On an Other Life

Sweet Rain: Accuracy of Death

2008-09-09T22:50:00.000+08:00

directed by Masaya Kakei
screenplay by Masaya Kakei and Hirotoshi Kobayashi
based on the novel by Kotaro Isaka

a bracingly sympathetic universe, filled with things ordinary, not-special, but very, very important.

and not hard to look at, at all. much awesomeness.

WALL-E

2008-08-31T23:17:00.000+08:00

directed by Andrew Stanton
story by Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon

OMGOMGOMG!!! WALL-E has finally arrived in our sector!!!1!!

my enthusiasm had ebbed a bit over the last couple months, i'd been anticipating the movie's arrival for so long that i had begun to imagine there was absolutely no way it could possibly live up to my expectations but, anyway, that didn't keep me away from the cinema, Saturday morning, its first weekend in theaters here. now i keep wanting to talk about it but i loved it so much on such a visceral level that i don't know where to begin, knowing that if i try i'll probably just end up gushing and gurgling incoherently about it, the way i imagine i must have been gushing and gurgling as i stared wide-eyed, barely blinking, up at the screen in the cinema.

[gushing and gurgling deleted by poster]

ok. i tried. i gushed. i gurgled. i deleted gushing and gurgling for the benefit of the reader. just thought i'd point that out in case i wasn't being clear. maybe try again later.

for now, suffice to say i loved this film and, though i say this every time a shiny new Pixar movie comes out (except Cars. i could never get Cars. and now they're making a Cars 2. but why?), this may well be my favorite Pixar movie EVER.

well, maybe, maybe not. but it's certainly pretty darned shiny.

why so serious?

2008-07-29T10:10:00.000+08:00

David Cox's attack on The Dark Knight hits on all the things that make Nolan's Batman a brilliant deconstruction of the superhero myth, and yet he remains well in the dark (hey, cheap rhetoric begets cheap rhetoric, yeah?). Mr Cox is clinging to the myth, looking to superheroes to keep providing us with what Nolan suggests they no longer can, nor should. The Dark Knight is the anti-superhero, the only kind of moral spirit possible for us in our increasingly ambiguous times. i'm sorry to say you're right, Mr Cox. the time of superheroes, as you know them, as you still wish they could be, has passed.

details at 12.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

2008-07-26T22:45:00.000+08:00

directed by Chris Carter
written by Frank Spotnitz and Chris Carter
starring David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Peet, Alvin 'Pimp My X-Files' Joiner (i had to sneak that gag in somewhere), Mitch Pileggi (oops. spoiler?) and Billy 'You Couldn't Hate Me If I Were A Paedophile Priest Like I'm Supposed To Be In This Movie' Connolly

hurm. can't say it was bad; just absolutely inconsequential. one might argue that 'The X-Files: I Want to Believe' is meant to be a post-X-Files X-Files story, that Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz had gotten the gang* together to pull one last rickroll-style bait-and-switch on unsuspecting fans: 'here's something that will absotivolutely rejuvenate the franchise...oops, hang on, no, sorry, can't be done, you see the world has moved on since the 90s...' Scully, at least, baldly states this sentiment, and it sort of almost looks like maybe Mulder might have come around there at the end...allowing, of course, for an unexpected take at the b.o. that might rejuvenate the franchise after all.**

as cruel and unusual as that would have been for even the likes of Carter & Co., yeah, i might actually have wanted to believe that.*** instead, i'm more inclined to believe that this story was originally a screenplay for something else entirely, but which Carter couldn't sell until he slapped the X-Files label on and tweaked it so it wasn't too obvious.

that said, again, i can't really say it was bad. it might**** actually have done well straight-to-video, or if it were released in the late 80s or early 90s as a made-for-TV movie. sure, the pacing seemed a bit off, but it was never quite excruciating; the photography was sometimes pretty, if hardly brilliant, but anyway mostly plain and unobjectionable. the script might have made for wooden dialogue, but was shot through with enough of that Carterian geek-inflected, noir/dragnet-pastiche, infodump/moral speechifying to be called reasonably quirky.

the story? see above.

as for seeing Scully & Mulder together again after all this time, i wish i could say it was like watching two old friends who'd had a falling out get back together...but, well, the problem with that is it was like watching two old friends who'd had a falling out get back together. it's sorta sweet, you like both of them enough you hope it'll work out this time, but there's just something excruciatingly cringe-worthy about it all, like you could see that the reason they didn't work out in the first place had just pulled them further apart in the interim, and that this latest attempt has all the fire and passion of a pathetic, broken, resigned sort of desperation.

and, as entertaining as watching them might have been before with all that unresolved sexual tension simmering beneath the surface to bubble up into flirty bickering, these days, it's just no fun having to watch anymore.

if there is any pathos to be felt for the characters in this film, it is for the fact that every single one of them seems unmoored, as if they'd just dropped into unfamiliar territory without a map. unfortunately, the effect is hardly Wong Kar Wai.

and, most of all, there simply wasn't anything 'cinematic' about this movie. as Manohla Dargis put it in her NYT review, in Rob Bowman's 'The X-Files', the series 'supersized nicely, filling the larger spatial dimensions by staying true to its conceptual parameters.'

there's no such supersizing here, not that i could tell. 'I Want to Believe' has the pace and feel of a particularly unimportant and unexceptional filler episode incomprehensibly spread into a two-parter on the old series. actually, no, it doesn't even feel like it belongs in the old series, despite the familiar characters and aforementioned script quirks or even the rather slap-dash x-filesy (ish) twist. like i said, this feels like something else, and only serves to convince me that, sadly, Scully's right: the world has moved on; chasing down x-files just isn't their job anymore. and what are x-files these days, anyway?

oh, if there was any sort of 'filmic' moment that could be had, it was at the very end, with the sequence of visual textures that were run throughout the end credits and that, sadly, everyone else walked out on. these might, in fact, indicate that Carter had been trying to make the kind of statement i would prefer to think underlies the entire movie after all (rather than call it a complete failure, at any rate): the textures initially recall the black oil that figures so importantly in the series' mytharc; as the credits roll, the visual textures morph into something less ominous, more recognizably of this world; even friendly. soon we realize we aren't looking at black oil; it's only the ocean, just the ocean--threatening in its own right, but hardly black oil, certainly not x-filesy--the shadow of the helicopter that must be carrying the camera we're looking through crosses our view; finally, we come upon Mulder (or, at any rate, David Duchovny) all manly with his chest hair and his red speedos rowing a rowboat towards a paradisical island in the (we assume, what with those waving palms or coconut trees or whatnot) tropics, Scully (or, rather, Gillian Anderson) lounging in the tubby wooden thing wearing a bikini, her skin so luminous it is practically phosphorescent. (best. bit. of the movie. too bad it was a long shot, and slightly out of focus.)

in the end, Dana & Fox--Gillian & David--see us looking down at them. they don't seem to be bothered at all by our voyeurism; in fact, there's a hint of a smile on their unfocused faces; they look up together and wave.

fade to black.

now: what are we to make of that?

*what's left of them
**highly unlikely
***you knew that joke was coming eventually, didn't you? admit it. it's too easy. all the reviews i've read so far pulled something like that, so i thought i'd give it a go
****MIGHT

more on The Dark Knight

2008-07-22T22:51:00.001+08:00

i can't seem to stop picking at The Dark Knight, taking it apart in my head. something inside me keeps telling me things like

the myth of the superhero is meant to be a thing of comfort, an expression of the desire for a powerful, benign force that knows what's best for us and will do whatever it takes to make sure we get it, as most recently (and best) exemplified by Singer's embarrassingly wussy Superman; Nolan's Batman deconstructs the myth, strips it bare, and reveals just how disconcerting an idea it really is. Batman certainly seems to be a "benign force" who "knows what's best" for Gotham, and will do everything in his power to achieve it, but the result is hardly comforting. granted that Batman's position as the subversive element in a dysfunctional status quo makes it deceptively more palatable than Superman's petty meddling, there's something objectionable about the politics of the superhero as revealed by The Dark Knight, the Machiavellian, paternalistic, elite dictator casting its manipulative shadow over a spineless majority. but what's most disconcerting about it isn't the realization of how far Gotham must have fallen to get where it is--and here the League of Shadows had it exactly right--nor how Gotham brought everything--the reign of terror, the absolute need for a Big Brother figure--down on itself; it's that despite how utterly dystopian (read: hyperbolic, fictional) Gotham appears, Nolan manages to make it distressingly immediate, even familiar

and won't stop until it gets out.

oh hey. i can actually hear myself think now.

thanks to E. Cross Saltire for pulling me back from the pits of the Marxist dialectic i was attempting (ill-advisedly) to impose on this analysis.

but if someone must be blamed, i can think of none better than Michael Moorcock.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog; and, a bit about the Doctor

2008-07-19T23:58:00.000+08:00

directed by Joss Whedon
written by Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, Joss Whedon, Jack Whedon
starring Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day, Nathan Fillion

http://www.drhorrible.com* helped a bit with my Doctor-withdrawal. which reminds me, i'd meant to say more about Doctor Who, but couldn't quite get my thoughts organized. maybe later.

meanwhile...now Dr. Horrible's done, too. good grief. now what? i can only watch H2G2 so often...

*edit to add: this seems relevant as i've just discovered a specific sort of divide on the internets as to opinions re:the greatness (or not) of Dr. Horrible: no, i am not a Whedonite, or whatever they're called. i did not like Buffy, or Angel, or Firefly. though i did enjoy that episode of The Office directed by Joss Whedon (that shot of Jim as Count Orlock was brilliant!), but i most certainly dug this. maybe it was Neil Patrick Harris. or the singing. or Felicia Day. i like redheads.

anyway, i liked it. i might even have loved it. that i could not say much more owes to the fact that Act III sort of knocked me down. not how i expected it to end at all.

check it out quick; it's free through the above link for a limited time only, methinks, and it may already be too late by the time you read this.

The Dark Knight

2008-07-19T19:19:00.000+08:00

directed by Christopher Nolan
written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan
starring Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Morgan Freeman

the Nolan Batman is as far afield from the old Adam West vehicle as you could possibly get with the same set of characters, and yet they share at least one thing in common: an obsessive focus on symbolism.

this, at least, jives with my own personal experience with the mythology, restricted as it is to the aforementioned Adam West incarnation, Tim Burton's transitional mischief and Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth--all of which have that same focus, if at varying degrees. compared with those iterations, what's unusual about Nolan's version is that the symbolism is embedded in a rich layer of realism, adhering to a system of logic that might almost be recognizable as the sort that governs our own world; i believe this was Frank Miller's approach as well, but it's fairly new to my experience of the character.

the effect, i find, is a more subtle, but also more effective, kind of surrealism.

let me reiterate: the symbolism is embedded, not buried. what the Nolans have done is deconstruct the crimefighter/superhero mythos using the fictional construct that is Gotham City as a kind of Cambellian template, each character a kind of Jungian archetype. this manifests in at least two ways in both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

one: each character/facet acquires an appropriately (dare i say) comic-bookish two-dimensionality. every surface is flat, like the panels of the Batmobile's armor. 'Criminals aren't complicated,' insists Bruce Wayne, and they aren't. neither is Wayne himself, when it comes down to it, nor Alfred, nor Gordon (even if it is Michael Caine holding that tray, Gary Oldman behind those glasses--gasp!), nor Lucius. no, not the Joker, not Raz Al-Ghul in Begins, not Harvey Dent here.

in fact, even in terms of personality alone (character complexity/depth aside), with the exception of Heath Ledger's Joker, none of the others would be able to compete with RDJ's Tony Stark or Ron Perlman's Hellboy.

and yet the construct the Nolans have created from these surfaces is so intricate that we are presented with a convincing illusion of complexity. it isn't the surfaces, then. examine a facet of the aforementioned Batmobile's armor and you would be confronted with an uninteresting square, or rectangle, or triangle; no polygon with any more personality than that. no, not the surfaces taken by themselves, then, but the way they're put together; the flexibility, the uncertainty, the tension are all in the interactions of symbol and meaning, the ethics of their coming together, the morality.

the Nolans' Gotham is, in effect, an ideological battlefield. and what puts their Batman over other crimefighter/superhero types is that this Batman engages in ideological battles we genuinely feel he cannot win.

two: each character/facet becomes elemental; because they are all symbols, they have the power and awe-inspiring effect of symbols. one complaint i might lodge against the Nolans is the way they've crammed their screenplay with ham-fisted, ideology-ridden dialogue; when i think back to the movie, it isn't the quiet, funny moments i remember--though in fact those are the moments i personally enjoyed the most while i was watching--it's the speechifying Moments every primary character gets at one point or another in the course of the film, scored with slow, magnificent--almost irritatingly so, if only because of their ubiquity in the movie--orchestral swells.

in the context of The Dark Knight, however, such otherwise objectionable oration feels exactly right; this is an ideological battle, after all; any physical damage done is collateral.

in fact, this almost explains the cinematic choices Christopher Nolan made while making this movie, the exhilarating but almost incomprehensible explosions of violence (though not as incomprehensible as the fight sequences of Begins) punctuating and contrasting the unwaveringly lucid (even when delivered by what are ostensibly madmen) dialogue.

no, despite all the madness, there is hardly any gibbering here.

Christopher Nolan, if nothing else, has created an amazingly tight film in a class of its own, entirely confident in itself--its origins, its symbols, its meanings; confident enough to speak in its own cinematic language.

*

perhaps the most intriguing thing for me about this movie, apart from its deconstruction of the superhero/crimefighter mythos, is the way it resolves--or fails to resolve--the conflict it presents. The Dark Knight is very much a sequel; more than that, it feels very much like a middle film--though a particularly solid one; i find myself having to agree with the reviewers at AICN who've compared this to The Empire Strikes Back--very tight in itself, but hanging open, loose at both ends.

however, i would suggest that the hanging ending isn't the sort that requires closure the way Empire's did. what i find most intriguing is the way it feels as though the Nolans are encouraging us--without being in any way didactic--to resolve the Gotham City conundrum ourselves, that is, off-screen, or, if you prefer to be beaten over the head with it, in the real world.

a third film, while probably inevitable, seems almost a disservice at this point. The end of The Dark Knight makes the diptych of Begins/Knight an interesting exercise in the philosophy of symbols that can be extended beyond the fictional boundaries of Gotham. a third film could only be one of two things: since we already have the rise and fall of the Dark Knight in the diptych, the third would either have to be a repetition of the cycle--a new beginning or an overture, either of which would be redundant--or it would serve to close off the loop, undermining the symbolic power--what some might call 'relevance'--of the two already existing films.

besides, although i would argue that Harvey/Two-Face is the core symbol of the Nolans' Batman, i can't imagine a successful third film without Ledger's Joker. Ledger's performance was so iconic, so perfect, that to alter it by the slightest iota of a twitch of a tic would hurt the character--and the subsequent film. i feel sorry for the next fellow to step into the character's purple suit, even if it is an Arkham-issue straight jacket instead.

Fear and Trembling by Amelie Nothomb; and bits about being Lost in Translation, Ingmar Bergman & others

2008-07-16T20:09:00.000+08:00

hell has been something of a theme for my Other Life of late: there was the Hellboy movie and the last Hellboy collection, most obviously; before that were Roberto Bolaño's By Night in Chile and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. i've also been trying to 'educate' myself in film and picked up some Ingmar Bergman titles (i've seen The Seventh Seal and The Magician so far--more on the inadvisability of watching Ingmar Bergman films in succession later), on top of which i finally got to see all three Infernal Affairs movies a few days ago.

when i picked it up, i had no idea Amelie Nothomb's Fear and Trembling would fit so comfortably in with the rest, whether thematically or in whatever other way. to begin with, i only picked it up because i was thirsting for something to have a conversation with about the Lost in Translation experience--yes, the one described so eloquently by Sofia Coppola in the movie--a conversation i thought i could have with My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, or Scarlett Johansson's Anywhere I Lay My Head (which actually ended up being a conversation with Tom Waits speaking through a This Mortal Coil filter, but i digress), if only because the Kevin Shields signature shoegazer sound seemed so perfect an accompaniment for all the other sensations in that movie.

(also, i found myself strangely enchanted by Ms Nothomb in this Guardian interview. the fact that she'd written something--ie, Fear and Trembling--about the shock of being immersed in Japanese culture was serendipitous; call it synchronicity. i do.)

in the end, however, it was Amelie-san's novella that gestured backwards, sweeping its hand over everything i'd just seen and read and pointed out the whole infernal affair (bwaha. i'll regret that later, i'm sure). or maybe i have it the wrong way round. maybe it's that context that makes me think of Amelie-san's book this way.

at any rate, i was surprised to find Fear and Trembling to be a most satisfying iteration of the 'redemption(TM)' brand of narrative arc, perhaps more successful a spin on the type than some of those other things on my list, despite being, in fact, nothing of the kind.

next on my reading list: Conrad Williams's The Unblemished. see? hell.

now, about Bergman...all signs seem to indicate i will most likely find myself agreeing with James Meek on the matter--though The Seventh Seal was heavy (and heavy-handed) on the existentialist philosophy, i actually found the ending rather celebratory, even life-affirming, if blackly so; The Magician even more so--but my subconscious doesn't seem to agree, as though it had been listening to other things, picking out other cues from the films than those i was consciously recognizing. it might not sound like it, but i've been immensely depressed of late, waking up each morning with Marvin sitting on my chest, refusing to let me up unless i let out a pointless sigh indicating my complete agreement with and resignation to his worldview.

i'll have to tread carefully through these films then; it might be a good thing that the one i have in front of me now, waiting to be popped into Pam's spinner, is The Devil's Eye, which, says the back of the dvd case, resulted from Bergman's 'need' to 'tell a joke'.

i suppose we'll see.

Hellboy 8: Darkness Calls

2008-07-14T00:02:00.000+08:00

story by Mike Mignola
art by Duncan Fegredo

Duncan Fegredo's art is messy and hectic; he captures what i imagine must be the more Kirbyesque aspects of Hellboy (something i can't say for sure, knowing about Jack Kirby's work in comics only from than what i've read that's been said about it by people like Neil Gaiman and Mike Mignola)--the sprawling, dynamic, literally larger than life depictions of action--some of Mignola's attention to detail and stylistic anatomical excesses in character design, but little else. i tend not to enjoy Hellboy as much when drawn by hands other than Mignola's--i even have reservations about the one drawn by P. Craig Russell. the latter, however--'The Vampire of Prague' (collected in Hellboy 7: The Troll Witch and Others)--at least had a script that seemed suited to Russell's style. Darkness Calls is very much Mike Mignola writing for Mike Mignola's Hellboy, and the fit is jarringly, exasperatingly imprecise; Mignola's Hellboy has always been somewhat minimalist in both writing and art, and the combination here (Mignola's writing and Fegredo's art) is disorienting--one never ceases to distract from the other. Mignola's Hellboy, even at its most cryptic and subtle, never failed to be coherent. Darkness Calls, by comparison, is a sprawling, untidy mess.

it's a shame that i should feel the urge to leave this series just when Hellboy's destiny seems almost certain to finally catch up with him; moreover, it seems churlish to say the least to judge Fegredo's work against Mignola's so summarily and so soon after his arrival to take over the reins from the book's creator. nonetheless, unless Mignola and Fegredo can find a balance between the minimalist, almost poetical narrative style of the former and the excessively cluttered art of the latter, i'm sorry to say i might not be there to see the end.

