do their thing.

But then, how do a few heroes stop a vampire apocalypse? Soon we're hearing that you only have to kill the Master Vampire and you can stop the apocalypse. So it is a job for three people, after all.

Which was the point where I stopped reading and decided to write this post. Because I have trouble believing that vampires made by a virus and a parasitic worm give a hoot who the Master Vampire is. So there goes your convincing science fiction.

I think if I were writing about a vamp apocalypse, I would be more inclined to write a story like 28 DAYS LATER, where it's not about stopping the vamp apocalypse, it's about a couple of people trying to survive it. A close, personal story, where the characters are flawed, and don't necessarily help each other, and get into arguments at inappropriate times.

Of course, that's not a bestseller. That's a novel in danger of becoming literary. Then you have a literary novel about vampires, and what section do you put it in? I had the same thing with THE CIRCLE CAST: it's a novel about a girl with a huge talent and a huge flaw, and that makes it sort of a literary novel. But it's a literary novel about a young sorceress learning her magical powers, so what section do you put it in?

I sometimes wonder if I could write a bestseller. Again, not talking about sales figures; that's as much to do with marketing as anything. On the one hand I think I could write a book like this one, or like THE SWARM. On the other hand, I think I would be strongly drawn to making the characters flawed and interesting, and taking the plot off in some unexpected direction. And then it wouldn't be a bestseller any more.

UPDATE:

I finished reading THE STRAIN. What a disappointment. Where is the Guillermo del Toro of PAN'S LABYRINTH? You would think a novel would be more personal, more distinctive, than his movies. After all, it costs nothing to write a book, and it costs millions to make a movie. A novel can be anything you want. A movie has to answer to the studio fronting the money; the music is the composer's, the acting is the star's. Aside from the scary vampires with their six foot tongues, where's del Toro? (And it's not like we haven't seen six foot tongues before, e.g. Doc from Season 5 of Buffy.) It's as if he sat down with Chuck Hogan for a few days, gave him some ideas, and then walked away, leaving the bestseller writer to do his thing.

It's not even top quality bestseller writing. At the end of the four day period of the novel, the hero is bravely uploading footage of a vamp to the Internet, to prove they exist. This, after vampires have been rampaging around all over Manhattan for days. Surely there would be hundreds of videos up on YouTube by this point? The Iranians managed it, and they had to smuggle cell phones out of the country.

Well, I hope del Toro will take his loot and go and make a personal movie. Something truly creepy, and unique, and original.

Labels: reading books, vampires

11:31 AM

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Monday, December 21, 2009

Alfred Duggan's CONSCIENCE OF THE KING is a marvelous tale of the founding ruler of Wessex, the kingdom of the West Saxons. It's marvelous because he is a wicked man, a backstabber and a traitor. And yet you find yourself rooting for him, even when Artorius shows up trying to save Britain for the British. Such is the power of a narrator to win you over to his side no matter how wrong that side is.

Like the best of historical novels, it's a visit to another time and other ways of thinking. Cerdic is born around 500 AD, the same time more or less as THE CIRCLE CAST. He's born a Roman but of Saxon descent, and his journey takes him from Roman Britain to Saxon Britain to Saxony and back. It's the Dark Ages of Britain, when Roman civilization is collapsing without any Saxons civilized enough to take it over. Alfred Duggan captures the nostalgia his hero feels for the comforts of civilization even as he's destroying it for his own reasons.

CONSCIENCE OF THE KING is not a passionate book; Duggan's hero is a conniver who barely feels much sentiment for his own son, and doesn't regret his murders. But it is a fascinating book. I'm looking forward to his other two Saxon novels, THE KING OF ATHELNEY, about Alfred the Great, and THE CUNNING OF THE DOVE. He really brings another time and place to life, and with tremendous historical accuracy. It is hard to find a movie that does that.

For you Celts, Happy Solstice, and for you Saxons, Merry Yule, and for those of you who still cling to the ways of Rome: Joyous Saturnalia! (Did I miss anything?)

Labels: Arthur, historical novels, reading books

8:06 PM

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Friday, October 30, 2009

In Neil Gaiman's lovely short story and then comic ONE LIFE FURNISHED IN EARLY MOORCOCK, he writes about how he felt betrayed by C. S. Lewis's Narnia series, once he figured out that it was all a Roman Catholic allegory.

...until, last year, rereading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for perhaps the hundredth time, it had occurred to him that the transformation of the unpleasant Eustace Scrub into a dragon, and his subsequent conversion to belief in Aslan the lion, was terribly similar to the conversion of St. Paul, on the road to Damascus; if his blindness were a dragon…

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him.

But not Michael Moorcock's Elric series.

At least the Elric stories were honest. There was nothing going on beneath the surface there: Elric was the etiolated prince of a dead race, burning with self-pity, clutching Stormbringer, his dark-bladed broadsword — a blade which sang for lives, which ate human souls and which gave their strength to the doomed and weakened albino.

Which might possibly be why I took it into my head to reread a bit of Moorcock lately. They are fine, short and yummy.

And, oddly, not very dark at all, when you compare them to almost anything Mr. Gaiman has written. Honestly, THE GRAVEYARD BOOK is quite a bit more disturbing. Funny about that. In THE GRAVEYARD BOOK, one boy is at risk of being killed. In the Elric books, the hero lays waste to lives and souls, serving the evil lord of Chaos, Arioch. A couple of times, the existence of all Earth is up for grabs. But it's all a fun read. Nothing truly disturbing at all.

I guess part of it is that in Elric, you know who's evil and who's not. On television, it's not the level of carnage that makes something acceptable for network or restricted to pay cable. CRIMINAL MINDS has horrific torture porn, and it's on broadcast TV at 10 pm. What puts a show on cable is when you're not sure who's good and who's bad. It's the shades of gray. DEXTER is a serial killer, but we like him. That's disturbing. Take NEVERWHERE. Is the Marquis de Carabas a good man? Mmm, no, not really. Is Hunter?

Maybe that's why I read right through THE ELRIC SAGA BOOK ONE with great pleasure, and have no need whatsoever to pick up the next compilation. It doesn't leave me with anything. While Neil's stuff pops into my head at odd hours.

Not because Neil's trying to slip something by. It's all there, the gods, the fae, London Under. It's not an allegory. But it is a fairy story, in the Tolkien sense. It's a new myth. Or as Puck says in Sandman #19, "It never happened, but it's true!"

That's what I'm trying to do in THE CIRCLE CAST: something you can read for fun, but which pops back up at you at odd hours. Something which never happened, but is true anyway.

And Morgan isn't exactly a good person. But I love her for who she is.

What rings your bell?

Labels: reading books

10:44 AM

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