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Number9dream by David Mitchell (2001) 418 p.
I like the idea that an author’s personal travels are reflected in their writing. You can know nothing about Hemingway’s life and still know, from reading his stories, that he travelled to continental Europe, East Africa, the Caribbean and the upper Midwest – and apparently nowhere else. Similarly, David Mitchell’s novels are largely focused on East Asia, as he spent nearly a decade working in Japan as an English teacher. On the other end of the spectrum is Stephen King, who sets virtually everything in his home state. I hope that my own works one day reveal a rich history of globetrotting.
Number9dream, Mitchell’s second novel, takes place entirely in Japan as 19-year old Eiji Miyake travels from his sleepy island home to seek out his long-lost father in Tokyo. This is one of those time-honoured stories about a young man hitting the road with nothing but a guitar case and ten bucks in his pocket, taking a series of crummy jobs and sleeping in a tiny rented room, gradually networking his way through the grand adventure that is life, making friends and falling in love. These stories are always overly romanticised, but I’m a young man myself and I’d be lying if I said they don’t appeal to me.
This novel is something more than that, fortunately, because it is written by David Mitchell, a god among men. Number9dream takes us on a beautifully evocative tour of the gigantic, incomprehensible sweep of Tokyo, the subways and teahouses and love hotels and construction sites, the hackers and gangsters and lawyers and pizza delivery boys. Not only that, but this is a book about dreams and fantasies, the power of the imagination, and Mitchell mixes this in to make a dazzling, fantastic narrative where what is real and what is not are not always distinct.
There are other stories mixed in as Eiji navigates his way through Tokyo. Memories of his childhood on an idyllic island, which reminded me strongly of both a Miyazaki film and Final Fantasy X (with a sports team taking a ferry to another island for a tournament, come on). Bizarre and poetic stories featuring a fairytale character called Goatwriter, perused by Eiji as he sits in an attic. The journal of his great-uncle, a kaiten pilot in World War II. It’s not as pronounced as in Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas, but Mitchell’s talent for voices emerges once again. There are also, as always, some nice links with his other works, in this case a character and a secret government facility from Ghostwritten.
The only problem I had with this book was the story thread in which Eiji falls in with the Yakuza, which I thought was unrealistic, even for a Mitchell novel. Mitchell likes to push all our buttons at once. He wants to write profound literary fiction dripping with beautiful prose, he wants to write about slice-of-life journeys of discovery, and he wants to write about Yakuza gunfights and satellite weapons and post-apocalyptic wastelands. In novels like Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, consisting of distinct narratives where these conflicting urges can be safely filed away in separate drawers, this works a charm. In Number9dream, not so much. Eiji goes from spending an evening with a Yakuza grandmaster, watching men get gunned down and cars explode as though he’s a character in Grand Theft Auto, to sitting in his apartment on a hot summer night ruminating on the mysteries of life with his girlfriend. The Yakuza chapters are brilliant, they just don’t fit with the rest of the book at all. Similarly, I found the Goatwriter stories to be tedious, and the great-uncle’s WWII journal to be surprisingly mediocre for such a rich opportunity.
On the whole, Number9dream was better than Ghostwritten, but not quite as good as Cloud Atlas or Black Swan Green. It’s still an amazing, awesome trip through a fascinating world with a gifted author as a guide, always readable, always intriguing, every page covered with beautiful sentences and paragraphs. I discovered David Mitchell at the beginning of this year, reading Cloud Atlas in Japan; now, on the last day of the year, I’ve finished reading his collected works and he has become my favourite author. How appropriately cyclical. Happy New Year!
P.S. Reading a few other reviews I’ve come across the notion that Mitchell is “looting” from Haruki Murakami. While this book clearly owes a debt to the tone and themes of Murakami’s works, David Mitchell is one of the greatest writers of his generation, whereas Haruki Murakami is one of the worst. Point, match, Britain.
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard And Glass by Stephen King (1997) 845 p.
This is the one most people hated, but I thought it was pretty good. Not as good as The Drawing of the Three or The Wastelands, but still slightly better than The Gunslinger.
The previous book ended with Roland’s motley crew escaping the ruined city of Lud aboard Blaine the Mono, a train controlled by a half-insane artificial intelligence. Wizard and Glass begins with them defeating Blaine in a riddling contest and arriving at their final destination of Topeka… specifically Topeka, Kansas, in the world of King’s other grand novel The Stand. This is as jarring for the characters as it is for the reader, as they explore a corpse-choked, post-apocalyptic city and wonder why the hell they’re there.