Hellboy 2 The Golden Army

2008-07-12T22:49:00.000+08:00

directed by Guillermo del Toro
starring Ron Perlman (yay!), Selma Blair, Doug Jones, someone's voice in a clunky, but nifty, steampunky suit, Elric and his daughter (as siblings), Jeffrey Tambor and a cast of thousands. and Jimmy Kimmel.

not as good as i had hoped it would be. i love Hellboy, but del Toro's version has always been a different creature from Mignola's. the movie Hellboy's main weakness, to my mind, is also its strength: unmoored from 'real world' myths, legends and folklore (which underpin Mignola's original), the filmic version of the big red guy lacks weight, seems less substantial than the comic book version; in addition, his struggle against his dark destiny as Anung Un Rama, which takes centerstage or, if not, at least haunts the proceedings constantly in the main series of comics, giving the comics a foreboding gravity, a dangerous undertow to the blackly (and subtly) comic antics of HB and the Gang, feels like an afterthought here; they point to it, and not at all subtly, but it feels like a bit of a pantomime, really: oh, btw, Red, you'll be responsible for destroying the world...do i hear a callback for Hellboy 3? cha-ching!

cinemacynicism aside (and if there's a 3 coming up, bring it on), this unmooring, as i said, is also the movie version's strength: paying homage only to a tradition of the fantastic going not much further back than Tolkien and thereby playing very much on the surface of fantastic fiction, del Toro gets to lord it up and bring the full force of his literally monstrous imagination to bear, throwing everything from toothfairies to trolls to goblins to an elemental, an angel of death and giant killer mecha--none of which much resemble anything from the collective unconscious--onto the screen. Mignola once said all he wanted to do was draw monsters; he seems to have found his filmic counterpart in del Toro.

while i'm grateful that the magnificently talented body actor Doug Jones has been given some much deserved extra screentime, i'm afraid the otherwise charming Abe Sapien makes a poor lead for a film, and this decision having relegated Hellboy almost to the sidelines (though not in the action sequences, of course) hurts the film immensely. this is relative, mind you; objectively speaking, i do believe the film is split fairly evenly between the two leads; still, much of Hellboy's charm is Hellboy himself, and though i do agree that that much talked about scene with the two friends (Red and Blue) boozing it up to Barry Manilow was brilliant, i can't help but feel cheated of Hellboy's salty, straight-talking charm. the movie assumes our affection for Hellboy without really reminding us why we should love him, and while i love Hellboy more than most people i know, this assumption undercuts the full brilliance of the final shot of the film, making it feel insubstantial, even, dare i say, baseless and therefore rather twee.

Selma Blair, thankfully, remains as hot as ever.

oh, and for you geeks out there, the climactic (or pre-climactic) scene with the Golden Army kicks seventy times seventy different kinds of ass out of any scene from Bayformers.

so there.

The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick and a bit of John Clute's review

2008-05-20T22:55:00.000+08:00

i don't know what to make of John Clute's review of The Dragons of Babel. not that it (the review) isn't a brilliant deconstruction of Michael Swanwick's brilliant deconstruction of the 'hidden monarch' template, but rather, i suppose, a nit i feel compelled to pick after reading something about a previous comment attributed to Mr Clute, re: the fabricated world in which The Dragons of Babel is set, which is the same world into which Jane is thrust in the far darker, angrier, more relentlessly cynical The Iron Dragon's Daughter, in which he (Mr Clute) says something to the effect that Mr Swanwick has constructed an 'anti-fantasy' in which the very tropes which bring us comfort in typical fantasies--magic and elves and faeries and even dragons &c--fail to do so, never allowing us to use them to escape the realities of our own world. in his review of The Dragons of Babel, Mr Clute, to my mind, excuses us from any guilt for doing with The Dragons of Babel what Mr Clute had (allegedly--i haven't read the source) said Mr Swanwick would not let us do with The Iron Dragon's Daughter. Mr Clute lays it down for us, saying that Mr Swanwick has written 'a tale whose very speed burns euhemerism--which is the process of interpreting myths as being mundane events misunderstood by the primitive folk who tell stories about the world--to ash.' which i admit isn't at all the same as saying 'The Dragons of Babel is good, clean, escapist fluff', but at least saunters vaguely in that direction. sort of.

which leads me now to think i'm probably better off wondering what i should make of The Dragons of Babel in light of The Iron Dragon's Daughter. because now, after reading Mr Clute's review, it has become possible for me to see The Dragons of Babel as a kind of subversion of what The Iron Dragon's Daughter did, and did so well.

to be fair, there is still quite a bit of the old cynicism from The Iron Dragon's Daughter on show in The Dragons of Babel (henceforth TIDD and TDOB, or Daughter and Babel, or maybe Iron Dragon and Dragons, respectively, depending on which moves me in the moment). perhaps more importantly, TDOB retains the fierce intelligence of TIDD, never once letting us think that Mr Swanwick is getting soft in his old age. or, rather, not getting soft *that way*. because, in fact, Dragons is a far kinder, gentler book than Iron Dragon ever was, and i feel almost sorry for the way the earlier book treated its protagonist.

certainly, Babel's protagonist, Will le Fey, undergoes his fair share of the requisite 'hero's trials and tribulations' and then some, but i for one never felt this was a particularly 'dark' book, certainly not in any way like Daughter.

instead, what TDOB is, unapologetically, unrelentingly BRILLIANT, in every sense of the word, including the one that suggests UPLIFTING and LIFE-AFFIRMING, two things TIDD was most decidedly not. in other words, what Mr Swanwick has done to subvert the essence of TIDD is this: he has allowed redemption to become an undeniable, integral part of Will's story.

moreover, if TIDD worked by going head on against the conventions of the genre, TDOB, true to its core trickster theme--and yes, it is very much a trickster story--works firmly within those conventions, if in ways that are very much its own.

*

Mr Swanwick's Faerie may recall to more recent fantasy readers' minds China Mieville's Bas Lag, with its hectic, multi-ethnic (as Mr Clute points out), decadent urban society and the combination of elements both science fictional and fantastical, but to my mind Swanwick's is the superior construct. Mr Swanwick's alchemy is far more fluid, resorting to none of the rather forced justifications Mr Mieville imposes on his world for the coexistence of the two sets of elements. Mr Swanwick recognizes that they are all, whether 'science fictional' or 'fantastical', products of the imagination, textural instruments of narrative, and handles them (and handles them deftly) as such. moreover, Mr Swanwick more successfully borrows from myth and folklore, recalling Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Mike Mignola's delightful guignol in Hellboy, and hewing closer to the kind of motley cast one finds in the Titus Groan books, albeit without the delightful twist of Mervyn Peake's creations being all, ostensibly, human despite their grotesqueries; at any rate, i have always felt that Mr Mieville was better off relying solely on his admittedly magnificent imagination.

there is another reason why TDOB bears comparison to Mr Mieville's oeuvre--and this is what Mr Clute seems to have deftly sidestepped in his review: while TDOB (again unlike TIDD) can be enjoyed solely as an escapist romp through an overwhelmingly colorful and richly textured if somewhat sordid--squalid?--sordid fantasy construct, there is very definitely some Politics-Capital-P going on here. not punk-rock-adolescent-rebel-coming-of-age-schoolyard-and-living-room-and-dinner-table politics as in TIDD, though there's a dose of that as well, but real-world-current-events-news-at-eleven-old-farts-on-a-bench Politics, the kind Mr Mieville has been known to engage with head on. Mr Swanwick, however, doesn't take the bull by the horns. rather, it feels more like he's hitched a ride on its back or is simply running with it: the Politics in TDOB feels like the kind of subtext that is woven intrinsically into the 'hidden monarch' template, another thread, a means for the narrative rather than an end; Mr Swanwick seems to be saying that the Politics is as much a part of the collective subconscious as the fey, trolls and speaking toads &c that populate the story. there is a scene that recalls 9/11, and yet the horror is undercut...but i won't give it away. suffice to say that although the Politics is there, there seems to be an unwillingness to fully engage with it, a refusal, almost, to bear any responsibility for what is being said and pointed out whatsoever.

he may be right about it all, but on some level i can't help but find it a bit gimmicky. if it didn't work so well, i might be led to think that Mr Swanwick is playing another trick on us (and there are many tricks in TDOB), trying to convince us that the story he is telling is Relevant-Capital-R, when all it is is good, clean, escapist fluff, an old emperor clothed in the latest fashions.

whatever the case, i happily confess myself hoodwinked. at the very least, though no longer the same kind of audacious subversion of the genre that was The Iron Dragon's Daughter, The Dragons of Babel, even while submitting to the demands of the genre template it deconstructs, cunningly shows us just how fresh and intelligent fantasy can still be.

Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage (El Orfanato); plus: two cents on the Oscars and a nod to Anthony Minghella

2008-03-23T17:19:00.000+08:00

saw The Orphanage today. i'll let Peter Bradshaw tell you about it, over at The Guardian:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_Film_of_the_week/0,,2267233,00.html

The Orphanage is far more complicated and intelligent and yet also more heartwarming and somehow more conventional than Alejandro Amenabar's The Others. personally, i prefer the latter.

i guess i just like it when things are subtly unusual. as a f'rinstance, i liked both There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men (the only two films from the Academy's most recent list of nominees i've seen) but prefer the former, the strangeness of which i find harder to define than the overt weirdness of the latter.

also, i think Daniel Plainview and his limp (or his bowling ball, take your pick) are more bad ass than Anton Chigurh and his captive bolt pistol. but that's just me.

*

the most striking things about the work of Anthony Minghella (that i've seen) for me are wisdom and compassion. displaying a thorough understanding of the moral complexities of modern life, Minghella somehow managed to remain uncynical without seeming naive. his films were unambiguously moral without being black and white: they showed us that knowing right from wrong is all it takes and yet hardly ever enough. they seemed completely aware of the flawed nature of humanity and yet refused to see that as a reason to lose faith in it.

Moriarty paid tribute to some of Minghella's best work (imho) over at ain't it cool news:

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/36054

meanwhile, Colin Vaines at The Guardian posted a more conventional tribute:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/anthonyminghella/story/0,,2267545,00.html

The Bedlam in Goliath, The Mars Volta

2008-01-26T17:56:00.000+08:00

as with 2006's Amputechture, the album that first got me into TMV (the samples i heard from the first two full-length albums always suggested too much of At the Drive-In to me and i freely admit that i could never push myself to give either De-Loused or Frances a proper effort), Cedric Bixler Zavala's lyrics here are awfully forgettable and more likely than anything to elicit a thoroughly sincere 'eh?' still, by the second run of 'maybe i'll breakdown/maybe i'll try/circumvent inoculation' &c, i'm trying (i said the lyrics were forgettable didn't i?) to sing along as well as nodding my head to every funky downbeat i can catch (which isn't easy, by the way, but a bit easier than on Amputechture). CBZ throws words together with a kind of Durrellian abandon: regardless of what they mean, it's hard to argue with the fact that the lyrics, unintentionally funny or not, do, in fact, fit, nestling comfortably in the liberal noodlings of the rest of the band.

on first listen, trying to convince myself i wasn't always going to buy the CD the moment i saw the Jeff Jordan artwork by sampling it first at the HMV listening station, Bedlam struck me as Amputechture amped. a closer listen suggests maybe these guys are trying to rein things in a bit after all. don't get me wrong, the songs are as chaotic as ever and i've yet to hear a prog rock band as visceral and compelling (viscerally compelling?) as TMV, but there's a tighter proginess to this album that suggests, say, Metropolis rather than Erotomania (Dream Theater anyone? no? ah well).

but enough of my wanking about with things beyond my ken. have a gander at what's being said here, over at punknews.org:

http://www.punknews.org/article/27438

with bands like TMV, you get the full entertainment package: music, lyrics, album art, rabid internet snarkery.

Cloverfield

2008-01-19T22:18:00.000+08:00

written by Drew Goddard
directed by Matt Reeves

Cloverfield does exactly what it says on the tin (ie, 'a monster movie for the YouTube generation'), which is more than can be said for a lot of recent movies (insert relevant 'I am Legend' digs here). the monster itself isn't anything anyone who's seen a fair share of post-Toho's Big Five monster movies will find surprising, i think, and i doubt it has enough of its own personality to knock any of these off the list, but it serves its purpose.

just try not to walk into the theater looking for the sort of thing Manohla Dargis ostensibly was prior to writing this NYT review.

admittedly, there are quite a few moments when the idiocy of hanging on to the camera will most likely get to you; still, overall, it worked for me.

i particularly liked the way the filmmakers chose to give us glimpses of the pre-Rob's Going Away Party And Monster-Fest past. interesting spin on the flashback. true, most people probably won't take much away from the sparse character development despite these glimpses offer, probably not enough to form a truly effective empathic relationship with the characters, but the film does what it can within the constraints it sets for itself.

right. winding down with 'Something's Gotta Give' on TV. yes, i can be *that* kind of movie guy.

Chuck Palahniuk's Rant

2008-01-09T22:18:00.000+08:00

how weird is that? every now and then while i'm reading Chuck's latest thing, this godawful mess of a book he calls an oral history, this audible groan starts to well up from deep inside of me like all the different voices Mr Palahniuk had flashfrozen onto the pages of Rant were joining up into some biblically-disproportionate monastic chorus of disillusionment in my head. rising OHMS and OHMS and OHMS, and i'm sure it isn't just four beats, four cycles a second but it could be and anyway what do i know i got no rhythm? and then i'd turn the page and it would cut out. the noise, that weird noise, it would just cut out like someone'd pulled the plug. and i'd just keep going like that until i hit the end and there weren't no where else to go, no thing to do but crossfade from the words on the page to the four walls surrounding me that are just a little hard to focus on right now.

huge noisy messed up lug nuts book like that just shouldn't work should it? something as big-minded and pretentious as that, it's gotta fall apart some time, right? only a matter of time and it's gotta fall apart. what's keeping it together, right? it can't be anything can keep something like that together. right? well, i'm done. and i'm still waiting.

it took me two or three false starts before i could finish Rant; this last attempt, it took me two, three days, maybe even a week to get past the first 90 or so pages, reading them in little bits, a chapter here and there. then the last two hundred words or so, i swallow them all up in two nights, two big gulps just like that.

i can imagine why someone would put this book down and never pick it up again. but i can't imagine that being anything but a sad thing, either. sure, i put this book down after i started it myself; twice, maybe thrice since i got it. but i always knew someday i'd see it to the end.

this is a book of ideas, whatever that means, chockful of them like Chuck was a newbie and didn't know better but to put all his easter eggs, the good with the rotted, if you will, all together in one tight little basket. it starts off weird enough, crazy, and it just gets crazier and crazier as you go along. first you think it's one thing, then it's something else. it flipflops once or twice and every now and then it gets a bit hard to swallow, and by the time you get back to that one thing, it's formed such a crazy messed up loop and those OHMS are just so crazy loud in your ears that when it cuts out in the end you're kinda just left there with your mouth hanging open, not sure if you want to laugh or if you want to cry or if you're blinking fast enough because you can't just seem to get the walls around you to focus. or maybe it's my astigmatism.

heard of a relativist novel? i haven't. i just thought it up, and it just seems like a really good way to some this book up that i had to ask if you'd heard of such a thing. with Rant, Mr Palahniuk, it's clear he's playing games with you, and by the end he'll have you either laughing with him or shaking your head in frustration, a big ol' pile of poisonous varmint snapping at your heels as you walk away. it's like, you know he's gotta have ONE THING in mind, right? there's gotta be something definite, but everybody, everyone you talk to, every witness he calls to the stand for you to cross-ex, they just refuse to budge and they won't tell you nothing's for sure. i mean, sure, they're telling you what they know to tell, maybe some of them really are and maybe some of them really aren't, but you can't never really know for sure, can you? like he's saying, Mr Palahniuk he's saying, in the really real world (which Middleton and the America of Rant can't be, can it?) one story can't just be one story anymore but all manner of different others depending on who's telling, and you can't never tell what's true and what isn't. and the ones that seem truest maybe the ones that make everything one big fat lie, and not all folk, not everybody's going to like that, will they? how weird is that?

but i guarantee he'll have one or two things stuck in your head, clawing around in there for days like it's trying to get out. like a big fat jab in the arm, like an inoculation. how weird is that? for some folk it might be just the thing for an inoculation from boredom; a few just might find themselves inoculated against things like complacency, stupidity, or whatever you call it, sheepiness; but for others, i won't deny it, it may just inoculate them from wanting to pick up this book ever again.

but you gotta pick it up to find out for yourself, you know?

Beowulf

2007-12-02T10:49:00.000+08:00

screenplay by Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman
directed by Robert Zemeckis

the weakest thing about Zemeckis' Beowulf is the presentation: the graphics and Zemeckis' direction--it seems they haven't yet gotten CG 'photorealism' down quite right, and Zemeckis still appears to be at the experimental stage with the form, not really knowing what to do and what not to do with it. in fact, his hyperkinetic direction takes away from the true brilliance of the movie, which is the story Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman have crafted from the otherwise sparse narrative (i don't mean the language of the original poem, some of which Gaiman and Avary leak into their screenplay, i mean the actual details of the story). true, the dialogue itself can be a bit clunky, but the story is fuckin' brilliant (nods to QT and Avary's Pulp Fiction). contrary to what you may have heard, as far as i can tell A&G have been perfectly faithful to the original. where they do depart from it are in places that allow exactly the kind of liberties they have taken to subvert and, paradoxically, realize the full potential of the tale as a narrative.

certainly the departure has an almost kitsch-y comic-y zing to it--the slinky, sexy femme fatale of Grendel's mum, f'rinstance--but that only seems right considering what we've always had with Beowulf: a particularly zippy piece of Archeo-Pulp entertainment.

but i digress. i'd meant to talk about the weaknesses of the film, and how CG doesn't have to be as clunky as it seems to be in Zemeckis' hands. i'll let you see for yourself. first, go watch Beowulf. you've seen it? then check out this vid:

(thanks to cloudedOne over on YouTube; clips from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. music by Tool--Wings for Marie, pt. 1 from 10,000 Days. note to self, get in on the Final Fantasy series.)

the eyes are still a little creepy, but don't they seem warmer to you than Wealthow's were, even in her tenderest moments? and the action...if you're going to go all hyperkinetic about it, that's how it's done.

now don't get me wrong...i entered the theater a bit uneasily when i went to see Beowulf, and a good number of scenes at the beginning had me cringing in my seat for all the wrong reasons. but as i've said before at the other life, i walked out pretty happy with what i saw. although admittedly, most of it had to do with the reasons stated above.

the odd thing is, the Pixar people seem to know exactly how to handle this sort of thing. why can't the rest of Hollywood seem to get it?

Moonlighting, Season 3 Episode 11: Blonde on Blonde

2007-11-30T21:18:00.000+08:00

written by Kerry Ehrin
directed by Jay Daniel
series created by Glenn Gordon Caron

(i had decided long ago that i wouldn't write reviews. but, hell, this deserves something as excessively overwrought as everything that follows. if you have a low tolerance for bad puns, melodrama and cliche, steer clear of this post.)

ever since the show went off the air, i always assumed that when i ever found my way back to the Blue Moon Detective Agency, my fave episode would be Atomic Shakespeare, Maddie (Cybill Shepherd, in full-on Cybill Shepherd mode) and David (Bruce Willis as we'll never see him again: with a full head of hair at the start of the series--which, btw, he lost progressively with each ep) taking on the roles of The Bard's Kate and Petruchio. ('Didn't think I could pull it off, did you?') but four episodes later (with, admittedly, a couple low-fizzlers in the mix), they knock my socks off with Blonde on Blonde, and a better summary of the show's conceit i have yet to find (or only rediscover).

we start off with what looks to be a pretty straightforward pea-in-a-cup mixer: a couple hot blondes playing off each other in alternating scenes to Janet Jackson's Nasty, both of 'em drop-dead gorgeous lookers. remember when MTV was edgy? already we have an idea where this is all headed: by the end of the show, both bombshells will have dropped killer secrets, but only one of them will have dealt Dave a fatal blow. (see?!? melodrama!)

the show always excelled in subverting all the cliches of hardboiled detective fiction (and other genres besides), and this ep does it better than most. in one scene, after having tailed Maddie to the neighborhood grocer's, we get an extreme close-up of Dave: almost flush with the slightly fisheyed lens, almost filling the screen, his cold, damaged eyes looming in the foreground. the perspective further diminishes Herbert Viola (Revenge of the Nerds' Booger, Curtis Armstrong) who stands earnestly behind him. Bert tells him some people in the office think there may be a 'personal thing' between their two bosses. does that have anything to do with what they're doing here?

'You have been laboring under a severe delusion, my friend,' Dave tells Bert in a pitch-perfect Bogeyesque deadpan. 'What we're doing is simply covering a fellow operative without said operative knowing what we're doing here.'

who does he think he's fooling? but he pulls a spook story about some terrorist escaped from a jail in Cairo who's heading out to La-La Land, pulls it right out his ass, fully formed like, as if he had Borges' library somewhere deep inside his bowels, and reels poor Bert in.

nevermind that Herbert 'Smaller than a cello, bigger than a violin' Viola eventually gets left behind and forgotten by Kerry Ehrin when, almost exactly halfway through the ep (if not halfway exactly) the switcheroo is pulled, and Dave ends up tailing the wrong blonde.

we saw this coming, we see this sort of thing pulled all the time, and if you don't take too kindly to knowing jabs in the ribs from the off-camera crew (even from castmembers throwing winks across the fourth wall), the whole thing will no doubt seem, well, laborious. as per the requirements of any ubermensch of the hardboiled genre, Dave has one of the worst nights of his life, waking up next to a dead body, jumping down two stories into a garbage bin, even landing himself in the joint. and in the end he'll be left standing in the rain.

for those of you who haven't seen the show, well, i'm not spoiling any more of it for you. but even for those like me who know how it will all end, there's a lot more to be found on a second, maybe even a third viewing. Glenn Gordon Caron hated detective shows, once even had his characters say there were too many of the kind on TV those days, but you wouldn't know it from the way everything is done here. the show is the perfect homage to the genre, taking the most familiar, most facile elements of hardboiled detective fiction, of pulp, using cinematography that harks back to the heyday of noir...takes it all and uses it as nifty packaging--that's right, damn pretty gift wrapping is what it all is--and it somehow isn't insulting at all. despite the pastiche/parody treatment, the genre is somehow elevated, and in the end the show uses those kitschy and cliched elements to tell an almost excessively romantic (despite always keeping its head down, low-key and, unlike this post, anti-melodramatic), startlingly humane--and yes, still somehow immediate--Story.

but maybe that's just me. i've been in love with Maddie and Dave since the first time i laid eyes on 'em, one dark and stormy Sunday* night.

*the show aired Tuesdays in the US, but i remember it was past bedtime Sunday nights back home.

Caitlin Kiernan's Alabaster

2007-11-28T21:33:00.000+08:00

Ms Kiernan's writing sits comfortably on the shelf between Poe and Lovecraft, perhaps leaning with her ear held close to Lovecraft; albeit the stories she tells are character-driven, with non-kitschy prose and sans unpronounceable horrors with not enough vowels or too many consonants or both (or have i got it the wrong way round?) and without a hint of the word 'eldritch'. (i don't think i've encountered it yet, but you never know.) on a table (the sideboard loaded with sweetbreads and cornbread and raw fish and foie gras and tarts and gorey puddings and jellybeans--and is that a bottle of absinthe?) with Neil Gaiman seated at one end and M. John Harrison at the other, Ms Kiernan sits beside Neil, waving, perhaps, at Edward Gorey leaning in to say 'Halloo'; Elizabeth Hand is also at the table--she sits closer to Mr Harrison. the two ladies seem to be somewhere between the two, but that might only be a trick of perspective. they might be holding hands beneath the table one moment, or arguing over matters of natural history the next. Ms Kiernan might also have a place at Angela Carter's knee--Ms Carter's very modern, very hip teenage daughter, who just so happened to be raised in that strange land across the Atlantic. Michael Moorcock creates a whole other tangent with her work, though who sits on the other end of that particular line it's hard to say; maybe it's only Moorcock again, in Mother London rather than Eternal Champion mode. William Gibson, in Goth drag after listening to Robert Smith and Tom Waits all night, coated with the dust of paleontology rather than the junk of technophile sociology, might also be peering from some tenebrous corner.

of course, Ms Kiernan's voice is also very much her own; this taxonomy, or genealogy, is all mine (and, probably, subconsciously stolen from the literature map though i haven't been there in a while): a lazy way to describe what should better be experienced. i could drop quotes, but, like i said, i'm lazy, and while one line seems as good as another spoken in Ms Kiernan's beautiful voice, i'd rather you went and found them yourself.

Mike Carey's Hellblazer: The Gift

2007-11-10T00:16:00.000+08:00

i may have mentioned this before, and anyone who has been following the adventures of John Constantine doesn't need me to repeat it, but here it is again anyway: every writer brings his own brilliance to John Constantine. i've never read Alan Moore's original, but there is an identifiable essence that ties each incarnation to the others.

still, each version is distinctive: in Neil Gaiman's hands, Constantine was always the Laughing Magician, a man of undeniable charm, unflappable humor and salty if obscure power, wielding a magic that seemed hardly typical of the word in fantastic fiction; in Jamie Delano's hands, he was a working class mystic, with a handyman's approach to magic, though his manipulations of synchronicity were more recognizable as the stuff of occult fantasy; Garth Ennis gave Constantine a harder edge by making his desperate entanglement in the war between Heaven and Hell more personal, more intimate, more visceral. Ennis also revealed the secret to Constantine's power: more than your typical magician, he is a confidence artist, and a bastard; Ennis' Constantine rarely cast spells, unless it were to bluff, preferring less occult means of deception. Warren Ellis portrayed a more typical hardboiled character with his almost stereotypically noirish story arcs; Azarello--i hear, not having read his run--made Constantine almost unlikeably ruthless.

i may have mentioned this before: Mike Carey struck a fine balance between Delano's mystic and Ennis' bastard confidence trickster. it is almost redundant to say that each time we run into Constantine, he is at the end of his tether, but while it may seem Ennis had done the ultimate 'John-at-the-end-of-his-tether' story with Dangerous Habits, it seems to me we feel it more acutely with Carey: while Ennis practically ground Constantine into dust during the course of his almost sadistic run in the comic, Carey's Constantine seemed ground from the get go: Carey's Constantine had already gone through everything Ennis and the other writers had thrown at him, seemed barely emergent from that dust--and he goes on to live through much more.

Carey's Constantine fit perfectly into the past--the life story--other writers had built for him. while he seemed to follow most naturally from Ennis' Constantine, it is easy to see this JC as the end result of everything he had gone through throughout the comic's life.

Carey's first Hellblazer story, All His Engines, seemed to me almost pitch-perfect in its portrayal of John Constantine and his world. from the very beginning, Carey had made the comic his own, as if he had been writing Hellblazer all his life. it doesn't seem surprising, then, that in the course of his run, it seemed at times almost as though he were only rushing through it all, racing through issues fast as he could to hit certain beats in the narrative, or only beat his deadlines and ultimately get to the end. almost as if he were bored with the comic, and only wanted to get it done so he could move on to other things--Lucifer, presumably, or his Felix Castor books. still, it pays to stick it through; if there's one thing Carey's good at from the narrative standpoint, it's in giving his readers a jolly good pay-off at the end of each story.

exemplifying this apparent impatience, Reasons to be Cheerful often read to me like a laundry-list of old characters, as John Constantine's children eliminated everyone who had ever known or only just met him--no matter how fleetingly. but more than this, as Carey approached the end of his run, he seemed almost hellbent on wiping the slate clean--in fact, he seemed headed in that direction even earlier, with Staring at the Wall, which ended with Constantine's memory wiped, the man wandering aimlessly through London without even his name.

in his final story arc, R.S.V.P., Carey even dealt a fatal blow to John Constantine's relationship with his one remaining friend, the one person who'd stuck through everything with him.

but Carey, thankfully, did more than simply 'wipe the slate clean'; with The Gift he laid down the bare bones of John Constantine the character, presenting a template for future writers; here is the 'identifiable essence' that comes through with each successful incarnation of the character. The story is now one of my three fave Hellblazer short stories--the other two being Gaiman's Hold Me and Ennis' Forty. in The Gift, Carey shows us just how well he understands John Constantine as a character, and, more than just a beautifully dark, darkly subtle coda to the tragic Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go, it is also a good place to begin for someone who has only just met the man both Heaven and Hell love to hate.

The Gift also shows us what magic is all about, what Constantine has always known magic to be all about, what--one suspects, one hopes, given the the subtelties of his Voice of the Fire--Alan Moore had always intended the character to say about magic: it isn't about casting spells, throwing bones or cheating the devil. ultimately, magic is legerdemain, sleight of hand; smoke, mirrors, turning tricks--perceptions. magic is about revealing the truth in the world by what appears to be the only truly effective means: deception.

in the end, we must face the fact that Constantine's talent for magic doesn't come from studying spellbooks, old religions, apocryphal texts, etc.; nor does it come from the blood of Nergal coursing through his veins; in the end, Constantine's good at magic for one reason: he's a right bloody bastard, innit? and the best bloody liar you're ever likely to meet.

INTERSTITIUM: this life, reimagined, revivified

2007-11-02T21:07:00.000+08:00

i wouldn't have admitted it then, but when i dubbed this blog my 'other life', i had been rather obviously acknowledging what reading was for me back then: escape. while the aesthetic i frequently vocalized elsewhere never directly condemned reading as escapism, i had always consciously struggled to make more of my reading than there really was to it.

when i first decided i was probably a writer, it was because i kept finding myself dissatisfied with what i thought was all there was to read. Neil Gaiman's stories weren't as ubiquitous then as they are now, Michael Moorcock was near mythical, legendary in his abscence in our bookstores in spite of all i'd hear about Elric and all the other incarnations of the Eternal Champion; i hadn't yet even heard of either Mervyn Peake or M. John Harrison. and i'd grown tired of Tolkien and Lewis, the legion of clones they raised in their collective wake, no matter how brilliant i knew the originals were--and still are, for all that they are dead and constantly being reanimated and plundered.

like many of the decisions i've made in my life, the impulse behind the one that 'made' me a writer was at heart one of rebellion. a refusal to simply accept what i was being served.

to put it less dramatically, being dissatisfied with the great bulk of fiction i was being presented with at the time, i wanted to write things of my own, things i knew *i* would *want* to read.

as Banzai Cat once put it, i spent too much time wishing for a certain kind of fiction.

occasionally, i *would* get my wish. hence Peake in my library; hence Harrison, hence Mieville, hence VanderMeer, and Moorcock and Moore. hence even Eco, hence Ondaatje and Greene, hence Thomson and Durrell. hence James Salter, hence Jose Eduardo Agualusa, hence Anais Nin. but even then, i suppose, it's been true all along: that aesthetic, deliberately constructed though i thought it was, went deeper after all. reading wasn't all escape for me.

it was research.

it isn't that i was directly stealing ideas, though in some ways, it really *is* as bad as that. when i created, for instance, St Etienne-vaux-Grumm and Ruttage, sister cities to Troll's Vespertine from Troll's Doll--and Vespertine as well--i wasn't just re-inventing New Crobuzon, or Ambergris, or Gormenghast, or Viriconium. rather, from those cities--those writers, i should say, i.e., Mieville, VanderMeer, Peake and Harrison, respectively--i learned how i might craft my own fiction of place, structured and individualized on the most familiar landscape for a functioning autist: my own closeted imagination.

i am not, therefore, your conventional bibliophile. i cannot simply be told a story. i must be able to take more away from it than that; i must also in some way learn how to tell it the way you did, without necessarily making me a mere mimic--that must mean i must also somehow see myself in it. else there must be something in it i can twist, defile, corrupt, make my own. is it ideas i'm after? is it style? i'm not too sure, but i believe it's something subtler than that, more subliminal. in some ways, to the reader and writer who are fortunate enough to be 'purer at heart', more sinister.

blame it on growing up with Choose Your Own Adventure, if you like.

i am not, however, completely unaware that this in itself is a kind of escapism; the artist's desire for expression is in some ways another way of showing a failure to cope with--to confront and to ultimately accept--external reality. yes, of this i'm all too aware.

nevertheless, this, i've come to realize, particularly with my more recent choices, is why i read: i read for research. which is probably why it's a good thing i finished the first draft of spukhafte ferwirkungen, Sehnsucht, vom Geist der Schwere (pretentious title, ennit?) before i found Alison MacLeod's The Wave Theory of Angels, before I found Janna Levin's A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines.

it is, however, also quite probably a good thing that i found them when i did. what an embarrassment it would have been if i'd actually tried to get the shitty thing published, the state it's in!

i knew there was a lot yet to be done with the thing, but now i have a more solid idea of what i need to do, and what i've gotten myself into. sigh.

more on Ms MacLeod's and Ms Levin's books later. when i get my head around talking about them. rest assured, i *am* reading them, and though i make no promises, i *do* plan on attempting to semi-real-time review them--though it's a bit late for Wave Theory.

yup. it would appear that this other life is just about set for a revivification.

V. 1922 - 2007

2007-04-12T22:54:00.000+08:00

no, not quite a fan, nor even necessarily a believer. but is there any particular reason i need to explain myself to you? to anyone?

Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen: first one, or maybe two stories...we'll find out in a bit

2007-04-09T17:00:00.001+08:00

[note: this (with its subsequent clarification here ) continues to apply.]

i forgot: i also got Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen over the weekend. (yes, i know...retail therapy. what a bitch. still, it seems to have worked. i'm feeling much more chipper now, thank you very much. i, consumer.)

my introduction to Link was by way of The Faery Handbag, which i'd pulled at random from the interweb. sadly, no, that didn't get me out there hunting for her stuff, and i passed up the other samples of her work available online.

surely, however, i was missing something? so i went ahead and read bits of The Specialist's Hat from some 'Slipstream' Anthology a bookstore had sold me by mistake. (i can't remember the title of the book, but Banzai Cat will know the one. ask him.) better, imho. much. but i'd only read the first bits of it to fill in some dead space in between doing other things, and when i put the book down to continue with those other things, it promptly, er, slipped from my mind and i've never found the urge to get it back.

but i ramble aimless. where was i?

right. Stranger Things Happen.

Story the 1st: Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. sigh. i can't help but feel disappointed by this story. certainly, the dead man's letters are simply lovely, and the prose and narrative and all the strange details are all successfully evocative of that same twilight described by John Singer Sargent's painting -- that precarious balance between fresh-lit lanterns and faded evening sunlight, that ethereal yet somehow ambivalent glow to the faces of the innocents, the carnations, lilies, roses, used here to magnificently subtle effect (and affect) to illustrate something like capture, or maybe entanglement in the delicate membrane between life and death.

unfortunately, the intervening omniscient voice, though most likely deliberate, strikes me as a kind of literary failure of nerve, as though Ms Link couldn't find it in herself to trust either her dead man narrator or the reader to get the story right. or, at least, not the way she wants either of them to get it.

i can't help but feel this story could have been so much better without those intervening bits, and was thus mortally wounded by them, the way, say, AI could have been so much better without being Disneyfied by Spielberg.

(ok, it isn't quite the same thing, not a very good analogy at all, but i wanted an excuse to link to this.)

so what Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose suggests to my mind is a writer with obvious talent, more comfortable with the sort of evocative yet minimalist prose that seems favored by high-minded literature these days than most other writers in the so-called genre, but who hasn't yet learned to trust either her self or her audience or both.

no, i wasn't completely happy with Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (this is entirely unoriginal of me, but can't you tell i just love that title?), but there's no way i can deny it's a beautiful piece of work.

an ambiguous start: promising, and lovely, but fatally flawed and, by itself, ultimately disappointing.

Story the 2nd? no, not yet, i think. not here, from work. i'm currently (perhaps wrong-headedly) trying to draw up some vague parallels that seem to be lurking between Water off a Black Dog's Back and James Salter's lovely My Lord You, and while i'd like that to manifest in the next post, i have to admit it might not.

fiction comma electric

2007-04-08T22:55:00.000+08:00

in case i wasn't being clear -- and a recent conversation with Banzai Cat seems to indicate as much -- i have dropped all pretense towards 'critical' review on this blog. whatever i may say by way of 'comments' (such as this here set of so-called 'reviews'), until further notice, is purely reactionary; none of this from-the-hip 'criticism' (for lack of a better word) is meant to stand up to critical deconstruction, and if any of it does, i'll be more surprised -- if, i'm sure, more pleasantly so -- than anyone.

anyhoo, that out of the way...

today i picked up James Salter's A Sport and A Pastime, Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, and The New Nature of the Catastrophe, ninth volume of The Tale of the Eternal Champion, the latter as a result of my crusade to track down and obtain every single piece of published fiction i can find by M. John Harrison (not to mention the fact that, yes, Jerry Cornelius is cool).

though i'm still wholly engrossed in Rupert Thomson's Death of a Murderer, i dipped into Catastrophe for M. John Harrison's 'The Ash Circus', which starts after the death of Jerry Cornelius, and, about which, this seems the best way to describe my feeble-minded reaction:

I read anyone who electrifies me or seems to be doing something I don't understand

-M. John Harrison, Disillusioned by the Actual, interview by Patrick Hudson, here, at The Zone.

(which also happens to go some way in leading me closer to a solution to certain investigations i have been conducting in my increasingly malcontent little headspace.)

a better way to celebrate Easter all by my lonesome, i can think of none.

here comes the rooster

2007-04-01T20:24:00.000+08:00

so. The Road beats all the other competitors to a spit-roasted pulp and takes the Rooster. more meat for the roast, i presume. a bit disappointing for being a most predictable end to my first experience of the Tournament of Books.

no, i haven't read it. sure, ever since Paul raved about it on his blog, i'd been curious about it, reading the first few passages everytime i step into a bookstore. but somehow, i never felt the urge to take it with me out of the bookstore. if the reviews are to be believed, this book has everything going for it: post-apocalyptic setting; check. heavenly writing applied to descriptions of Boschian hell; check. the 'intimate in the face of the cataclysmic'; check. enough gloom to last a lifetime; check. brilliant minimalist *black* cover, great quality paper, etc.; check.

i *almost* got it yesterday. instead, i got Rupert Thomson's Death of a Murderer.

so far, it's working out rather well, pulling me out of Thomas Disch's bathetically cool 334.