It’s of little concern, really, since the majority of the book (about 80%) is flashback, a story of Roland’s youth that he tells the others around a campfire. I knew this in advance, which is perhaps why I didn’t hate it as much as those who were waiting for this book for six years. (I also know Roland’s ultimate fate, and I like the idea, but we’ll see how the execution goes.) Roland’s world is an interesting one, and so is his backstory; I was waiting to have it filled in for quite some time, and the fourth book is the logical point in a seven-book series for that to happen.
The flashback story takes place when Roland is fourteen years old, shortly after the much briefer flashbacks in The Gunslinger, which detail how he beat his teacher and became the youngest gunslinger ever. Roland’s world is already beginning to crumble, as a warlord named John Farson raises armies and starts wars in the lands surrounding Gilead, stronghold of the gunslingers. Roland and his two friends, Cuthbert and Alain, have been sent to the far east to the sleepy seaside barony of Mejis. Ostensibly this is to take stock of the barony’s resources for logistical purposes; an actuality, it’s to keep the boys out of harm’s way. Things are not as they seem in Mejis, however, and the three young gunslingers soon find themselves in worse danger than they were in Gilead.
Unlike the previous books, which all involved time-honoured fantasy quest travel, Wizard and Glass‘ flashback section takes place entirely in Mejis’ central town of Hambry, and the deserts and ranches surrounding it. There’s a cast of several dozen characters, a mystery to follow, and a well-established sense of place – orchards, farms, the inns and mansions of the town, the local witch’s hut and a box canyon containing a bizarre and dangerous anomaly are all locations visited more than once. Particularly interesting is “Citgo,” a ruined industrial complex dating back to the ancient times of Roland’s world, where a few automated pumps still draw crude oil from the ground, and words like HONDA and SHELL are stamped on decaying vehicles and tankers. Despite appearances, Roland’s world is not ours in the future, yet there’s obviously been some crossing over in the past – the song “Hey Jude” is popular, people talk of the Jesus-Man, and Mejis has a Spanish-speaking underclass of servants and peasants. And Citgo is not just a nice worldbuilding touch, but an integral part of the plot.
For a book of eight hundred pages (and why is always the fourth book that gets bloated?) Wizard and Glass could easily have dragged on, but it’s paced well and I never found myself reluctant to read it. There are a few chapters here and there that dawdle, especially those dealing with Roland’s first love (romance is not King’s strongest hand, which he freely admits) but on the whole this is quite a page-turner – after you get past the rocky start with one of those weird, shuddering scenes that grosses you out and makes you wonder at authorial motives. King establishes his characters well, particularly the rough-and-hard trio of thugs who run the town’s “security” and emerge as Roland’s bitter enemies. These men are not one-dimensional villains, but believeable bastards who have arrived at their current positions after a lifetime of immoral decisions.
The ending was also enjoyable, one of those well-constructed climaxes like a chess end-game where the pieces are making bold strategic moves and quickly knocking each other off the board; one of those sequences where, as a writer, I can feel the bare skeleton of the plot underneath, who needs to be where, what needs to happen, who has to die, and with plenty of exciting action scenes. The last one of those I read was Snow Crash.
At the end of this we have an extra hundred pages of the “real” story, concerning how Roland and his new gang escape Topeka after encountering some old enemies. It moves very quickly and feels almost rushed; somewhat unneccesary, in fact. If this book was going to be predominantly backstory, I don’t see why the frame narrative was needed at all, let alone why King dragged it out to an almost-but-not-quite story that takes up 200 pages split down the middle by the enormous chasm that is the flashback. But, hey, whatever.
On the whole, I’m glad this book turned out to be much better than I expected. There are several loose ends, which Roland suggests he may tell at another time, and I hope he does. Maybe not through flashbacks as long this one – the Dark Tower awaits, after all – but he’s an intriguing character from an intriguing world, and I’m now invested in the fate of his old friends and want to know how, precisely, they met their gruesome deaths.
December 2009 marks five years that I’ve been writing End Times, the foundering ship which I am riding all the way to the ocean floor. I began writing the first entries in December 2004, and publishing them online in real-time format on January 1, 2005. The real-time format lasted for about three months before inevitably slipping away from me, and now I’m staring at my stranded characters across an ever-widening fissure of time.