(wtf?!? you say? where did *those* books come from? what happened to Ballard and Pynchon and Darrieussecq and Peake? welcome to the clamor and chaos that is this facet of my life: 334 peeped out from my boxes back home and insisted i take it with me, and now Myra Hindley's quiet whispers are beckoning, and, i find, impossible to resist.)

the hunting of the snark

2007-04-01T00:49:00.000+08:00

read this before you go on. then, if you still feel the burning need to, proceed as you will with the rest of it:

Wail of the Sun:
i admit: i’ve had it with this sort of epic fantasy, you’ve got to come up with something truly imaginative and magnificent to impress me these days with this sort of fiction; so there’s no way i can pass off saying i approached this story without apprehension, without bias. still, there’s much to be said about how this story didn’t work without resorting to ‘bah. another epic fantasy. grumble grumble’: the fantastic elements felt very contrived. some vivid imagery, maybe, but typical. the human elements were even weaker: Redenthor’s ‘flaw’ was hardly anything more than fluff, and couldn’t have been more poorly chosen; the characters in general were stereotypes, their dialogue predictable, artificial, unnecessary. the underlying sentiment of the entire piece was more melodramatic than truly affective, and while this story is supposedly meant to be a mere fragment, it also dismisses any responsibility for that connection; a king falters, a world burns; we’re meant to feel for the fact that he dies for his daughter? it can be done, sure -- in fact, i’m all for focusing on the intimate in the face of the cataclysmic -- but it certainly wasn’t done here.

Thriller:
this was the most fun of the lot. the sheer imaginative cheek of the premise alone is worth giving it a go, and Andrew Drilon’s well-sustained second-person execution does it justice, with just the right amount of humor -- cheeky, at times even self-effacing -- thrown in with the gore. it’s a typical zombie story, sure, and fits right in with the whole ‘Living Dead’ canon, with, perhaps, a little less of the biting social commentary. but who really watches those movies for ‘social commentary’ anyway?

and what did you expect after learning that MJ’s true legacy wasn’t, after all, certain questionable doings at a whimsical little place called Neverland? (i know, i know: we’ve all heard that one before. but it’s true, ennit?) pure entertainment.

The Middle Prince:
i’ve said much about this already, broadcast by Banzai Cat over on his blog, and i really don’t know how else to put it. an interesting premise that was not done justice; there seem to be a few too many ‘shortcuts’ in the narrative, ‘violations’ of the ‘rules’ upon which the premise relies so heavily for it to be truly
meaningful. i can’t help but feel it could have been so much richer; i don’t feel convinced this is the way the story ‘should’ have been written, what i feel is one of the ‘obligations’ of a writer to the reader. that may be utterly wrong-headed and, in the end, may have been the only problem, but still: that definitely ruined it for me.

Insomnia:
pulpy, predictable, derivatively lovecraftian horror? hell yeah! Joseph Nacino drops one from his personal crusade to translate spec fic tropes into something that actually fits a Filipino context. i don’t think BC quite does it here -- he good cop-bad cop elements, for instance, are a little disinheriting, though i’m sure some local filmmakers would beg to differ -- but the delivery doesn’t push any such pretensions, and so neither does the appreciation of this story require it; this is a story told the way it’s told, the way it happened. period.

Inhuman:
a friend of mine pointed out the sentimentality of this story: ‘the fifth element is love.’ while there is something, appropriately, very Filipino about resorting to such melodrama, i realized my friend was right; there’s also something about it that simply throws the whole thing off. however, i’m not sure we meant the same thing: well-written (possibly the most well-written of all the stories here), well-researched (possibly the most etc., etc., as well), i found a pretension to the tone of this story that i felt inappropriate, and while my friend didn’t agree it was at all ‘too pretentious’, it was his comment that unlocked it for me: the gravitas to this story is somehow undone by that sentimentality; suddenly the pretension is revealed to be naiveté, and the whole thing collapses on the weight of its own, er, gravitas.

obviously, i wasn't personally happy with most of the contents of this Digest, but, given my current tastes, mindset, etc. (and anyway, who am i to talk?) that should probably be taken as a mark of approval rather than a fatal judgement: Kenneth has provided a much needed avenue for the publication of stories that might not otherwise have found a home.

not all of you will be pleased, not with everything you find in this Digest; then again, isn't that part of the nature of genre?

Crimson (after White)

2007-03-23T16:14:00.001+08:00

Everything in this world issues fully-formed from the loins of a benign monster called manufacture; a never-ending stream of objects - of graded quality, of perfect uniformity - from an orifice hidden behind veils of smoke.

Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

this isn't part of the chaos just yet (though it may well be in the future), but thanks to the first eighteen 'episodes' having been published as an online serial by the guardian, i've found it threatens to deform my rather malleable reading aesthetic, and may supplant one or two books from the current pending list...

only i find i'm not sure i'm *quite* in the mood for another doorstop to enter the list, what with Against the Day underneath it all...

right. 'work.'

Don't get soaked. Take a quick peek at the forecast
with theYahoo! Search weather shortcut.

unmelting, irrelevant

2007-03-23T00:59:00.000+08:00

Two centimetres of snow since last year; not enough to wipe out our traces. No one left in a radius of four thousand kilometres, except for three Russians who are hibernating in the Vostok base. And us, of course, but how can we be counted?

Marie Darrieussecq, White

that's right. a fifth book has fallen into the chaos. but for now i've chosen to spend most of my time with Millennium People. at last, i think, i have a sequence of books i truly want to follow-through with, though i know the end of one must inevitably distort my perception, deform my plans.

nevermind. i'll gawk at that bridge when i get there.

meanwhile, Tom Waits has returned to my playlist with Alice, alternating with the manufactured comfort of Amos Lee's Supply and Demand.

When I'm dead in my grave
Set me adrift and I'm lost over there
And I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice

Tom Waits, Alice

tourney season?

2007-03-20T21:34:00.000+08:00

...it is by no means an easy thing to be promoted from the rank of 'visitor' to that of 'resident. It has been known to take many years. It is difficult to understand quite how the transference comes about. It is an almost mystical procedure and is, of course, in the hands of the natives - that basic layer in the triple sandwich of island life.

Mervyn Peake, Mr Pye

Tourism is the great soporific. It's a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea that there's something interesting in their lives.

J.G.Ballard, Millennium People

while the Tournament of Books rages on elsewhere (thanks Paul), i, too, find myself coincidentally pitting several books, if not necessarily against each other, then in a chaotic, randomly rotating tag team.

of these, Mr Pye and Millennium People (incidentally, i don't know why the cover on amazon.co.uk is in grayscale. my copy has Richard Green's cover illustration against a field of sunset-y orange reminiscent of Liz Pyle's cover for Mother London) provide the most interesting contrast: one was written right smack in the middle of the twentieth century, the other not long after the end of it. both describe a kind of parochialism and/or the struggle against it - in the Sarnians of the former, the middle class revolutionaries of the latter - and identify (or identify with) the decadence of that period, and, in their own distinct ways, constitute a rebellion against it.

Peake, though considered a 'modernist', writes in prose that feels almost archaic: his sentences are lengthy, his diction colorful and vivid; Ballard's prose is stark, a sharp if typical example of the kind of prose found in postmodern surrealist fiction. (well, the sort i've encountered, at any rate, in books that have often, if not consistently, been labeled as such.)

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, i find, provides a nice bed for the other two to lie in, a sort of contemporary mongrel middle ground that resists categorization while nestling comfortably into either 'potential pigeonhole' (or foxhole, as we are, ostensibly, at war here.) and quite a few others, at that.

Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics fills a few unavoidable gaps in the fractured rule of my inner gestapo of 'taste'.

i've also been unable to stop myself from writing, providing a disingenuous sense of creative equilibrium.

oh, cool. The Office. and Donny Osmond, Kelly Holmes and David Baddiel on The Kumars at No 42.

interrobang.

the absurd answer

2007-03-18T04:19:00.000+08:00

The middle class was the new proletariat, the victims of a centuries-old conspiracy, at last throwing off the chains of duty and civic responsibility.

For once, the absurd answer was probably the right one.

J.G.Ballard, Millennium People

i'd always found Ballard's premises brilliant, but somehow, inexplicaply, never felt a demand from any of his books to be read. not Concrete Island, not High Rise, not The Drowned World or Vermillion Sands or The Terminal Beach; not this book's predecessors, not even Empire of the Sun or Crash. but this middle class rebellion, this compellingly relevant if equally absurd anarchy, this comically tragic (or tragically comic) form of terrorism...how can i say no?

something like sark

2007-03-17T18:50:00.000+08:00

...there she lay at full stretch upon the skyline, her attenuated and coruscated body reaching from north to south, the morning sunbeams playing along her spine and flickering upon the crests and ridges of her precipitous flanks.

Mervyn Peake, Mr Pye

of course, Sentosa's flanks aren't precipitous; they slope gently, their descent cushioned with thick green. however, surprised by finding myself confronted by her across the bay after having at last found a copy of Mervyn Peake's classic, how could i help but feel a certain kinship with the inestimable Mr Pye?

how perfect is that? what else could i ask for?

you know what else.

cored

2007-03-14T20:12:00.000+08:00

i turn the page and, suddenly, everything phosphoresces: all my insides wiped-out in a wash of substitute light, fallen from overexposure.

Everything is flat out here. No one drives themselves anymore.

M. John Harrison, Suicide Coast.

how can i help but feel this explains everything?

desperado

2007-03-11T21:13:00.000+08:00

this past week: i've read a couple chapters of Justina Robson's Living Next-Door to the God of Love, about half of China Mieville's Un Lun Dun, a few pages of Geoff Ryman's The King's Last Song; spending more time than i should in various bookshops, i read bits of Geling Yan's The Uninvited, John Connely's The Book of Lost Things, Ryu Murakami's Piercings, David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and Black Swan Green, a sizable serving (yet barely a chunk) of Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. i enjoyed some of these more than others; either way, i willingly subjected myself to their diversion, but was diverted only for as long as each book was in my hands.

i scrabbled from book to book, churning with a kind of placid desperation.

i'm no longer the voracious reader i used to be; i suppose i do still read for a sort of escape after all, but i no longer find it as satisfying to be so passive. i find it more and more difficult to be drawn into worlds painted for me, constructed entirely from another's imagination.

reading about magic and literal wonders has become, for me, wearisome: words are symbols, Alan Moore reminds us, and are thus themselves magical; the use of words to describe magic and literal wonders in the direct terms of comfortable fantasy and science fiction seems to me not only trite, but disinheriting, even unnecessary, as though one cannot help but undercut the power of the other.

and yet i cannot do without that strangeness...the weirdness of some of the more estranged books in the 'modern lit' shelves just isn't the same thing.

so what can i do? Elizabeth Hand, M. John Harrison; they seem to be the only ones in my library capable of making that translation, of successfully transcribing real wonders with as little entropy as possible.

i'm afraid they're the only ones who really do it for me these days.

China Mieville's Un Lun Dun

2007-03-09T23:15:00.000+08:00

no, not a real-time review. not even, really, a review. of any sort.

every now and then, i read a line or a phrase from a book that makes me blink for its valuably trivially brilliant throwaway insight.

i remember how Neil Gaiman repeated the opening lines of Neuromancer in American Gods, making a keen observation concerning change from the odd vantage point of a living room sofa. and now, China Mieville:

'I wish I had my phone,' Deeba whispered to Zanna. 'I want to take a picture.' (Un Lun Dun, p. 90.)

i see the grey in my hair is actually starting to mean something.

out of the rut?; or, At Last, Something Without Anything By M. John Harrison In It

2007-02-25T02:22:00.000+08:00

Elizabeth Hand has always impressed me with her prose, and yet apparently never enough for me to get through more than a few pages of any of her novels. still, whenever i find something of hers, though admittedly from secondhand bookshops, i've rarely been able to resist getting a copy. i've enjoyed a page or two or maybe a bit more each of Waking the Moon and Glimmering, still have no idea why i passed-up getting copies of Winterlong and Aestival Tide when i found them some months back - oh wait, yeah, i'd been saving up for the change - and still occasionally wonder why i never just finish reading either of her books in my library.

Saffron and Brimstone is the first brand-spanking-new copy of an Elizabeth Hand book i've ever gotten, and i'm relieved to be enjoying it as much as i am. thus far, i've made my way through Cleopatra Brimstone and Pavane for a Prince of the Air, and while i was initially uncertain of the rather pulpy, predictable, almost cheap twilight-zone-ish premise behind the first story, and the wearyingly detailed examination of suffering, ritual and magical ephemera comprising the bulk of the second, in the end, i found i couldn't easily dismiss either story. these are 'uneasy' stories, not least because they are strange without (particularly with Pavane) necessarily submitting to the all-too-familiar models of 'fantasy'; however, Ms Hand's use of language makes them anything but unreadable; her prose makes these stories the fascinating studies of inevitability that a thoughtful slow motion sequence might make of a film.

*

John Constantine must have one of the rawest deals in the history of serialized (anti-)heroes; i thought he had it bad with Garth Ennis' run on Vertigo's Hellblazer series, what with the cancer and the having-his-heart-ripped-out-and-stomped-on and all that, and with Warren Ellis' relatively breezy run, allowing John to just be the cheeky, smirking hard-boiled bastard for a change (i'd missed and have never been able to catch up on Azarello's run), i woulda thought he'd seen the worst.

well, maybe he had; but Mike Carey's run makes a strong argument against that.

like Ennis' run, Carey's Hellblazer story arc is a veritable downward spiral for John Constantine. the raw intensity of Ennis' run is easier to grasp, even though his politics, for a non-Englishman, might drop accessibility down just a tiny notch. Carey's run is far more complicated, more cerebral; does this make any of it less raw? less intense?

hard to say, because John Constantine gets it pretty bad; at the start of Stations of the Cross, John is pretty much at the bottom of the barrel, and Mike Carey is utterly unforgiving here: sure, John gets a few licks in, but it's hard to see anything substantial in these little victories (although if Carey's run is to be considered notable for only one thing, it may well be for surprising you with the significance of little throwaway details he gets in under your radar), and the only glimmer of hope we have at the end of the story arc is the fact that John gets to be his wily old bastard self again.

if i have one complaint about Mike Carey's run, it's this: he doesn't give John much of a chance to really shine as a character. every writer has taken a different slant on the character; Jamie Delano's John Constantine had a definite slant towards being a magic user, if an unconventional one; Ennis and Ellis showed John to be more con man than mage, though Ellis seems to let John use magic more than Ennis; Mike Carey somehow manages to strike a balance between these two aspects of the character, but unlike previous writers, he seems to have gotten John much too busy to really be himself. my fave John Constantines are the ones in Ennis' 'Forty' from the Fear and Loathing story arc, and from Neil Gaiman's 'Hold Me' and Books of Magic. these are the stories that really let John be a *character*, and not simply a device to drive the plot.

still, Mike Carey's Hellblazer story arcs are some of the best in the series, with each story arc setting the bar higher with a cliffhanger ending that promises even bigger things; so far, Carey has managed rather well, and though the one-shot All His Engines is still my favorite Mike Carey Hellblazer book, i'll definitely be following his run through to its end; and then, it's off to the Denise Mina story arcs.

John Constantine with empathy? Holy Hell-freezing-over, DinkMan!

er, right.

Cats

2007-02-19T15:17:00.000+08:00

whenever M. John Harrison writes cats into his stories, the four-legged critters always steal the scene. always. whether perched on the shoulder of Michael Kearney in Light, refusing to get off Pam Stuyvesant's couch and window in The Course of the Heart, or streaming down the streets of Saudade in Nova Swing. real cats can't seem to help but be the most graceful metaphors, and this seems to suit Mr Harrison's particular slant on literature just fine.

so it was that i was totally enthralled by his 'straight epic fantasy' novel, The Wild Road, for, in case you didn't know, Gabriel King *is* M. John Harrison. did i just let the cat out of the bag?

sorry. couldn't resist.

only i never finished The Wild Road. strongly suspecting that Mabel - who fell in love with SF Said's Varjak Paw and who i seem to remember enjoyed the black cat's insouciance in Neil Gaiman's Coraline - would enjoy Tag's adventures as well, i left my copy with her when i left for Spore City. i got a copy of the sequel, The Golden Cat, and have been resisting the temptation to continue Tag's adventures, never mind the crucial abridgement of Road's latter half.

the Gabriel King books somehow manage to take Mr Harrison's skill with language, his sharp eye for metaphor and detail and his own understanding of nature both human and otherwise and employ them in something (for M. John Harrison) surprisingly straightforward: pure, unadulterated storytelling.

just one of the many reasons i can't wait to get back home.

unreviewed: M. John Harrison's Nova Swing and others

2007-02-13T21:00:00.000+08:00

it's been awhile, and i've honestly lost the stamina to do a review, no matter how utterly blown-away impressed i was (and am, come to think of it) by the last book i read, M. John Harrison's Nova Swing. (well, technically, the last book i read was Victoria, the first novella in Paul Di Filippo's Steampunk Trilogy, but as it comes in an omnibus that includes the other two novellas, Hottentots and Walt and Emily, and as long as *i'm* making the rules for this thing, that dun don't count until i get through them other two. then, after all, there's Michael Moorcock's Mother London, which i started reading and vowed, to my chagrin, to finish within the next two years.)

among all the things i've been scrabbling through these past few months (finished or not) were, most notably: Simon Ings' The Weight of Numbers, Avram Davidson's Adventures in Unhistory and Gabriel King's The Wild Road; not quite notably: Jim Younger's High John the Conqueror; even less so Eva Hoffman's The Secret and Dean Alfar's Salamanca. i read all the shorts in the Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, and have opinions on each, and am sure i dipped a toe or two in a few other things.

that's all i'm saying for now.

except: while reviews are, indeed, forthcoming, i can't say this is a promise to review all the things i've enumerated here; however, having said all that hopefully will spur me on to them anyway. you never know.

i'm a right lazy bastard these days

M. John Harrison's Signs of Life: in the end...

2007-01-01T22:32:00.000+08:00

if there were ever any doubts in my mind as to Mr Harrison's ability to deconstruct, demolish and degrade the most opaque, sturdy and 'dignified' (i use each of these words, particularly the last, in the loosest, most forgiving sense) of personalities, having produced his most apparently solid, full-spirited characters in Signs of Life, such doubts have been laid to rest, terminally and irresurrectibly, by the latter half of that book. though the book started out on an almost optimistic note, infused with the enthusiastic life-energy of love in its early, pre-terminal stages, the book soon enough goes dark; the stress of the book eventually begins to weigh on the apparently seamless surfaces of each character; fracture lines, old and new, begin to show; if i had not known how this book was to end before hand, the ending would most certainly have been forgone long before i reached the 'climax'.