I posted a new entry a few minutes ago, and given my track record, we all know it’s the last one I’ll be posting in 2009. This was an entry for October 10. The first entry I published in 2009 was for October 1. Some days have more than one entry, so that’s a total of fifteen, which is still abysmally low.
The reason I don’t post nearly as frequently as I used to is, shock horror, because I don’t enjoy writing End Times anymore. When I started it (in high school!) I had no idea where it would lead. A few other people were writing apocalyptic journals online and I thought it looked like a bit of a lark, so I figured I’d write one myself until I got bored with it. It proved to be quite popular, with – at its peak – maybe twenty or thirty regular readers. That made me feel good, and encouraged me, and I kept going.
Somewhere along the way I began to gradually lose interest in it. I have no idea where in the five-year saga that happened. The result was that I posted less frequently and that there was (in my opinion) a noticeable decline in the quality of writing. As a result less people read it, which meant I had less incentive to write it, and with that the negative feedback loop was up and running. And now we come to the close of a year in which I posted, on average, once every 24 days – a span far too long to keep all but the most devoted reader’s attention. Even assuming I were to post more frequently, and only have an entry for every couple of days of storyline time, that would mean an optimistic finish date of late 2012.
I do have an outline for the rest of the story. I know how the rest of October plays out, I know what will happen in November and December, and I know how it’s going to finish. The only thing preventing all this from happening is my deep loathing of actually sitting down and doing it.
Here’s the kicker: I don’t really have much of a desire to write anything these days. There was a time when I felt obligated to write End Times before anything else, so that it was holding me back from other projects; there was a time when I had abandoned that notion and worked quite often on other projects; and now there is a time when I have dozens of ideas for novels and short stories floating around in my head, and this enormous barnacle-encrusted leviathan sitting unfinished on Livejournal, and yet I devote less than a couple of hours every few weeks to working on any of them at all.
That worries me. Writing is pretty much the only thing I’m good at. Why don’t I want to do it?
The best explanation I can offer is that perhaps, in my early twenties, I’m in the period most writers spend actually exploring the world. Explaining it and telling stories about it comes later – though no doubt they spend these years constantly writing anyway, even if none of it comes to fruition.
I do write, though – I write a lot of book reviews, and when I go abroad I keep travelogues. Who says I have to write fiction? Apart from the fact that I want to be a fiction writer.
That’s the thing, really. I’ve become one of those writers for whom the actual writing is an unfortunate and unpleasant step on the way to the accomplishment of having written.
I didn’t always used to feel like that. I used to love it. I used to get excited when I was writing End Times, when I was pounding through a particularly action-packed entry and the words were flowing like water. Now… nothing. The most recent entry is quite eventful. But I felt nothing writing it.
Am I over the whole idea of swashbuckling boy’s adventure stories? Do I want to write something more mature?
I don’t think I can. If I’m really lucky, I might have it in me to be another Stephen King. But I will never be another David Mitchell or Michael Chabon.
I’m starting to ramble and it’s getting late, so I’ll finish with the same topic I started: I have been writing End Times for five years now. While I may compare it to a stinking albatross hanging around my neck, I do not regret it. It has been an interesting experiment, an absolutely epic work of fiction, and regardless of its dubious quality as a piece of literature I will feel quite accomplished when I finally finish it. And I do still intend to finish it, even if nobody wants to read it and I don’t want to write it, because I am an exceptionally stubborn person. I am a person who read the entirety of Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series, who watched an entire season of 24 in a single sitting, who spent months longer than he had to working at a hellish kindergarden in South Korea. Partly because I feel that I owe it to the few remaining readers, and partly because I have come too fucking far to give up on it now, I WILL FINISH THAT DAMNED NOVEL OR DIE TRYING.
Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household (1938) 192 p.
This is another book I read after plucking it from the Classics list of the New York Review of Books, and while I was reasonably entertained, I can’t say it held up to the high standards of Inverted World.
Written and set in 1938, Rogue Male begins with a famous English sportsman recounting his attempt to assassinate a European dictator. The book goes to great lengths to avoid stating precisely who the dictator is and which country he rules over, but if you read between the lines and carefully follow the implications, you can deduce that it is probably HITLER. ADOLF HITLER. IN GERMANY. The hunter, one of those unnamed stiff upper-lip narrators in the grand tradition of 20th century British literature, maintains that he wasn’t going to pull the trigger – that he was simply seeing if it was possible. The German agents who come across him in the act aren’t convinced of this even after an extended torture session, and so they eventually try to kill him by throwing him off a cliff to make it look like an accident. He survives, however, and manages to evade pursuit. After successfully returning to England, he realises that national borders are of no interest to his pursuers, and the hunt continues.