Signs of Life is a stilted rhapsody full of eccentric but earthy melodies and odd rhythms generated by the tinkling of test-tubes, the clattering of a defective centrifuge and the diseased moaning of laboratory vermin (and, of course, Tom Waits' gravel-throated crooning); an earthquake-damaged mosaic, the most brilliantly-colored tiles falling first off the wall to shatter noiselessly on the ground, to be hidden by the grass, or to sink into the soggy earth; a collage of jarring images or a jar of collaged images, a narrative constructed from the fragments of a life, brought together by the search for meaning imposed by a tragically human perspective. in the end, M. John Harrison to my mind warns us of the dangers inherent in attempting to define ourselves with our dreams: whether we deny our dreams or cling to them, the effect is fatal; having no dreams, however, seems no better. what then, are we to make of the signs of life? what are we to make of ourselves, and how?

http://www.theedge.abelgratis.co.uk/harrisoniview.htm

M. John Harrison's Signs of Life: Ashton et al.

2006-12-21T08:51:00.000+08:00

contrary to what my absence on this blog over the past few days may indicate, i have not been completely inactive here. in fact, my reading of M. John Harrison's Signs of Life continues to progress, albeit slowly. i have also made a digression or two, most notably through the first chapters of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. it's just been hard to wrap my head around what i want to say here.

right. Signs of Life. here goes...

i've fallen in love with the trio of characters at the heart of this book. i love Mr Harrison's characters in general (even the misanthropic Yaxley from The Course of the Heart and the morally despicable Michael Kearney and Seria Mau Genlicher from Light), but Mick 'China' Rose, Isobel Avens and Choe Ashton feel more solidly realized than anyone else in Mr Harrison's fiction. all his characters tend to be fractured personalities, informed with one form of desperation or another, but the distinction of these three is that they feel like they have a more active approach to life and living. Pam Stuyvesant, Lucas Medlar and the nameless narrator of The Course, for instance, all feel somewhat insubstantial in the way they seem to be knocking about their lives, like ghosts in the attic bouncing off walls and antique debris, searching for the light switch only to fall one by one down the open hatch to the equally unlit, if not quite as dark, flat below. the characters of Light, on the other hand, feel like warped reflections or ill-fitting fragments of each other, and while each has a distinct flavor of personality, there's something ghostly about the way the knock about as well, colliding and adhering to each other like something wet and sickish, despite the razor's edge of desperation (i really can't think of a better word for it) each character has.

the trio in Signs feel like hardier personalities, despite being no less 'victims' of the 'real world'. they are people we can cheer for, expressly raising our voices to goad them on through the story, their lives, despite the ultimately tragic end we come to expect, this being, after all, an M. John Harrison novel (this is not to over-generalize...Light, after all, had an optimistic ending, and the final reflection of The Course, to my mind at least, feels somewhat redemptive in its ultimate acceptance of humanity, of love). Isobel Avens is the 'obvious' dreamer. she is unabashedly an escapist; she finds Mick/China's lie about flying 'brilliant', delights in a dream of flying she has while with Mick/China. Mick/China fills the 'observer' role of the nameless narrator of The Course; is he, perhaps, an escapist, too, living vicariously through his ostensibly diametrically opposed friends? nonetheless, he feels more substantial and grounded than the painfully hopeless narrator of that other work. Choe Ashton is the sort of person one 'lives vicariously' through...one, however, wonders at the driving force behind Choe Ashton's daredevilry, creating an interesting dimension to the character.

I wasn't sure boredom was entirely the issue. Some form of exploration was taking place, as if Choe Ashton wanted to know the real limits of the world, not in the abstract but by experience. I grew used to identifying the common ground of these stories--the point at which they intersected--because there, I believed, I had found Choe's myth of himself, and it was that myth that energised him.

an apparently reasonable assumption for Mick/China to make, i might interject, a neat little package to wrap the whole personality that is Choe Ashton in; however, Mick/China follows this immediately with:

I was quite wrong. He was not going to let himself be seen so easily. But that didn't become plain until later.

these lines represent for me the trajectory Mr Harrison has launched all three characters on, and i admit finding myself intrigued, not only to find out where that arc might terminate, but by the shape of the arc itself.

M. John Harrison's Signs of Life: an introduction of sorts

2006-12-15T08:12:00.000+08:00

it may only be because the copy of M. John Harrison's Signs of Life i own is the one in Anima (which publishes Signs together with The Course of the Heart), but i feel compelled to draw parallels and make comparisons between the two books. for instance: the first detail of Signs, the very first thing we are told, is the narrator's name. in fact, we learn, the narrator has two of them:

My name is Mick Rose, which is why a lot of people call me 'China'.

Mick's, or China's, depending on your preference, is a more amiable voice than that of the narrator of Course, whose name we *never learn* throughout that book's 200+ pages. there is a more familiar humor in Mick's voice; it seems, perhaps, more natural, more of the 'average joe'; more of the wakeful day than the dreaming night, one might say; more modern, more 'hip': Mick's voice makes him feel more grounded, less inclined to question his reality the way Course's narrator seemed predisposed to even in childhood:

When I was a tiny boy I often sat motionless in the garden, bathed in sunshine, hands flat on the rough brick of the garden path, waiting with a prolonged, almost painful expectation for whatever would happen, whatever event was contained by that moment, whatever revelation lay dormant in it. (The Course of the Heart, page 7.)

interesting counterpoint, yes? also rather obvious for certain aspects of this discussion: Abigail Nussbaum in an earlier review noted something to the effect of The Course of the Heart being a nongenre 'fantasy' and Signs of Life being a nongenre 'science fiction' story. if that is, in fact, the case, the way the two stories begin, the way they differ from the very first word and proceed from there, all these things make an interesting comment on the 'genres each story chooses to transcend', if i may put it that way.

these two stories, in that light, appear to be companion pieces, Mr Harrison's own commentary on the elements that are used to define the two genres and ultimately distinguish them from each other. the value of collecting the two stories into one volume appears to be based in part on the substance behind Ms Nussbaum's analysis and this subsequent comparison. the publishers of Anima, however, also make it clear that the decision to collect the two stories in one volume is based on something else:

When a writer like M. John Harrison looks at love, you know the results will be unusual and compelling, evocative and imaginative, dark, depressing and transcendent. Here in one volume are his two classic love stories...fantastical romances, quests, thrillers - and wholly M. John Harrison. (Anima, from the back of the book.)

clearly, there is a *thematic* intersection between the two stories, and this seems yet another good reason to look at the two stories as complementary, to examine one in light of the other. however, the differences, to my mind, also dictate something else, that must be just as important to the appreciation of either work: the two stories must be taken separately, on their own terms.

this seems a painfully obvious conclusion to make of any two works, but it is one i feel i must state: having read The Course of the Heart a long time ago, it continues to resonate in my mind as one of the most beautiful and interesting stories i have ever read; unfortunately, the resonance of that work now informs my reading of Signs of Life. (putting the stories together in one volume doesn't quite help.)

by stating that one obvious fact, i am attempting to exorcise those resonances; of course, it may not be possible (might even be wrong-headed, come to think of it), given that the presence of any one thing is supposed to deform the universe, and our previous experiences make impressions on how we perceive later experiences. but i would, at the very least, like to try.

Mr Harrison's skill as a writer, thankfully, makes it possible to succeed: though his writing in Signs shows the same sort of attention to detail, informed as it is with the same 'low latent inhibition' suggested by his writing elsewhere, Mick 'China' Rose has a particular voice that is able to incorporate that aesthetic in what appears to be a more 'practical' or, perhaps, more 'conventionally rational' mindset.

to put it another way, The Course of the Heart felt like it was still somewhere between Viriconium and the 'real world'...Mr Harrison's writing in Signs suggests it exists further on the other side of the spectrum. which pushes me harder, personally, to try to read Signs as a distinct entity, and not simply a 'companion' to Course.

Inter Alia: Alan Wall, Iain M. Banks, Daniel Handler

2006-12-12T07:52:00.000+08:00

Things That Never Happen took so much of my attention that i really couldn't say much about my digressions--well, nothing i thought sensible enough to post; but here, allow me to try to recover some of my thoughts at the time: Alan Wall is an amazingly sharp writer, and between his first novel, School of Night and his latest, China (both of which i'd only really dabbled in, reading only the first few chapters of each book), you can see the progress he's made over the years. both are well-crafted, beautiful works, but there's a comfort with the rhythm and flow of China that i couldn't find in School. Mr Wall's writing, appropriately enough for China feels like 'jazz when it works'...but i couldn't continue; everything just felt too, well, linear after the scattershot-genius of Things; i was in the wrong mindset for it, so i'll probably have to come back to Mr Wall's books some other time.

Iain M. Banks' State of the Art opens rather tepidly, imho. Road of Skulls seemed too embroiled in its own wit, and while it had its moments, the ending didn't quite 'linger like smoke rising from a crematorium' as Publishers Weekly put it over on Amazon.com. Road just wasn't as clever as it thought it was, to my mind. A Gift from the Culture started out much more promisingly; i've always admired Mr Banks' wit, but always thought it worked best when 'being clever' wasn't allowed centerstage. i got through a couple pages of A Gift, but i'd only picked the book up to keep me company while i waited for someone, and when she arrived, i closed the book, set it aside, and haven't gone back to it since.

Daniel Handler's Watch Your Mouth was my most recent digression before going back to the beginning of M. John Harrison's Signs of Life. i am utterly distressed by (read: i absolutely love) Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, though my reading mindset has thankfully (read: regrettably) of late kept me away from finishing the series off by reading The End. Mr Handler is Mr Snicket's 'representative' as i understand it, and is no less gifted, i hear, with wit. no doubt about it: the writing in Watch Your Mouth feels like ASoUE for adults--with healthy doses of sex and everything; sans Baudelaires, of course, though i expect i would not be surprised at all to find a hook-handed man, powder-faced twins, a person who looks neither like a man or a woman, or dirty old men with eyes tattooed to their ankles lurking about in the shadows of the book's pages.

i feel like i missed a 'digression' or two; ah well: all this more or less gets you up to speed with where i'm at, and brings us back round to Mr Harrison's Signs of Life.

M. John Harrison's Things That Never Happen: 'The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It' and 'Gifco'

2006-12-11T08:11:00.000+08:00

this stands at the heart of it all:

http://www.mjohnharrison.com/archive/tointerview.htm

i had just been musing how, having read M. John Harrison's longer works, reading his short fiction at times felt like accidentally walking into rehearsals for some magic trick or other you'd seen before, catching bits of it through a backstage door propped open with a broom, from the wings or from the entrance to the theater while some stagehand, bouncer, receptionist or urchin from the street outside tries to distract you with irrelevant conversation--conversation that in retrospect suddenly becomes startlingly significant.

it's almost a kind of deja vu; only with print, you can always go back to it and more solidly make the connections. or can you?

i've already noted in previous installments how some of these stories can be found in altered form in Mr Harrison's longer works: The Quarry and The Great God Pan in The Course of the Heart most notably, and A Young Man's Journey to London. but there are other bits i failed to note, of which i can now only remember two: The Gift features, in passing, some parlour or other called 'Nueva Swing', a drycleaners or laundromat called 'New Venus'. Here in the next two tales, more connections can be found: The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It opens with what appears to be one of Mr Harrison's favorite images, that of a horse's skull (paraphrasing: 'not a horse's head, but its skull, which is nothing like the horse's head'), an image that repeats like a bad dream in Viriconium and is a vital element of Light, and 'You bloody piece of paper!' which i remember from The Course of the Heart; Gifco includes a dream sequence which makes its way into Light. this 'cut-and-paste' aesthetic makes me wonder whether i should feel cheated by Mr Harrison; but each fragment is blended so seemlessly with the rest of the text that it hardly seems to matter. or does it?

these last two stories feel like jigsaw puzzles of memory; episodic, messy and obscure, the meanings of everything shifting, imprecise: mutable, and in many ways obscure. the Ephebe of The Horse maps his life out using Tarot cards, and we find in the end only the beginning; Gifco's narrator, some Jack or other, reconstructs the fragments of his life and encounters the limitations of memory, how life becomes, in retrospect, something of an illusion. both stories leave me to ask whether finding the sense of it all is a futile endeavor, or the only thing that matters.

the next few stories, as i understand it, are also to be found in Signs of Life, which i've not yet read. should i press on? see the fragments before they slot into the whole? i wonder.

i expect i'll be going back to Signs of Life before i continue with Things That Never Happen. however, having seen the effect of watching the magic show before catching rehearsals, i wonder what the experience might be like turned around?

M. John Harrison's entire body of work, to my mind, begs to be read in its entirety, not stopping at mere fragments, but gobbling up every short story and novel the man has written, and will presumably write. the intersections (the source, at times, of the feeling of being 'cheated' by a writer who knows more about his own work than you do) appear to create a metafictional web that illustrates Mr Harrison's philosophy, or philosophies, and it seems a shame to begrudge yourself even one tiny piece of the entire puzzle.

i fear my mind too weak to completely comprehend what Mr Harrison is saying: perhaps, at the end of it all, the meaning will suddenly become clear, like a mountain vista at daybreak. perhaps not. for me, however, despite its difficulties and obscurities, and despite all of Mr Harrison's cautions against 'reading only for entertainment', i find it an utter joy to make the journey. much like life. perhaps that's the point.

perhaps not.

M. John Harrison's Things That Never Happen: Five more stories

2006-12-05T07:25:00.000+08:00

reading M. John Harrison's stories can be a lot like reconstructing lives from the snatches of conversation you hear on the commute to and from work; as you sit in a restaurant waiting for your order, or for the waiter to hand you a menu; as you walk by the edge of a crowd gathered round some accident or other you cannot see. in Michael Moorcock's Mother London, David Mummery, Josef Kiss and Mary Gasalee are all gifted/cursed with hearing voices: this is, to the practical mind, obviously the manifestation of some psychiatric disorder, and they are treated accordingly. they are, in fact, 'hearing' the 'voice' of London, catching the run-together internal monologues of her citizenry. Mr Moorcock inserts fragments of 'London's rambling' into Mother London's narrative, creating a bizarre 'dialogue' where there isn't any, and a third party to the conversation when there is. these fragments, then, are like flourishes, garnishings that add an odd flavor to the work; Mr Harrison, on the other hand, constructs his narratives solely from these apparently random musings.

After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you will never learn anything about the fire: by the time the ashes can be handled the meaning has passed on. (The Gift, p231)

it would appear, then, that Mr Harrison's stories play not in the ashes but in the fire, constructing vivid portraits of 'events' from the fractured landscape of images, ideas and people that crowd around any given instant. the result is something strange, fragmented and baroque, but ultimately familiar. if his characters are equally strange, fragmented and baroque, it is because we are merely eavesdropping upon them, catching snatches not only of their lives, but of the world they are integral to, being the sources of our perspectives. his characters are people and, like any of us, have merely stumbled into the world they were born (i.e., written) into: they distort their world by their mere existence in it, but are ultimately unable to shape it. Mr Harrison's approach, admittedly, makes them hard to empathize with; we may get to know these people well or not at all, but either way, while we may find some of them familiar, they are all ultimately strangers. somehow, to my mind, it also makes them more vivid, more 'real': more recognizable as 'people', and not simply 'plot devices' or even 'characters'.

The Quarry can also be found in modified form as the most affecting digression in Mr Harrison's novel The Course of the Heart; informed with rare optimism concerning human nature, the story exists in the interstices of perception and 'objective' reality. A Young Man's Journey to London is a re-working of A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium, another meditation on escapism, hope and desire made all the stranger for being made banal. Small Heirlooms is either an unusual 'ghost story' or a meditation on memories, our own and those of the people we think we know, how the two sets of memories relate and interact and again affect our perceptions. The Great God Pan again re-works (or was re-worked into) a fragment of The Course of the Heart. it also appears to be a reflection of (or on) Arthur Machen's story of the same name; Mr Harrison, however, focuses on the 'primal darkness' that is inherent in our own lack of understanding for our own nature as humans, rather than on an external 'power'. here, the darkness within, we find, manifesting in our senses (figurative, literal, or however else you mean the word), is no less alien than that without. and in The Gift, two people blunder through their lives, stumbling through their loneliness until the story ultimately brings them together in a bizarre 'metafictional' collision. slapstick isn't uncommon in Mr Harrison's work, but rather than being purely comical, in his stories there is something tragic about it, the awkwardness of the physical condition perhaps translating into (or translated from) something more deeply rooted in our inherent humanities.

the 're-worked' stories were a delight for me particularly as they allowed me to revisit key moments of M. John Harrison's longer works without having to re-read those books entirely; all these stories stand alone well, capturing enough of the longer works' spirit to be able to live and breathe on their own; at the same time, they seem to represent an underlying philosophy in Mr Harrison's fiction: that we are only ever privy to fragments, and can never really know the whole story.

M. John Harrison's Things That Never Happen: first seven stories

2006-11-23T08:19:00.000+08:00

i find it utterly intimidating, doing any sort of review of Mr Harrison's work. Mr Harrison is the sort of writer who has very definite intentions for his stories, but isn't about to tell you what they are; in fact, he seems to delight in keeping everything as obscure as possible for the casual reader, in spite of (or, perhaps, because of) his almost overreaching insistence on descriptions of banality. Mr Harrison is the sort of writer who conveys the strange (perhaps numinous) in something as mundane as making a pot of coffee.

well, here goes. if Mr Harrison catches wind of this, i at least think i'm prepared for the mental thrashing that will no doubt follow, if he thinks any of this worth bothering with at all.

the first seven stories in his collection, Things That Never Happen, are brave examples of what a writer can do with fiction. Settling The World starts the book off on a strange note. obviously rooted in more thoughtful, if not at all 'hard' SF, Settling is anything but: it is a disturbing Chestertonian mystery that explores the nature of the divine, and unsettles the reader with the incomprehensible alienness of it. this is followed by Running Down, which takes an assumption of the ridiculous and explores and extends it to its very limits, invoking, from my limited experience, echoes of Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft and Machen, though the element of the 'alien' in this story is perhaps closer to the sort represented by Poe, if no less spectacular or literally 'cataclysmic' than that found in the works of the other three. The Incalling is an exploration of an all too human desperation (as are, in a way, all these stories thus far), and here we begin to see more clearly an inkling of Mr Harrison's take on escapism: what it does 'for' us and, ostensibly to us. The Ice Monkey is deeply rooted in the realities and complexities of human relationships, and is no less strange for it. Egnaro more blatantly examines escapism, and evokes images and rationalizations of geekdom that hit rather close to the mark for this reader. here is a cheekier take on the sort of material Borges explored with Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a bit darker for being much more intimate. next, i must admit to floundering with Old Women, which explores, perhaps, the strangeness of 'old women' in the eyes of men, and yet in the end suggests a basic similarity between the sexes. i must admit to floundering because i do not truly understand what happens in this story, much less what it all means. the portrayal of 'old women', however, while being strange, seems spot on with reality: you've met one or two or all the women in this story in your life, i'll wager. this story was first published in Women's Journal, and i can't help but wonder what those readers thought of this story. finally, i closed the book arbitrarily (and temporarily) on The New Rays, which follows Old Women with a first person account of a woman who begins by seeking desperately for a cure, and ends with her wondering at our own desires and hopes and fears and how they affect who and what we are.

these stories tread the entire landscape of strange fiction without heeding the arbitrary ('fictional'?) boundaries of 'genre'; some of these stories have overt fantastical elements, and one, Egnaro, deals with such elements directly without exactly 'committing' to them. none of them, however, seek to 'escape reality'; instead, Mr Harrison seems to want to bury our imaginations in it, like seeds in fertile (if fetid) earth.

at the same time, none of these stories seem to commit to a single portrait of 'objective' reality either, except, perhaps, to say that the ultimate reality is that defined by the fact that humans are fragile, tiny things lost in an infinitely larger universe they can never hope to comprehend; that this is also, perhaps, the one thing that makes being human matter at all.

this is the first collection of short fiction i have ever found compulsively readable; my approach to short fiction collections has always been to dip into a story or two between longer works. Mr Harrison, however, has had my complete attention with the first seven stories of this book, and if i stop reading the book for now, it is only from a conscious decision to try to keep myself moving through the progressive accumulation of books that are currently acting as dust traps in stacks by my bed.

i don't think i'll be staying away for long.

M. John Harrison's Things That Never Happen

2006-11-18T08:11:00.000+08:00

i totally love that the copy of M. John Harrison's Things That Never Happen i got *does not* have the introduction by China Mieville. now, me, i tend to be one of those freak book lovers who utterly dig all the ephemeral shit of a book--everything from prefaces to introductions, forewords, afterwords, footnotes, endnotes, acknowledgements, bibliographies, blurbs--i have a particular thing for blurbs, whether or not i agree with them, i don't quite know why--author's notes, appendices, those brief author (auto)biography thingies, notes on fonts--i don't necessarily read them all, but i do like having these 'other things' to browse through when i need to take a mental breath from the main content of a book.

M. John Harrison's fiction, however, best speaks for itself. i haven't read Mr Mieville's introduction, but no matter how much i respect Mr Mieville's talents as a writer and have no doubt that he has managed an intelligent, insightful and enlightening introduction to Mr Harrison's work, i have the feeling that any sort of introduction to this book would be a major disservice.

perhaps the best, most acceptable introduction to Mr Harrison's fiction in my mind is the one blurb, provided by Iain M. Banks, that is included with my particular copy of this book. printed on the back cover, Mr Banks says:

M. John Harrison is the only writer on Earth equally attuned to the essential strangeness both of quantum physics and the attritional banalities of modern urban life

now, i don't know if he really is the *only* writer on Earth equally attuned etc, etc, (in fact, i rather doubt that) but Mr Banks has pretty much summed up the wonder of Mr Harrison's work. but if i may add, what may possibly set Mr Harrison apart from other writers who deal with similar material (Mr Banks himself, for instance, has said much on the 'attritional banalities of modern urban life') is that Mr Harrison succeeds in communicating this 'essential strangeness' to my mind, even barring the strangeness of the actual subject matter of each story, by his distinctive prose alone.

possibly my favorite thing about Mr Harrison's prose is the way he deals with dialogue. the way each line flows with the rest of the text without losing the distinctive voice of the character speaking the line. the way each 'spoken' line grazes the main text, grazes the characters and rather than bouncing between them strikes them tangentially, wounding rather than impaling. the words therefore somehow manage to be both evanescent and razor-hard. characters talk 'at' rather than 'to' each other.

the grotesques from Mervyn Peake's Titus books perform similarly random feats of tangential conversation, but in those books the effect is jarring, like the noises and visions of a circus or carnival during its peak hours; in Mr Harrison's fiction, the voices seem to echo long after the people have left, the lights have gone down with the curtains, and the carnival has called it a night.

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves: part one of N

2006-11-03T08:14:00.000+08:00

there's been enough of a gap between now and the last time i broke open Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire for a book or two or three to slip in, and last night i felt meself suffering from a kind of bibliomaniac's option paralysis trying to figure out which book i wanted to read before turning the lights out. as i'd mentioned in me 'other life', Christopher Nolan's The Prestige was just interesting enough to get me to dig-up me old copy of Christopher Priest's The Prestige, and i went ahead and read--actually, re-read--the first chapter.

Mr. Priest, while being an intelligent, eloquent writer of interesting things, here intelligently, eloquently writing about something interesting, just hasn't ever been able to grab me. i've had the book for some time now, and everytime i read the first chapter (last night must have been the third or fourth time), i think 'hmm, this is good stuff. i wonder what happens next?,' put the book down, pick something else up and get back to it in another age.

last night was different because, having seen the movie, i, ostensibly, had some idea of the sort of egads and plot-and-what-if-whoppings i could expect. so i picked up the book, read the first chapter and immediately got a sense of where the movie might fit into the book, thought 'hmm, this is good stuff. i wonder what happens next?,' put the book down, and picked something else up.

yes, i'll probably get back to it in another age.

that 'something else', as it happens, was Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. the first time i broke that book open, i flipped through the pages and thought 'ye gods. how am i supposed to read this?' and, well, as it turns out, the way to do it is to start from the beginning.

really, there probably isn't anything i can say about this book that could possibly match the way it's already been dissected and picked apart, particularly as i've only read Johnny Truant's introduction and Zampano's first bit about The Navidson Record.

(see:

http://www.houseofleaves.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2131&highlight=reader%27s+guide

for just about anything and everything there is to say about the book, particularly if you want a taste of what to expect. but don't read too much of any of the threads. i may have done just that, and almost spoiled some things for me which only became apparent upon reading the relevant bits.)

i will say this, however: Johnny Truant sets quite a bar for a reader's expectations, and i really don't see how this book could possibly deliver. on the other hand, Zampano's descriptions of the first bits of the nonexistant Navidson Record have already started to prove me wrong: The Navidson Record succeeds for me where Koji Suzuki had failed, creating 'video images' in my head that were, though far more mundane, were also much more haunting than anything in Sadako's curse. (i mean the Suzuki version, from the book, not the Nakata version from the movie.)

that said, i suppose this book can't help but work for me, as i confess to being a bit of an ephemera whore. of course, i've yet to hit the truly whacked out uber ephemeral bits (just a couple or so footnotes and the narrative/text shift from Mr Truant's intro to Zampano's Navidson Record redux so far), so i could very well be wrong, and end-up hating this book utterly.

at the moment, however, the book has my undivided attention.

Apologia: this other life suspended indefinitely

2006-11-02T08:57:00.000+08:00

starting to feel a bit ragged from 'real world' concerns and such, and haven't been doing a lot of reading (not any in the past few days, in fact). Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire is still on my 'active' list, though more books are starting to demand my immediate attention. i may start reading several books at once, like i used to do, which means that if ever i do continue to do 'real time reviews', they'll probably be snippety things that really don't offer a lot of insight and will only be vaguely 'real time', and will only serve as something to encourage me to actually finish reading the books i pick up.

on the other hand, my 'other life' *has* been occupied by writing, mostly, so i suppose it isn't a total loss, depending on how you look at it.

Interruptus: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled

2006-10-21T10:42:00.000+08:00

my reading of Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire continues progressively, if slowly, but i dipped a small toe into Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. twice, actually, goaded by some reviews that say The Unconsoled is more reminiscent or suggestive or something of expressionist films than anything else. or something.

the first time i dipped a toe (i.e., read the first couple or so pages), i was struck by how i couldn't shake the image of the characters as Asian, when the book is, in fact, set in some obscure Eastern (?) European city. for some reason, i couldn't frame my imagination properly, and all the dialogue was spoken with distinctly faux-Asian accents in my head. while that may have to do with the name of the author being jammed into my subconscious than anything else, it bothered me more than it probably should have, and i put the book down not expecting to be drawn to it again anytime soon.

this morning, i was admiring the cover of the Vintage International edition, absorbed in the cool Nosferatu/Caligari-ness of it, and thought to give my little toe another dip. (incidentally, i find the Faber and Faber edition prettier, with a subtler expressionist film edge to the cover, and a less artificial/modern/manufactured book-smell. there's a more elegant feel to the entire book, but it feels oddly flimsier, something i find typical of UK editions: pretty and seemingly delicate, whether or not they are as fragile as they seem.)

thankfully, all the dialogue was now spoken with distinctly faux-European accents in my head.

i now declare that i'll be getting to the book as soon as i can, i.e. after Voice, and probably after Lemony Snicket's The End.

right. Saturday. office. work. groan.

Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire: part three of N: The Cremation Fields

2006-10-20T09:38:00.000+08:00

as things keep popping up in my other life, i begin to find it harder and harder to sustain these reviews. my nights are still deeply immersed in Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire, but while that in itself ought to speak volumes about Mr Moore's writing and the story he's telling, it's becoming more difficult for me to put my thoughts on the book to words.

these past few nights, i've been finding myself almost reluctant to return to the book, wearied by the day, eyes heavy with longing for sleep, my brain still a-whirl with the stories that continue to build in my head but refuse to properly translate into words on the page...and yet when i do break open the book, i'm instantly caught up in 'The Cremation Fields's acerbic narrations.

refreshingly, the narrator does not ask for our sympathy: she has done and is doing something inexcusably horrible, her mind coldly calculating all the while, even as she describes in oddly beautiful grotesqueries the world in which she lives. and yet i find myself totally absorbed in learning about her life.

perhaps that descriptive quality of Mr Moore's writing is most remarkable to my mind. his writing rarely falls into the florid-if-precise descriptiveness of, say, Mervyn Peake, preferring a few quick phrases ('Boiled fish her breasts,' for instance) over painting an entire scene for the reader, and yet he manages to create vivid images in the mind's eye that make it easy to imagine an illustrator creating a graphic version of the book.

the book manages to be graphic without being literally illustrated in the way of Mr Moore's more familiar work. the visual quality of a prose work is something that seems amazing in the writings of the likes of Mr Peake, Angela Carter and, more recently, China Mieville, but is downright mystifying in Mr Moore's work. he describes character actions, motivations and ruminations more than actual scenes, and yet the image in the reader's minds eye is startlingly alive with atmosphere and detail.

i find myself thinking that a talented illustrator would find turning this book into a graphic novel a no-brainer, and, ultimately, an inessential and pointless exercise. it is so easy to enter the world of Voice that full illustration seems redundant.

is this, then, escapist fiction? i suppose that depends on how you define the term. there is certainly nothing easy or obviously liberating about the themes and events that populate both 'Hob's Hog' and 'Fields', both stories revealing (and, perhaps, grotesquely reveling in) the 'dirt' of the 'real world', but immersion into the book's world of symbols, images and words is so complete as to rip the reader away from his place on the page, and fly him off to *somewhere else* entirely.

Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire: Part two of N: Hob's Hog and The Cremation Fields

2006-10-17T09:22:00.000+08:00

there’s a grotesque sense of relief that comes with the end of ‘Hob’s Hog’. by the time you get to the literal Voice of the Fire at the end of this story, you ought to have become accustomed to the nameless narrator’s pre-literate English; yet it becomes no less trying on the mind, as, even with the limited vocabulary and restrictive, sophisticatedly unsophisticated grammar, Alan Moore manages to twist the words into novel turns of phrase that, while compulsively readable, are so unfamiliar that they aren’t always easy to tease into meaning.

as the fire burned at the end of ‘Hog’, i found myself struggling for air, coming out the other end of the liquid flames to take a deep lungful of ‘The Cremation Fields’.

set 1,500 years later, ‘Fields’ is an almost literal breath of fresh air after Mr Moore’s stifling linguistic tricks in ‘Hog’. the narrator’s voice is more conventional here, and, to be sure, is very distinct from the narrator of ‘Hog’, being, for one thing, capable of more complicated ideas (we find her at the beginning of the story violently initiating what looks to be a ‘long con’), and, even more refreshing to my mind, imbued with a sense of humor. but the poetry, though ‘translated’ and, perhaps, ‘transubstantiated’, feels much the same. like the shifting lines of a well-crafted jazz piece, the rhythm changes, but, somehow, the soul of the overall composition is kept intact.

i should have come to this book with a fresher set of eyes, a less tainted mind. as it is, i keep thinking of everything in terms of what they say about ‘magic’: is magic, then, violent? because Voice, thus far, is so riddled with violence, both mental and physical, figurative and literal, insinuated and barefaced, that at this point it appears that whatever Mr Moore may have to say on the topic of magic—the interplay of symbols and meaning, of language, experience, fact and fiction—that it is difficult to come to any other basic conclusion.

Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire, thus far, is as dark as it is illuminating. right now, i can’t imagine coming to the end of this book without that fact still burning in my mind.

Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire: part one of N: Hob's Hog

2006-10-16T10:18:00.000+08:00

i’ve found it impossible not to draw comparisons between Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire and Iain Sinclair’s Slow Chocolate Autopsy. published around the same time, Autopsy’s premise bares similarities to that of Voice, both being, in a way, ‘geographical biographies’: Autopsy is the biography of London as told from the perspective of her literal prisoner, Norton; Voice tells the story of Moore’s home of Northampton.

(there, however, it may be necessary to point out, the similarities end, for Moore, if any of the previous reviews that have been written on the work are to be believed, has a deeper intention, using Northampton’s ‘biography’ as structural framework to underpin musings on the principles and concept of ‘magic’.)

on the surface, perhaps, and comparing the first few pages of the two books, one might think that Sinclair’s writing is superior. Sinclair’s words are beautifully chosen, and the sentences and phrases clamber over each other as though to outdo each other in cleverness. by comparison, Moore’s nameless narrator in the opening story of Voice, 'Hob’s Hog', has a harshly limited vocabulary, and is written in a painfully reductive voice, being, for one thing, confined to the present tense and, for another, lacking all but the most basic forms of pronouns (he, she and I) -- there are almost certainly other grammatical and otherwise-structural limitations that i am unable to identify. furthermore, language to Moore's narrator is painfully literal, and so is the world in his mind, such that he is unable to grasp the concept of symbols, and therefore distinguish between ‘truth’ and ‘metaphor’, ‘objective’ and ‘perceived’ reality: dreams and memories and illusions and hallucinations are muddled in with his own physical experiences.

and yet, Hog’s narrator, it seems, has a better grasp of rhythm than Sinclair’s Norton: Norton’s sentences and phrases jar against each other, such that one is tempted to tear apart his fragmented narration and frame each sequence of words as a separate entity. the style has made Autopsy, in my mind, at least, virtually unreadable as a single coherent text. (reading it in bits and pieces, however, is another matter entirely.)

'Hob’s Hog', on the other hand, i find nearly impossible to put down, but for the fatigue that eventually wins out from the difficulty of comprehension. i recall an earlier review, that compared reading 'Hog' to the first time one reads Shakespeare as a child: the words are familiar, but are constructed in a way that makes it difficult for an inexperienced reader to comprehend, and while the words flow beautifully, virtually singing in the mind’s ear, one may find oneself hindered by the incomprehensibility of the strings of words, such that i, personally, occasionally find myself having enjoyed an entire page of text without necessarily having understood what has been said, and therefore having to retrace my footsteps to the last landmark of comprehension, and read it all again.

Neil Gaiman, in his introduction, compared Voice of the Fire to a circle, quoting Alan Moore quoting Charles Fort: you can start at any point in the narrative and proceed to ‘measure the circle’ from there. i’ve only started reading the book and could, of course, therefore be wrong; however, if other reviewers’ readings of Mr Moore’s intentions are to be believed, i find that the beginning of the book is, in fact, the best place to start.

from the first few pages alone, i’ve already begun to ‘glean’ what Mr Moore has to say about language and magic, and if i’m on the right track, there can be no better introduction to the ideas behind the Voice of the Fire than 'Hob’s Hog'.

Interstitium: Angela Carter and Philip K. Dick

2006-10-09T09:33:00.000+08:00

haven't been reading as much as i used to, being occupied by work and writing and other things on my mind, but over the past weeks i have managed the first chaps of Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus, plus about a third of Philip K. Dick's Ubik.

i'd meant to say more, but my brain has decided to be reticent on my other life at the moment. hopefully i'll have it all down in the next few days.

Interstitium: Justina Robson's Natural History and others

2006-09-30T09:23:00.000+08:00

reading had to take a backseat to other things in the past few weeks since i did the real-time-review of Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword. when i get distracted the way i was in the past few weeks, reading becomes sporadic, and it becomes harder for any one book to hold down my attention for a sufficient period of time for me to actually wrap my head around it enough to actually say/write something worth hearing/reading about the book.

still, i managed to slog through about a bit(ish) more than half of Justina Robson's Natural History before i had to admit that i was just not getting into it enough to continue, much less to write a real-time-review of it.

thankfully, that doesn't really say much about the book. i went through the same sort of thing several times over the course of about three years with M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart, until i started it up again about a month ago and surprised myself by getting to the end right before Shriek hit our shores.

Course is now currently one of my all time favorite books, and has, in fact, surpassed Viriconium in my mind.

that said, Natural History is still worth a few brief comments (though i have to say, these will be rather facile compared to the reading i did with Shriek as my head just hasn't been in it).

there are moments in Natural History that i can only describe as Kirbyesque. History's universe is one that is rife with magnificent visions of, of all things, people. it's the sort of bizarrely grandized reimagining of mankind that i myself utterly dig (and which i put down to writing, more or less successfuly, in my short story Generations). and it is at these moments that the book truly scintillates in my mind.

the Forged are akin to New Crobuzon's "remade" in China Mieville's Bas-Lag books; as with Mr Mieville and his remade, there seem to be no limit to the possible shapes and permutations of the Forged other than Ms Robson's imagination. however, unlike that bizarre subgroup of New Crobuzon's population, the Forged are people "remade" from birth for utilitarian, rather than punitive reasons. they are thus "enslaved" by the dictates of "Form" on "Function", an enslavement from which some Forged are actively seeking release.

unfortunately, it is in the smaller, more intimate moments that i feel Natural History loses me. "unfortunately" because, as far as i can tell, it's these "small things" that History, for all the jarring opulence of "big ideas" in the book, is really all about. the concept of Uluru, for instance, leaves me cold for various reasons. and the stories of Zephyr Duquesne and the Forged Corvax (disappointingly, a Forged human who seems to be trying to understand what it means to be "unevolved", or, one may put it, "unForged") just don't hold my attention. i could be wrong: for all its fecundity of incident (sorry, i just love that phrase, clunky as it is), i get the feeling that the first half of the book is nothing more than a set-up for the latter half, and the latter half may be all i need to turn me around on the book.

it may be some time before i get back to it, however, so i wouldn't recommend that you hold your breath for me to pick it up again.

in the meantime, i've dipped into a couple pages of Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop (rich, darkly beautiful faerie tale-esque writing, though at times a bit too melodramatic for my taste; i do love it when Ms Carter suddenly drops such throwaway, tongue-in-cheek lines as [paraphrasing] "she had to watch over her little sister in the garden to make sure she did not kill herself"), the entirety of Mervyn Peake's Boy In Darkness (a lovely little nightmare-or-not story of one of young Titus Groan's brief escapes from the castle, featuring one of the most chilling literary villains i've ever read: the Lamb), a couple pages again of Jon Courteney Grimwood's Stamping Butterflies (promising start, but left no real impression in my state of mind), and, most recently, and probably the book i'll stick with for now, M. John Harrison's Light. this will be my second reading of the last book, which i'm doing in preparation for the arrival of Nova Swing.

right. that's it for updates. will see if i can come up with a real-time-review of my second reading of Light. for now it's off to some coffeeshop or other to do an entirely different sort of writing altogether...