What I found most odd about this book was that the narrator decides against turning himself over to the British government, suspecting that they will simply extradite him to maintain good diplomatic relations with Germany. While this is true, it seems quite bizarre from a modern perspective. It would have seemed bizarre to readers even a few years after the book’s publication.
In any case, I found Rogue Male to be a fairly quick read, a standard thriller with a good bit of dry wit sprinkled throughout. I saw nothing of the “lip-chewing tension” that other reviews harp on about, but neither was I bored by it.
The Dark Tower Volume III: The Wastelands by Stephen King (1991) 512 p.
I’m largely reading the Dark Tower series because of Lost. Well, I’ve been meaning to read it for a while, but I’ve been told that the writers of Lost draw a lot of direct influence from the Dark Tower series, especially for the upcoming final season. So I’m trying to push through all seven books before the next premiere in February.
I’m already seeing these influences, the most obvious of which is time travel. In the first book, The Gunslinger, Roland comes across a boy named Jake who died in our world and awoke in Roland’s. Roland later lets him die again, sacrificing him to pursue his own quest. In the second book, The Drawing of the Three, Roland finds himself travelling into our world in the minds of three separate New Yorkers in various different time periods. The third of these is Jake’s murderer, and Roland kills him – before the murder takes place.
The first half of the novel deals with the results of the subsequent time paradox, as both Jake and Roland begin to go insane with two separate memories of their past/future/whatever duking it out in their brains. This problem is eventually solved with the drawing of Jake into Roland’s world, and the fortified party continues its quest for the Dark Tower.
The best part of The Wastelands is that it shows us more of Roland’s fascinating world, a unique and original creation that is part fantasy, part science fiction, part Western and part post-apocalyptic, and – because this is Stephen King – tinged with an American vibe that somehow manages to feel appropriate. While an excellent book, The Drawing of the Three was lacking in that regard because the scenes in Roland’s world took place entirely along the same stretch of dull, desolate beach. The Wastelands blows that effort right out of the water, as within the first fifty pages the party enters a pine forest and is attacked by a huge and ancient bear, which then turns out to be a nuclear-powered cyborg, one of many relics left behind by the long-forgotten Great Old Ones. That sounds silly, but it’s actually brilliant, and a thousand times better than Tolkien-riffed fantasy about elves and orcs.
Unfortunately, a very large chunk of the book is devoted to resolving the Jake-Roland time paradox, which means we are rudely thrust back into New York for 150 pages. This was a very unwelcome interruption, especially when I thought we were finally done with our own world and were about to go exploring in Roland’s. It also contains a pretty sloppy mistake for a series that so heavily involves time travel: this segment involves Henry Dean, Eddie’s older brother, and takes place when he is eighteen, shortly before he “shipped out to Vietnam.” It also takes places in 1977. Spot the error.
A second comparison I’m going to draw to Lost is the regular themes of fate and destiny, and an unwillingness to dole out answers. Lost was quite unwilling to hand out answers to anything in its early seasons, but I watched regardless, because it was a fascinating show and I had faith things would be explained eventually. The most frustrating thing was not the writers’ unwillingness to explain – despite complaints from unimaginative people who give up on the show, I’m smart enough to realise that if everything was dumped straight up in the first episode it would defeat the entire purpose – but rather in the characters’ unwillingness to ask questions. This is exactly the same situation that exists in the Dark Tower series. Eddie and Susannah are swept up in Roland’s quest and agree to seek out the Dark Tower without understanding what it is or why he seeks it. Jake’s adventures in New York are doubly frustrating, partly because we have to read about them at all, and partly because they’re all about fate and destiny and visions and things he just “knows.” It’s tedious to read, it bogged down the pace and I got mighty sick of it. (Yes, I was quite disappointed when Lost’s fifth season finale suddenly took a sharp turn back towards the DESTINY theme. Jacob in particular pissed me off, it felt like fan-fiction.)