Scoop! Jeff VanderMeer Tells All

2006-09-15T09:03:00.000+08:00

i have not been completely honest. this blog was more than simply an experiment inspired by Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword...it was also an attempt to insert myself, to participate in the--dialogue?--between Janice and Duncan Shriek. reading the book, i couldn't help the feeling that i was simply another layer to the book's reality...that we are all just layers of Ambergris...

i never imagined just how close i was to the mark, just how far it would go.

it's out of my hands.

prepare yourself. neither Jeff and i can emphasize enough just how important that is...

1. Why should a reader pick up your book as opposed to, say, just about anything else?

Because these are survival guides. As the wall between Ambergris and the "real" world becomes ever more tenuous, many millions of people will eventually find themselves actually in Ambergris. That this will cause a real refugee problem for Ambergris' gray cap overlords is secondary to the fact that those people who have not read the books will be much more disoriented and disinclined to survival than those who have read the books. I have waited until now to reveal this deeper purpose in writing the books to avoid being called a crackpot, but since this has been occurring recently in certain quarters anyway, I thought it best to drop the charade, kick over the facade, and just say what's really on my mind.

2. If an autographed and vacuum-sealed copy of your book had been pinned in place of the Vitruvian Man on the Voyager space probe's paneling, what sort of message would we be sending extraterrestrial intelligences about the human race? What action, if any, might they take in response?

What you have to understand is that the entire space program is an elaborate PR hoax perpetrated upon the world's public to distract them from urgent Earth-based problems of lack of resources, overpopulation, and global warming. We are made to feel as if there is some "out there" to which we might eventually travel if conditions on our planet become too difficult. Or, we are given the feeling that there are peoples out there--aliens if you will--who might come rescue us or in some way change our lot on this planet.

Unfortunately, the truth is that a vast black barrier surrounds the Earth at approximately 100,000 miles beyond the Earth's atmosphere. The sun, the moon, and the stars all occur before or at this barrier, much as if a scale model of a solar system (and galaxy) had been built around us. The truth is, the sun does not heat the Earth. Nor does the Moon cause the tides. It is all an artificial construct and the scientists in the know have no clue as to who or what created us or why we are stuck behind this barrier. It's too frightening to think about, and that, again, is why we have all of these distractions, like the so-called space program. Which is more of an inner-space program.

3. What impact might your book have on a preindustrial civilization?

We will probably find out in about 50 to 70 years as global warming continues, as part of some experiment our unknown overlords have in mind, to devastate the planet. I would imagine Ambergris will become very escapist literature by then. But then, when the wall between Ambergris and Earth falls completely apart in about 100 years, it will become full-on survival guide material again. I don't really know if Ambergris will trickle out into this world or if our world will just be devoured whole. No one can really predict these things, or what the fault lines might be. All we can do is prepare for the crash, really. And try, in the meantime, to find moments of small beauty in our lives.

4. Sesame Street and the Muppets can be pretty wonderfully fucked in the head at times. Did they have any role at all to play in the development of your fiction?

The subliminal messages projected out into the unsuspecting populace by both Sesame Street and the Muppets are rather dreadfully "fucked in the head" as you put it. These subliminal messages reinforce the lies about our so-called space program, reinforce the "science" that we are told to believe in even though it is false, and try to relax us into not thinking about the black barrier 100,000 miles out in space. So my "fiction" is actually a reaction against such shows, inasmuch as it acknowledges them at all.

5. What effect might your book have on muppets? Which muppet is best suited, tempermentally, psychologically, physically, to reading your book out loud to children? Would you consider a muppet-read audio book for children?

Given that muppets are viral carriers of subliminal messages, I suppose the muppets would begin to subliminally imprint the reality of Ambergris on the unsuspecting populace. Which would be a good thing for when the wall finally comes down.

Audio is so last-year. But mostly I would not trust the muppets not to be releasing viral subliminal messages contradicting my own core message: that the boundaries between our so-called consensus reality and Ambergrisian subjectivity are disintegrating. That we need to be prepared for the moment when our consensus reality implodes into a fine mist of spores and we find ourselves in a land where everyone is their own world, their own reality...and most likely carted off to a gray cap detainee camp. This is the message I will be taking on my book tour, as well. It's what I'm devoting an entire documentary to, because it's the most important thing in the world right now. Whether anyone else sees that or not.

6. You mentioned Nabokov in your Bat Segundo interview; who else might we find wandering through the pages of your book (apart from the characters and other people actually mentioned in the story, of course)?

Most of my characters are based on Disney or Warner Bros. propaganda tools such as Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny. The subliminal text of these propaganda tools is to reinforce the lies about the space program and our Earth's relation to the Sun, etc. I try instead to divert these archetypes to warn people about the divide between Ambergris and Earth falling apart, but I've only been partially successful. The problem is I'm only one person and I don't write that fast. The other side has hundreds of thousands of people working for it at secret locations all over the world.

Most of my stories about Ambergris are fictions using a real setting. Not many people understand that. So except for the people mentioned in The Early History of Ambergris and the entire manuscript of Shriek: An Afterword, you won't find many of those characters when you go to Ambergris. The writer allusions I make are simply to emphasize the fact that echoes of the real world already exist in Ambergris--and these echoes will become more and more prominent as, and it becomes tiresome to have to emphasize this, the divide between our world and theirs weakens.

It is perhaps now time to reveal that I stole Janice Shriek's manuscript off of her desk in the tavern the Spore of the Gray Cap and that the only part of it I really wrote was Sirin's supposed brief afterword at the end. So as far as I know, Shriek: An Afterword represents the only truly true account of Ambergris in any of my books. Early History is close, but I had to embellish it for literary reasons.

7. Have you ever been surprised to find yourself similarly wandering through the pages of someone else's story? If so, in what books, other than your own, to your knowledge, might we find you? If not, what or whose books would you like to be seen in?

Ambergris spreads like a virus. You find it mentioned in history books where ancient historians think they're describing Earth history but they've transposed little leaps of...I don't know what you'd call it? memory? matter?...Ambergris into their story. You also find it in many fictions, which is why novels and stories predating my Ambergris stories actually echo the Ambergris stories. I get exasperated sometimes when people talk about Nabokov, M. John Harrison, the Decadents, and Angela Carter being my "influences". The fact is, I got it right from the source, and I didn't distort the setting or rename it or anything like that--the way many of the others did.

As for what books I would like Ambergris to be in: as many as possible. At first I wasn't sure if I shouldn't in fact disguise the name and some of the facts, like the others had. But over time I've come to see that naming it correctly was very important. Because it does create a ripple effect. Many authors just coming on the scene today have absorbed a piece of Ambergris and allowed it to come out through their pores, into their fiction. And thus the process continues. I think this is the only way we will help prepare and save the human race when the time comes.

8. What has Ambergris got to do with Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius?

Well, again, these are all secondary or tertiary echoes. Poor old bastard Borges was afraid of seeing it properly. It was Ambergris that destroyed his external vision, but he still had his internal vision, so he could never really escape it. All of his work is about attempting to escape from that imagery, from the glimpse he had, looking into a still pool of water in a Buenos Aires courtyard, of Ambergris. It's in his journals if you know how to read them—that moment of clarity when the waters revealed to him the truth of the world. And ever since then he was infected, and became an infecting agent, no matter how he fought against it. It's nothing he could do anything about, except write. He thought he'd write the spores out of him without actually facing the subject head-on. But he was wrong. It wouldn't come out. It was inside of his skin, controlling him, so no matter how he fought it, a little bit of it would leak into the writing. He was strong, but not that strong.

There's not much more that can be said.

10. What the hell were you thinking?

A bit accusatory toward the victim, don't you think? I didn't ask for this. I didn't ask to be shown any of this. Can you imagine what it's like for a child to have this separate world open up around him, to be trapped there for three or even four hours? Except it was longer than that. I've mentioned in interviews that I was lost as a child in Rome for that amount of time, but I've never said where I was during that time. I roamed the streets of Ambergris for two days, and I was never the same. I couldn't go back to being a child after what I saw. All I could do is what Borges did--try to write it out of me. And like Borges, although without his talent, I couldn't face it head-on at first. I wrote "fantastical" fiction, yes, but not about Ambergris. It wasn't until my mid-20s that I found the courage, and only because I had to find some way to write the nightmares out of my brain or I would have gone insane.

So it's always been ironic to me that Ambergris has been the most successful of my creations, and a damnation at the same time, because it's not really my imagination at work. I'm more like a reporter who embellishes. I can't really describe how that feels. Basically, I'm a fake. A forger. An impersonator. And I comfort myself with the thought that, at base, I'm helping people. Come to an acceptance of what's going to happen in the next hundred years. And that helps. Sometimes.

9. What has any of this got to do with squid? Am I wrong in thinking that finding the connection between the squid, the spore and the gray caps is just as vital to our survival as everything else you've said?

The squid are just a social intercourse lubricant, so to speak. They're the sugar that makes the bitter medicine go down sweet, so you don't notice it. The fact is, there are giant freshwater squid in the River Moth, but they're not intelligent and they don't come out onto the land. Any agenda they have is locked away in their squeamous, soft-palate brains. They're vital as a source of meat and byproducts, but I don't believe they otherwise have any importance with regard to the gray caps. I could be wrong, of course. I've only visited Ambergris six or seven times, and on each occurrence it was only for a few hours.

10. Should we expect more from you about Ambergris? or have you exorcised those demons from yourself? will we, in fact, see Zamilon File or whatever's next come to light in the future?

How can you exorcise demons that are literal rather than figurative? How can you put aside a real place that you've visited? Especially given the context of anyone you tell thinking you're a complete crackpot. Zamilon File is a tricky thing because I have to use the gates. And the gates are unpredictable. To gather everything I need to gather for that, in terms of documents. Who knows? Maybe I'll wind up fabricating part of it? Which would defeat the purpose, but I'm not always a brave man. At the same time, I'll be the only cross-Echo whistle-blower in existence if I manage to pull it off. There may be a black barrier over our heads, but there's none between all of these Echoes. It's just tough to see them—see them at the right angles. Otherwise, it just looks like glints of sunlight. Specks of metal rust. A mote in the corner of your eye. See? I'm reduced to cliché when it comes to even beginning to speak of it…You don't understand a word I'm saying, do you?

11. To end on a personal note, I'd like to let you know that reading "King Squid" in City of Saints & Madmen made my life a lot more bearable. To know that other people also have this squidanthropy affliction has made me feel much less alone. And I've even thought of showing my friends all of the squid costumes I've knitted for myself over the years.

You know, I have answered your questions with a candor and openness that I have never shown in any other interview. All I ask in return is that you keep your filthy hobbies to yourself.

My apologies. What choice do I have but to be what I am? Would you deny the King his due? I'd thought you of all people would understand...was I wrong? For your sake, I hope not.

Do not underestimate the Squid.

thanks, Jeff, for indulging a nameless hack. and for letting us know the truth, as you have come to know it, behind it all...

NOT a real-time review: Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

2006-09-13T20:32:00.000+08:00

i know i said Justina Robson, but i've been too busy with other things lately to properly wrap my head around Natural History, so, to tide over any review hungry lurkers out there, here's a short review i wrote a while back that my friend Elmer over at Fu magazine informs me they just published in their latest ish. find copies at your nearest Seattle's Best Coffee or Figaro branch.* it's free.

and watch this space for something cool in the near future. honest.

right. enjoy. or not.

*anyone who's read the printed version might notice a small but significant mistake i hadn't caught until i re-read my review here. in the printed version, i compared Ms Clarke's novel to books written in the 18th century, when in fact, Ms Clarke uses a distinctly Victorian voice, which places the style squarely in the 19th century. my apologies to Ms Clarke, and to anyone who was in any way misled by my error.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

By Susanna Clarke

While the Study of Magic remains a perfectly acceptable gentlemanly pursuit, as far as “modern” magicians are concerned, English Magic hasn’t worked for centuries; not since the mysterious figure known as the Raven King stepped out of history into that peculiar realm of faerie tale, legend and myth. The “modern” gentleman magician has therefore learned to content himself with “theoretical” magic, and a legitimate member of the York Society of Magicians, the most respected organization of gentlemen engaged in the Study of Magic of the day, could hardly be expected to even attempt anything so laughable as to actually “practice” magic.

Until, that is, the arrival of two magicians, who would, as prophesied by a suitably ragged and odious street conjuror of dubious magical ability, bring about the Restoration of English Magic.

Into all this fantastically drawn Englishness, Ms Clarke introduces us to two of the most engaging characters to emerge in fiction in recent years: the charming Jonathan Strange and the rather refreshingly unsympathetic personage of Gilbert Norrell. The eponymous characters alone make it all worth the price of admission, but the charm of the novel isn’t confined to the two protagonists. All the other characters leap just as lithely off the page, and while it’s true that some characters commit undeniably vile acts and others genuinely heroic ones, Ms. Clarke lets their deeds speak for her, never submitting to the temptation of pointing out the villains from the heroes, allowing each character equal opportunity for developing a special bond with the reader.

But the one who most threatens to steal the limelight from the main protagonists is Ms Clarke herself. Though the narrator never unforgivably intrudes into the narrative, her “mannered” style of writing, garnished with a liberal sprinkling of “scholarly” footnotes designed to tell stories within the story and enrich the book’s internal reality, may be a bit excessive for some readers. Imagine Jane Austen if she’d written an epic-length genre-fantasy illuminated with the kind of footnotes that are as likely to be found in dull 19^th century social treatises as in Terry Pratchett’s wildly successful Discworld novels. However, perseverance has its rewards. The writing is always graceful, the footnoted digressions never fail to entertain, and the steadily building pace eventually sweeps the reader along with the story. In the end, the reader is drawn willingly from one chapter to the next, until he or she has nowhere left to go and nothing else to do but reluctantly turn the last page and finally close the book. Or, quite possibly, read it all again.

This book is a delightful dance of characters and events, an alluring blend of fantasy and history, social commentary and satire that is intricate without being confusing, intelligent without being forbidding.

What it amounts to, in summary, is an 19^th century novel of manners written with unobtrusive yet definite 21^st century sensibilities.

And Magic. Large, heaping dollops of it. And that’s a good thing.

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, originally published as a single volume, is also available from Bloomsbury books in a more manageable boxed set of three volumes.

If you liked Ms Clarke’s novel, you might also enjoy:

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

The Baroque Trilogy (Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World) by Neal Stephenson

The Penultimate Peril, book the twelfth of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

Interregnum

2006-09-08T07:39:00.000+08:00

while i really think the book can speak for itself much better than anyone else and can stand up to any set of expectations you can throw up in defense against it, i'm nonetheless a bit worried about the possiblity that i might have created a totally wrong-headed set of expectations for it, and in that sense, Jeff VanderMeer's brief comment over on his blog (trust me, it's somewhere in that linked post) about my (series of) review(s) of Shriek: An Afterword is absolutely essential for anyone crazy enough to have thought to base their decision whether to read the book or not on anything i've said. it's much more level-headed, for one, and, more importantly, it's easier on the eyes.

in retrospect, my own analysis may have been a tad bit overwrought (ha! a tad bit?!?), and the best thing about Shriek, despite everything i've said which suggests the contrary, is how beautifully simple it is...but it was fun (for me, anyway) dissecting it the way i did, looking and finding and peeling-off layers that may never have been intended nor, perhaps, been really there, and, you never know, it might actually add something to your own reading experience.

right. anyway, what i'd really wanted this post to say (before i found Mr VanderMeer's comments and link and effectively derailed my mental composition for this post) is that the other reality has finally (expectedly) caught-up with this blog... i'm going to be starting the next series of (increasingly inaccurately named) real-time reviews having had quite a bit of a head start on anyone keeping tabs on this blog.

i.e., i'd already started reading the next book down my to-be-read pile (Justina Robson's Natural History) two nights ago, but haven't gotten around to really thinking about my reactions to it...you know, real world issues, work, all that reality catching up and getting in the way...

but i'll post the first installment as soon as i can properly wrap my head around writing a proper real-time-review entry. right. back to the other life...

Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword: part several of several

2006-09-07T09:34:00.000+08:00

done. Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword is now off the reading pile. but it won’t be going into the done and forgotten pile, no sir. it’s off to the read-but-to-be-read-again pile, which includes his other books, Mervyn Peake’s and M. John Harrison’s.

that’s no small praise.

but i’m getting ahead of myself. i just want it clear that the following ‘review’, due to my own subjective enjoyment of the book, is going to be mucho biased in Shriek’s favor. still, i’d like to think i can throw a bone or two for you to pick on and decide for yourself whether it’s worth your time.

right. brace yourself, this is going to be a long one, even for me.

i try not to, but most reviewers tell you what a book is about so they can pick cleanly at its meat. i was going to do that here, but i chickened out at the last minute. and try not to listen to that guy in the comments section. (good grief you’re actually going to say it.) just because he wrote the darn thing doesn’t mean he’s any more reliable than anyone else at telling you what this book is about (apologize dammit! apologize!)

why am i so reluctant when i could just as easily have said ‘it’s about two possibly whacked-out and therefore unreliable sibling narrators and the people around them who may or may not have affected the life and history of the City of Ambergris and how the life and history of the City (including the ‘war of the Houses’ and the obscure and distant and uber-creepy ‘cataclysmic’ event called the Silence and something strange and new called the Shift) has affected said siblings and the people around them and how a war and the gray caps and at least a half dozen other things are muddled into everything and further help change everything (or possibly just the siblings and/or attendant characters) some more’ or possibly, thematically, even ‘it’s about mysteries; the nature of ‘truth’ and how we come upon it, whether through observation or imagination, scholarship or madness; about life, and death, and change; about different ways to have faith in the numinous; the numinous; about the complexities of love and hate and about the relationships between two possibly whacked-out and therefore unreliable sibling narrators and the people around them etc., etc…’ or gone to literary tropes and called it ‘a love story; a tale of the bizaare, the alien; an epic tale of history, war and strange machinations; a comic/tragic/satiric tale of politics and society, of artists and scholars, priests and merchants; a biography of several people all at once’?

or, even, ‘it’s about squid. and mushrooms’?

well, simply put, it’s because what this book is about could just as easily be what it isn’t about.

here’s the thing: it looks to me like whenever Mr VanderMeer writes about Ambergris, he plays an extreme version of the game (possibly) invented by Jorge Luis Borges in his Ficciones. Mr Borges’ game is pretty straightforward: essentially, he took the ‘easy way out’ to write ‘fantasy’—i.e., rather than write stories from or set in a fantastic world, he would invent the ‘documentation’ of those stories… or something like that. here, let him tell you himself, from his Ficciones:

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverished extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary.

in a way, Mr VanderMeer is playing the fool to Mr Borges’ emperor. he does, in fact, go on to write ‘five hundred pages’ (in Shriek, it’s about 345, but add to that City of Saints and Madmen as well) developing ‘an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes’ (i.e., with the emphatic statement ‘it’s about squid! and mushrooms!’), but rather than taking the usual route to writing a fantasy story (a story which would then, ostensibly, become the source of Mr Borges’ ‘imaginary books’), Mr VanderMeer takes a ‘once-or-twice-removed’ approach and writes, instead, those very ‘imaginary books’ that Mr Borges might then talk about, allowing the ‘imaginary writers’ of those books to comment on themselves and each other…and on the books.