But then – hallelujah! – Jake is drawn into the gunslinger’s world and we resume our quest. Not only that, but we finally get answers, as Roland divulges the reason he seeks out the Dark Tower – and a damn good one at that. It was established in the first two books that Roland’s world is euphemistically described as having “moved on;” not only has it suffered two separate apocalypse-level events, one a thousand years ago and one within living memory, but it seems to be physically coming apart at the seams. Time flows strangely, the sun rises and sets in odd directions, and the land itself is expanding like a cancer. The Dark Tower is a kind of lynchpin for reality itself. Roland intends to find it, make sense of it, and use it to repair his broken world. (Blaine, a diabolical entity encountered at the conclusion of the book, implies in passing that each “level” of the Dark Tower contains an entire world, including our own world; so perhaps the Tower both exists inside the universe, and also contains it).
And is if that wasn’t good enough, the second half of the book is simply excellent storytelling. The travellers enter the ruined city of Lud, and their experiences there are on par with Eddie’s drawing in The Drawing of the Three, both on the plane and in Balazar’s nightclub, for the best writing of the series so far – and the best writing King has ever done. Jake’s drawing drags The Wastelands down quite a bit, but the rest of the book is brilliant, and probably better than its predecessor.
My previous complaints about the Dark Tower series largely rested on the fact that it took too long to build up momentum. The Gunslinger introduced the quest and the hero, and the Drawing of the Three introduced his companions. The Wastelands, at long last, fires up the engine and comes screaming out of the garage. This series may have taken its sweet time to get started, but now I’m glad I put the effort in.
I sure feel bad for all the original readers who had to wait nine years for this book, though.
The Dark Tower Volume II: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King (1987) 400 p.
In my review of the first volume in the Dark Tower series, I commented that, while it was a good book, it was somewhat sparse and very obviously a foundation for a greater story to come. I don’t think it’s such a hot idea to start your 22-year magnum opus heptalogy (yeah, I went there) with a weak book, but fortunately, The Drawing of the Three makes up for what The Gunslinger lacked.
Having found himself on the shore of a turgid grey sea, tasked by the man in black with “the drawing of the three,” Roland is attacked by a lobster-like monstrosity that severs two of his fingers and leaves him with an infected wound that will soon kill him. Dragging himself along the beach with the last of his strength, Roland comes to a doorway standing alone on the sand – a doorway into another world.
Entering the doorway, Roland finds himself inside the mind of an inhabitant of that world, a man named Eddie Dean, who is sitting on a plane from Nassau to New York with two bags of cocaine strapped to his armpits.
The subsequent story is an example of Stephen King at his best, as Roland attempts to bring food and medicine back from our world to his, and to prevent Eddie from being arrested at customs. The point of view jumps from Eddie to Roland to a flight attendent to the pilot to customs officers and more besides, and yet never throws off the pacing or flow. One of King’s finest talents as a writer is to look inside his characters’ heads, to establish their motivations and make their behaviour and reactions perfectly understandable. Consider this scene, where Eddie has locked himself in the plane’s toilet and the flight crew knows damn well he’s smuggling cocaine:
Deere, the co-pilot, suggested Captain McDonald ought to lay off pounding on the door when McDonald, in his frustration at 3A’s lack of a response, began to do so.
“Where’s he going to go?” Deere asked. “What’s he going to do? Flush himself down the john? He’s too big.”
“But if he’s carrying-” McDonald began.
Deere, who had himself used cocaine on more than a few occasions, said: “If he’s carrying, he’s carrying heavy. He can’t get rid of it.”
“Turn off the water,” McDonald snapped suddenly.
“Already have,” the navigator (who had also tooted more than his flute on occasion) said. “But I don’t think it matters. You can dissolve what goes into the holding tanks but you can’t make it not there.” They were clustered around the bathroom door, with its OCCUPIED sign glowing jeerily, all of them speaking in low tones. “The DEA guys drain it, draw off a sample, and the guy’s hung.”
“He could always say someone came in before him and dumped it,” McDonald replied. His voice was gaining a raw edge… something was not right about this one. Something inside of him kept screaming Fast one! Fast one! as if the fellow from 3A were a riverboat gambler with palmed aces he was all ready to play.
…
McDonald – who had never put anything stronger than aspirin into his system in his entire life and then only rarely – turned to Deere. His lips were pressed together in a thin white line like a scar.
With only three throwaway lines nestled amongst the narrative, King establishes exactly why the captain is so determined to apprehend Eddie, without disrupting the flow at all. It adds a lot to the story, and proves that King can write quite well when he wants to.
After the “drawing” (recruitment) of Eddie Dean, we follow the formulaic drawing of the other two. All three of them are natives of New York City in various different periods of time, and the vast majority of the book is set there, with only brief interludes on the long, bleak beach in Roland’s world. The second recruit is probably the low point of the book; I found her particular quirk to be somewhat annoying. The third, however, brings us back to the excellent storytelling of Eddie Dean’s segment, with Roland going on a gunslinging shootout across New York City in his final desperate quest for antibiotics.