Mr VanderMeer, however, adds another twist, or layer: unreliability. i am, of course, talking only of impressions (mine) and don’t really know anything about the actual motives (Mr VanderMeer’s) behind the writing choices made in this book, but it seems to me that he is operating on the principle that a writer’s omniscience belies the existence of the world he has constructed. after all, who can know everything about the world he lives in, or any other world for that matter?

in a way, that factor of unreliability, and the source of it (which i refuse to elaborate on here; you’ll have to read the book to find out exactly what i’m talking about) reminds me of the games played by certain of M. John Harrison’s characters in The Course of the Heart. well, alright, here’s a bit of a spoiler: in Course, Lucas Medlar and Pam Stuyvesant play a game of imagination which is the ultimate expression of their desire to grasp at something numinous, to find comfort…it could be just such a game, it is possible to think at the end of the book, that, whether intentionally or not (and neither Lucas nor Pam in that other book, i think, do it intentionally), the siblings Janice and Duncan Shriek are playing.

and here, i imagine, would lie the book’s ultimate glory… and final frustration. at the end of the book, we find ourselves holding handfuls of the beautifully (intricately) detailed fragments of a puzzle that fit together perfectly (seamlessly) in so many different ways and still form a coherent picture. thus, in retrospect, we find we must call into doubt all the revelations we took for granted in the book as we read it.

certainly, while raising quite a few more questions, this book does hold answers to many questions concerning the world of Ambergris that were raised by City of Saints and Madmen, but only for readers who are willing to make potentially dangerous assumptions. and this is by no means the same book as City: in Shriek, Mr VanderMeer has created something entirely different, if cut from the same (if more mushroom-infested) cloth.

that is not to say that the book feels incomplete or in anyway unsatisfying, but we are confronted by all the unavoidable limitations one comes upon when seeking ‘truth’ in any of its forms.

of course, it could also be true that i am being much too clinical about the whole thing: the book can, in fact, be enjoyed for the sheer visceral effect it has on the reader. Mr VanderMeer has not written an easy piece of fiction in Shriek. but part of the gift of Shriek is in presenting us with all the uneasiness of our own entrapment in ‘reality’ in a beautiful, arguably easy-to-swallow (for the more literarily adventurous reader, perhaps) package.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword is, quite simply, the most complex yet viscerally pleasing and ultimately rewarding experience i’ve had with fiction since reading The Course of the Heart. and like that other work, it may well be that the next time i read it, i’ll have totally different things to say about it.

invoking Neil Gaiman’s Cain, from his Sandman series of graphic novel, he says ‘it’s the mystery that lasts, not the solution.’ (or something to that effect.)

in that sense, Mr VanderMeer has written a book that is also a mystery; this, i believe, is why Ambergris, of all the fictional haunts i’ve visited, positively resonates; and, yes, i believe both that world and this book will (or, at least, should) last.

Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword: part seven of several

2006-09-06T07:50:00.000+08:00

Everyone we cared about was dead or lost to us.

you can feel it in the words (and in the thinness of the righthand part, especially compared to the lefthand part, of the book when you hold it open at the page i left off of last night): it's almost over.

i suppose i could have 'closed the book' on Shriek: An Afterword last night; 'closed the book,' put it and anyone having bothered to read, having been bothered to read and having been bothered by reading this blog out of their misery...

nope, couldn't do it. let me have just one last night in its pages...it's gotten disturbingly cozy for me in there...

Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword: part six of several

2006-09-05T09:22:00.000+08:00

after the brief intermission of part five of several, i consumed three chapters of Shriek: An Afterword in a single, febrile flurry of reading before sleep once more sank her talons through the tissue of my eyes.

i could argue that the adrenaline of the first two chapters of part 2 lingered for me past the intensity of those pages, carried me through the succeeding chapters even as Janice returned to the relatively banal descriptions of life-going-on in post-war Ambergris, and this may be true. however, as the pace slows considerably, jarringly after those events (of the first two chapters of part 2), restored to an unseemly sense of normalcy, it is also true that a sense of weariness has come upon the narrations of this Janice, as though the simple act of remembering those events has drained her; there is a relief to having passed that point, but it isn't all a relief.

while this Janice (and this Duncan) is (are) essentially the same as the one(s) we met in part 1, we know her (them) now well enough, it seems, to look at that Janice (and that Duncan) in a new light. and we begin to have a disquietingly comfortable sense of what this book is really about, even though the single objective truth behind it all remains, if it exists at all, for us, as it does for the characters, ultimately elusive.

Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword: part five of several

2006-09-04T20:43:00.000+08:00

a brief pause between chapters 1 & 2 of part 2 of Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword:

tales of Ambergris, as befits a city borne of an aesthete as Boschian as it is Hawk-Alfredsonian, are richly textured and brightly hued, if often illuminated by a greenish phosphorescence and accompanied by a sweetly rancid odor, occasioned, at times, by a purple hint of lime. thus has Shriek: An Afterword been so far to the mind of this reader, but never yet more so than in the opening sequences of the second part of that book.

war has broken-out (and so had the skies outside my apartment, as if to provide a backdrop of rather ho-hum sturm und drang the Janice-Duncan balancing act thankfully, for all the violence of the relevant sections of the narrative, never allows the text to fall too seriously into), and as Janice and Duncan and all Ambergris goes about the rather tiresome business of surviving the war on a daily basis (or not, as the case may be), we are drawn head-long into the narrative, right through an explosive flurry of strange weaponry, stranger behavior and still-stranger diets, always being reminded that the worst is yet to come…

given the sheer cheek of Ambergrisians (and the book thus far), it isn't all that hard to imagine.

Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword: part four of several

2006-09-03T23:48:00.000+08:00

i’ve just turned the last page on part one of Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword, and it seems appropriate here to go over some of the things i’ve said about the book thus far:

first off, i should like to amend what i said earlier about the menace being in Janice’s and Duncan’s words: not true. the menace does not emanate from the words, but from the spaces between the words…

i also failed to note earlier that the initial impression of being a ‘difficult book’ fades soon after the first few pages, and reading the book soon feels as natural as talking to yourself, or eavesdropping on a conversation in your head, or waking from a dream to a dialogue between ghosts over your grave...

a kind of frustration remains, however, though it no longer lies in Janice’s stultified narration (her ‘false starts’ now fail to interrupt the flow of her narrative; instead, they have become welcome markers, signposts on the strange journey through this life in Ambergris & its environs, reminding us of where we are in the overall scheme of the book; Duncan’s interruptions, while still occasionally jarring, have also become a welcome commentary: apart from being ‘illuminating,’ they also have the almost calculated tendency to echo our own sentiments, such that when he exclaims ‘get back to the underground adventure!’ or something to that effect, we find ourselves in complete agreement); no, the frustration now stems from the impression of Janice’s (and by postmodernist extension, Jeff VanderMeer’s; or is it the other way around?) seemingly overwrought ‘checklist’ approach to her (his) narrative: have i told you of my time at the Voss Bender Memorial Mental Hospital? no, i don’t believe so, and yes, i met someone there you may remember from City of Saints and Madmen…inconsequential, perhaps, perhaps not, but undeniably necessary to the integrity and interplay of this and that work, not to mention an interesting and fun way to weave them all together…aren’t i simply too clever for my own good?...check.

mind you, while it arouses suspicion, it isn’t out of place: i wouldn’t be at all surprised if Janice really did have a mental checklist of all the things she wanted to put in this ‘afterword.’ (and the fact that i have been referring to Janice and Duncan as being the ‘real’ writers of this ‘afterword’ is either a testament to Mr VanderMeer’s talents, or to the questionable state of my own reality-testing.)

either way, nevermind: the suspicion bears mentioning but is of no consequence. Because, it seems, Mr VanderMeer really is too clever for his own good.

*

it still manages to surprise me (in a good way) how the books i read seem to send tendrils into the ‘real world’…today, as i turned the final pages of the first part of Shriek: An Afterword, and the first move had been made in what would ‘later be known as the War of the Houses,’ the skies over the coffeeshop to which i’d decided to take the book and my reading this Sunday afternoon turned the sudden, sickish shade of a gray cap, but refused to break.

it was pleasantly surreal, this interplay of realities. i’m glad this universe isn’t above engaging in such paltry games with us mere mortals.

*

at this point, it must be obvious that this book has thoroughly absorbed me, and it no longer seems important to me that this book deliver its promised revelations; or, perhaps, it already has delivered: the book has invaded my reality; even now, i feel it is an experience i should have regretted foregoing (if it were possible to miss something and still know what one missed), and i cannot now imagine scraping the spores of Ambergris from my flesh before reaching the end…

Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword: part three of several

2006-09-02T10:39:00.000+08:00

Chapter 6…i should have warned you that i’m a slow reader. and here i am pausing yet again after just one chapter. will i ever finish reading this book? i’m sure I shall, eventually, because this is a book i will not allow to be waylaid; even if i had only thought to dip a toe in the first few pages, even if i had not intended to dive into its oddly hued waters, i could not have helped but be swept up and away by these words. however, it is also true that i am reluctant to see this book end, to have to turn the final page and set the book aside at last; and then, also, there are times when i can’t help but stop, when the desire to let a few pages, a few paragraphs, a few words sit on my mind’s tongue like a mouthful of wine overpowers the desire to rush headlong into the next few pages, paragraphs, words. when i have to stop and think, rethink, and think again on what the pages, paragraphs, words have to say.

Chapter 6, and i find i have to make just such a stop.

Chapter 6 is a visit to the cemetery, to old friends’ graves, made all the more poignant by its moments of humor and passion both; the entire book thus far has been such a visit to the past, but here, at last, we make a visit with Janice Shriek grounded firmly, for us, in her present. here we have our first image of Janice and Ambergris as they were when she wrote her part of this book…and with that image, for me, came a realization.

all this time, i’d thought Janice and her brother Duncan had been tiptoeing about the ‘core’ of this book. perhaps. but having seen Janice in her state as she broke from the afterword she had been writing to take a walk through Ambergris, revisit her ‘site of triumphs’ and those graves in her mind, i wonder if that is, in fact, the case.

instead, i think now of Janice not tiptoeing about the ‘core’ of this book (and might it not be, after all, too late to be tiptoeing?), but limping through her past, a past that has changed herself and Duncan and their friends and their enemies and Ambergris, changed their entire world so much that even if it weren’t for her age, even if it weren't for the pain in her leg, could she possibly not have limped?

it is a viciously poignant revelation, such that when she proclaimed ‘I am Janice Shriek’ at the end of the first part of this chapter, a mental shiver traveled down my spine, and decided to setup camp at its base long enough, at least, for me to set these words down...

Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword: part two of several

2006-09-01T14:20:00.000+08:00

i remember once being nocturnal; even now, with my near narcoleptic tendencies, sleep is hard for me, or on me, such that it falls on me rather than i into it. still, these days nights have become a clockwork struggle just to keep my eyes open, overpowering me even though i might be enjoying the silken wrappings of a good book, something that once was enough to keep the Sandman at bay even as the City herself began to stir, reminding me that i, too, needed to sleep by herself waking-up.

so it was that last night, after i turned the last page of chapter 5 of Shriek: An Afterword, i put the book aside thinking i’d only be giving my eyes a moment’s rest (taking my cue from Janice’s own decision to stop typing for a while), that i would continue my strange journey through Ambergris that very night… and sleep promptly fell upon me and swept my wakefulness away like some raptor swooping down, having been perched upon my bedrail all that time, in wait for that vulnerable moment when...

for an indeterminate period of time, i was (and here i resort to cliché because, after all, being a cliché doesn’t keep something from being true) dead to the world; for though my days float placidly upon the river Lethe, nights are sheer Oblivion.

and then the nightmare came, the most vivid and complex nightmare i’ve had in a while.

the details of that nightmare have, perhaps, no place here, having, at least superficially, nothing to do with what i imagine was their source. and the source i imagine is this: Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword.

it isn’t that the last two chapters i read (4 and 5, respectively) were in any particular way horrific; in fact, after a pithy summary of Ambergris’ bizarre yet familiar (or bizarrely familiar) history, Janice goes on to describe a relatively mundane version of Ambergris that is most reminiscent for me of the decadence of Oscar Wilde, or of the satirical end-times of Michael Moorcock’s An Alien Heat (though my reading of the latter is as yet, admittedly, incomplete, my last attempt having been waylaid by the arrival of the very book i now find myself immersed in), apart from which these chapters contain nothing more frightening than going off into the woods and finding your way home, a description of Duncan’s scholarly dealings at Blythe (in the midst of which Duncan makes his lengthiest interruption of Janice’s text thus far), and the relatively placid, if at times argumentative ‘conversations in the park’ that her brother Duncan used to have with the (ex-) Truffidian Antechamber Bonmot.

and yet, for all their revelations in these last two chapters, the siblings still seemed to be tiptoeing about what i’ve begun to imagine as the core of the book…and we come at last to the main point of this particular entry, which we’ll get back to after one more brief digression.

despite my affinity for all things dark, dreary, disturbing and otherwise, er, creepy, i don’t read as much horror fiction as you might imagine. the reason for this is simple: most of those books do not achieve in me the desired effect. to put it bluntly, they don’t scare me.

but something about Jeff VanderMeer’s writing, particularly in this book, does. not in the way that might prevent one from getting up to go to the bathroom in the dark in the middle of the night, but in a way that’s subtler, more insidious.

for all its efficiency (note: not economy; his writing may not be as florid as that of some other writers i can think of, but neither does it strike one as being wholly succinct or strictly pragmatic), Mr VanderMeer’s prose exudes a strange, indescribable menace, even in the relatively enlightening or even cheery moments of the narrative, such as those that tell us that, yes, love does exist in this bizarrely (subtly) skewed world (yes, the siblings Janice and Duncan do love each other in the complicated way siblings do, and they love other people and other people love them, as displayed in these chapters).

maybe it’s just me; maybe it isn’t something other readers will find in these pages; still, that subtle menace is an utter delight, and i look forward to returning to Ambergris as soon as it’s dark.

Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword: part one of several

2006-08-31T08:20:00.000+08:00

it's true what's been said countless times before: Shriek: An Afterword is a difficult book. much of the difficulty lies in the approach taken by Jeff VanderMeer: the book was 'first written' by artist/historian/art historian Janice Shriek after the disappearance of her brother, the disgraced (yet famous/infamous) historian Duncan Shriek, based on her own experiences but also deriving much from the journal of said brother and, therefore, her own possibly erroneous interpretations of her brother's entries in said journal (i.e., interpretations of interpretations). this disappearance, however, was not Duncan's last (such disappearances are apparently common for Duncan), and the manuscript Mr VanderMeer has published as a 'novel' has been 'annotated' by Duncan through personal comments addressed to his sister; he had decided against editing anything his sister had written, and makes his 'corrections' and additions ('digressions and transgressions,' as another historian from Ambergris, Mary Sabon, might say) in parenthetical statements within the main body of text.

the style, in a way, recalls the shifting narrative perspectives Mr VanderMeer employed in his first novel, Veniss Underground; written in three parts, each focusing on one of three primary characters, the first part was told in the first person point of view, the second in the second person, and the third in the limited omniscient point of view. in Shriek, Mr VanderMeer takes that approach several steps higher, integrating the various perspectives into a single, surprisingly coherent body of text.

another thing that has been said before is also true: Shriek: An Afterword is a frustrating book. the title serves as a kind of warning to readers: this book was never intended by Janice Shriek to be a novel, and because of the vagaries of the definition of an 'afterword,' she finds herself writing tentatively about what she thought she had to say, ought to say, or should say, and so the first three chapters, comprising the first 73 pages, are consumed by false starts. taking a quick gander at the first line of chapter 4, i see that chapter will begin with Janice 'starting' the book yet again.

and yet, in the hands of Mr VanderMeer, these two true facts about the book Shriek: An Afterword are not flaws. a truly talented writer does more than provide you with an interesting story, told in an interesting way; more importantly, imho, a talented writer convinces you that the particular story being told could not have been told any other way, whatever our own reservations regarding the approach employed.

after 73 pages, Janice tells us, she has yet to truly begin her narrative; and yet by this point, much has already happened, and these first pages are as filled with events as they are with insight.

and yes, it seems, this story could not have been told any other way. the approach offers the reader a sense of the siblings tiptoeing around the matter in question, revealing the tale uncertainly, tentatively, a sense that i find essential to the experience of reading this book. it is as if the book is asking the reader, subliminally, whether he really wants to know the details, while also holding the reader in thrall to the secrets the tale promises to reveal.

an important question to answer, this being the first 'proper novel' set in the world of Ambergris, is whether it is necessary to have read the previous volume of stories from Ambergris, Mr VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen, prior to reading Shriek. i should like to know what a first time visitor to Ambergris would think or feel upon embarking on the strange journey of Shriek; i, for one, cannot tell. though i'm not the sort of reader who either remembers or perhaps even comprehends every secret or detail revealed by a particular work, it's a fact that, having read City, i find that Ambergris resonates. there's no better word for the way the former work informs my reading of the latter.

given my own experience, i should say no, one cannot be read without the other; the experience of City is too essential to Shriek, too vital. and yet, perhaps, the readings need not be done in that order. certainly, the books do not appear meant to follow each other chronologically, though, of course, a clue may again be derived from the title: Shriek: An AFTERWORD.

but is it necessary? it is, unfortunately, impossible for me to say. my experience with afterwords, barring spoilers, is that they can be just as easily read as forewords or prefaces. so perhaps it is possible to read Shriek without having indulged in City.

that said, i must return to my previous statement: one cannot, or, at least, should not, read one without reading the other. and that works both ways: if you've read City, it is essential to complete the experience by reading Shriek.

all this from the first three chapters. pretty good, i should say. and, despite my exceedingly high expectations for Shriek which i'd expected could not help but hurt my first reading, i find the book, at the very least, an utter pleasure to read.

in these first pages, Shriek has made me a promise of things to come. i really hope it delivers.

Antrum

2006-08-31T07:45:00.000+08:00

the enjoyment i gather from reading a review derives much from the insight the reviewer provides the would-be readers that comprise the reviewer's audience. yet all such reviews are written after the fact; they are retrospective, and as such, no matter how expressive the reviewer, the audience can never have a true inkling of what it would be like to read the book in question.

nothing wrong with that, really; in fact, it's the reviewer's prerogative to deny the audience such inklings, and the audience's lot to find out for themselves. only that now, with the internet and blogging and all, i thought it might be interesting to see what could be done with a closer-to-real-time review; still retrospective, of course, but supplied in fragments, as bits of the book are read.

also, because on-line journals are supposed to be commentaries on your life, and i do lead an other life in books, i thought it unfair to that life that i should blog about one and not the other.

(of course, all that's just pretentious pap. i'm only doing this because it's my idea of fun. and because, thanks to blogger, i can.)

i take my inspiration from Duncan Shriek's commentary to his sister Janice's afterword to the Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris (i.e., Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword).

and so, it is only fitting that we start there...