The strange thing is that, while this book is much better than The Gunslinger, it too is clearly a set-up for a greater story to come. The Gunslinger gave us the hero and the quest; The Drawing of the Three gives us his posse. While I enjoyed this book a lot, I find myself wondering whether Volume III will advance the quest and give us more of Roland’s world, or busy itself with yet more set-up. Once again, King himself acknowledges this in the afterword: “This longer second volume still leaves many questions unanswered and the story’s climax far in the future, but I feel that it is a much more complete volume than the first… and the Dark Tower draws closer.”
Unfortunately, we’re in early ’90s territory now, so King’s inevitable decline in quality also draws closer…
The Starry Rift by Jonathan Strahan (2008) 525 p.
I was quite surprised, when I began reading this book, to reach the end of the introduction and find that it was signed off: “Jonathan Strahan – Perth, Western Australia, 2007.” It wasn’t so much that I was surprised to discover a sci-fi anthologist based in my hometown, but rather a sci-fi anthologist who pulled names like Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds and Ian McDonald.
Strahan’s intention with this anthology was to recreate the golden age of sci-fi, to feature stories that would “offer today’s readers the same kind of thrill enjoyed by pulp readers fifty years ago.” He carefully avoids mentioning “children” or “young adults,” but many of the authors have chosen to interpret his mission statement as such, so the majority of stories in The Starry Rift feature teenage protagonists. Only a few of them try to recreate the space opera feeling of Heinlein juveniles, which I think is what Strahan was going for.
Neil Gaiman was the only author whose work I’d read before, and so the stories in this book offered an excellent sounding board to see which big-name sci-fi authors are worth further investigation. Stephen Baxter earned himself an immediate toss onto the rejection pile, with a poorly written space opera jaunt called “The Repair Kit,” full of wooden characters and the apparent belief that every noun must be preceded by at least two adjectives. I was ready to throw Cory Doctorow there too, as his smugly-titled story “Anda’s Game” featured an Australian stereotype on the very first page (I wonder what Strahan thought of that?), but he surprised me by telling an entertaining and thought-provoking story about MMORPG economies.
Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “Sundiver Day” was a story about human cloning that featured beautifully visual writing but did not particularly grab my attention. “Orange” by Neil Gaiman confirmed by belief that he is a fairly talented writer who is simply not my cup of tea. “Lost Continent” by Greg Egan was a thinly-veiled attack on the astonishing vitriol Australia treats refugees with, the politics of which I strongly agree with, but which was obviously shoehorned into the science fiction genre.
“The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice” by Alastair Reynolds was a promisingly creepy story about a kid hitching a ride of a vessel crewed by cyborgs where all is not as it seems, but which fell apart in the final act. “Infestation” by Garth Nix was a fairly interesting story about vampire hunters in which the vampires are actually insectoid aliens. By far the best story on the anthology is Ian McDonald’s “Dust Assassin,” set in a futuristic India with cyberpunk technology and evocative descriptions reminiscent of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. McDonald is the one author from this book whose other works I will most definitely be seeking out.
The rest of the stories are somewhat interesting but largely forgettable. Overall, The Starry Rift is an easy science fiction read and a good way to sample the works of some well-known authors in the genre, but if you die without reading it your life wasn’t neccesarily a waste.
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (2000) 867 p.
Many have commented that China Mieville’s Bas-Lag series, of which Perdido Street Station is the first installment, defies easy categorisation. While I don’t think it’s quite the staggering anomaly that other reviewers seem to, it’s certainly a creative mix of fantasy, science fiction, steampunk and horror, and the world of Bas-Lag is one of the most intriguing I’ve come across. My opinions on this book are mixed, but I still want to read the next book in the series (The Scar) simply to spend some more time in this fascinating world.
This is Mieville’s first and foremost talent: worldbuilding. Perdido Street Station takes place in the city of New Crobuzon, a filthy, smoggy, industrial urban wasteland where dozens of different species rub shoulders under the shadow of a fascist government. The city itself is explored through the eyes of a large cast of characters: freelance scientists, artists, convicts, journalists, thieves and adventurers, who come across (or are themselves) a variety of wildly different inhuman races, ranging from the wyrmen, small and stupid gargoyle-like creatures that infest the city’s rooftops and slums, to the Weaver, a near-omnipotent gigantic spider that lives beneath the city and speaks in a constant poetic babble. And it’s not just monsters – there are a lot of strange concepts jockeying for space here, like the anti-reality energy source called “Torque,” the city neighbourhood dominated by an enormous, half-buried skeleton, or the primitive artificial intelligence assembling itself from discarded machines in a city dump. Thankfully Mieville manages to keep them all largely believable and consistent, soothing my fears that I was going to end up reading another clusterfuck of a book like The Court of the Air.
It’s unfortunate, given the clear passion Mieville has for his creations, that he often stumbles over his own language when writing about them. Vast swathes of each page are given over to some of the most ridiculously ornate prose I’ve ever seen. Every sentence is saturated in adjectives, and Mieville seems to rack his brains to think of the most obscure nouns in existence:
There was a suddeon burgeoning swell of foreign exudations. The surface tension of the psychosphere ballooned with pressure, and that hideous sense of alien greed oozed through its pores. The psychic plane was thick with the glutinous effluvia of incomprehensible minds.
It’s always frustrating when an otherwise talented writer believes that the best way to paint a picture with words is to cram as many complex ones he can possibly think of into a paragraph. It looks amateurish and slows down the pace of the story, and this is already a book suffering from bad pacing. Let me break down the plot for you: a birdman who has lost his wings comes to New Crobuzon to have them regrown with the help of our protagonist, a scientist named Isaac. In the course of his research Isaac enlists the city’s underworld to steal a variety of winged creatures for him to study. One of these is a strange grub that eventually creates a chrysalis and emerges as an extremely dangerous moth-like monster that escapes, frees its brothers from a government lab, and proceeds to terrorise the city with them. Isaac and his cohorts must then try to hunt the moths down.
It takes Mievelle literally three hundred pages to get to the point where the moth emerges from its chrysalis. That’s two other novels, right there. And those three hundred pages are not particularly enthralling; Mieville regularly spends pages and pages exploring the minds of characters who are neither relevant to the plot nor particularly interesting. Combined with the aforementioned purple prose, this makes Perdido Street Station an appallingly slow read.
Now, once the story does get going – again, you have to wade through three hundred pages of set-up first – it’s actually pretty damn good. Mieville combines elements of fantasy, science fiction and horror to create a very unique story, playing off the strengths of each genre and discarding elements that don’t work. His characters, for example, are extremely resourceful and intelligent, devoting themselves to learning as much as they can about the creatures they have unleashed – and Mieville does not hesitate in giving them answers when they deserve them, unlike in most horror novels, when the element of fear relies on the unknown. I was happy to overlook some of the typical problems found in speculative fiction (stilted dialogue, overly rational characters, in-depth explanation of emotions as though they’re some kind of bizarre phenomenon) because Mieville was telling an entertaining monster-hunt in an original way in a brilliant fictional city.
Perdido Street Station is, overall, a good book – just not good enough to justify 867 pages and four weeks of my life. I’ll certainly read The Scar, but I hope that after his first novel Mieville threw away his thesuarus and got a better editor.
David Wellington, online serial horror writer, is celebrating the publication of his latest novel by releasing 30 free stories online for 30 days – apparently starting a few days ago, on the 22nd.
My opinion on David Wellington is kinda mixed; Monster Island was great and Monster Nation was fucking fantastic (huh- still free online, even though they’re in print… good on him), but I didn’t enjoy any of his subsequent novels nearly as much, and I haven’t really kept tabs on him. Although it was pretty cool when I randomly found Monster Island at my local Borders, in Australia, considering that many years ago I was reading it chapter-by-chapter online and talking to the author in the comments. As I’ve said many times before, I fucking love this decade.
Where was I? Right, short stories. They’re quick to read and don’t cost a cent, so check them out here. They’re hosted on a site I’ve never heard of before called DailyLit, which has an absolutely fucking retarded set-up where you have to sign up and have them emailed to you. I’ve read the first three, and now I’m looking forward to a month of Stephen King-style horror/speculative fiction, two genres that mix together so very, very well. And when Wellington’s on form, he can be quite artful with his prose.
edit – If anybody figures out how to access the rest of “Boy,” let me know. I’m getting maybe ten paragraphs in before a link urges me to “Read the rest of the story at DailyLit” and then says “Sorry – Could not find the book you were looking for.” Should have just hosted them yourself, Dave! Dammit Dave!
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (2006) 371 p.
Black Swan Green is a break from Mitchell’s usual style. Previously, he rivalled Michael Chabon as an author commendably unafraid to plunge into the waters of speculative fiction, despite what the long-beards on the Pulitzer and Booker boards might have to say about it. His previous novel, Cloud Atlas, was a dazzling trip through space and time, from the South Pacific in the 19th century to the dystopic, Gibsonesque streets of a 22nd century Korea, to the savage and brutal islands of Hawaii long after life has been snuffed out in the rest of the world. It’s partly because of this that Cloud Atlas is my favourite book. There are very few writers in the world who are able (and willing) to approach genre fiction with genuine literary skill, and I love them all.
Yet Black Swan Green is what some might call a “maturation.” Split into thirteen chapters set from January 1982 to 1983, it chronicles a year in the life of Jason Taylor, growing up in the titular village in Worcestershire. It is clearly, to some extent, a fictionalised autobiography. Jason is a shy and quiet boy, intelligent but not a genius, an aspiring poet. The novel follows his typical teenage trials – popularity at school, his parents’ rocky marriage, the inevitable encounters with girls – with barely a whisper of the more exotic and imaginative flair that rapidly made David Mitchell my favourite author. Black Swan Green holds no fabricants, no non-corpus, no nuclear wars, no omnipotent AIs, no expeditions to ruined observatories atop Mauna Kea. Instead we have Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands War, Woodbines, Beta and the jingoism of the Daily Mail.
This is not entirely a bad thing; Black Swan Green is still an excellent novel. David Mitchell is endlessly readable; he could write a novel about bricklaying and I’d buy it. His effortless use of prose to create beautiful, elegant sentences is a matter of public record, and of equal merit is the wide range of themes he weaves into his stories.
Not since Ender’s Game have I read something that so hideously reminded me of what those early years of high school are like: the savagery and the cruelty, the constant fear and anxiety, a few asshole kids capable of making you miserable on a whim (“Picked on kids act invisible to reduce the chances of being noticed and picked on,” Jason notes). Once you become an adult, when people automatically treat each other with civility and respect, it’s easy to forget what wretched pieces of shit most young teenagers are. “It’s all ranks, being a boy, like the army,” Jason says, and while his own popularity rises considerably over the course of the year, it all comes crashing down with a single act – one which any adult would characterise as selfless and brave.
Jason eventually learns to fight back, and stand up for himself, and repels his tormentors in a story arc I found to be entirely too convenient. You change fast when you’re thirteen – but not quite that fast.
Jason’s thoughts and feelings are livened up somewhat by the presence of three voices in his head, facets of his personality. Hangman is the personification of his stutter, a cruel monster that strangles his words, forcing him to live in constant fear that his secret will be discovered and he will be forever pegged “Stutterboy” by the other kids. Maggot represents everything he hates about himself, all his worst desires, particularly his desperate need to be accepted by his peers, no matter what the cost to his personal values and integrity. Unborn Twin is the most mysterious, sometimes a guiding angel and sometimes a luring demon, never fully explained.
There are a few echoes from Mitchell’s other novels – Neal Brose, one of Jason’s bullies, is the narrator of the Hong Kong segment in Ghostwritten, a shady financial lawyer who will one day experience his own epiphany and drop dead of a heart attack. The Neal Brose of Ghostwritten is not a good person, but not a bad one either – he is a human being, an adult, flawed and complex, containing multitudes. Mitchell’s choice of this character is not an accident; he is reminding us that everybody grows, that while Jason’s peers may be dickheads now, they won’t always be. As Jason points out, though, “How does that help me?”
The more interesting encounter is with Eva van Crommelynck, who was a teenager in Cloud Atlas, and the object of Robert Frobisher’s desire. She is an old woman now, tutoring Jason in poetry, and at one point they leaf through her old photo album together. Robert Frobisher, Cloud Atlas’ greatest character, is enshrined in black and white, and Eva spends a page or two recounting his fate and revealing the terrible guilt she felt over his suicide. Zedelghem, we learn, was destroyed during World War II. Now it’s just “little boxes for houses, a gasoline station, a supermarket.”
And, of course, we revisit Mitchell’s favourite themes. Aside from the obvious presence of predation in schoolyard bullying, we see bigotry and hatred and ignorance cropping up everywhere. Walking down a country lane, Jason is told to clear off by a farmer who then sets his dogs loose. Jason escapes, and is: “Okay, but poisoned. The dog man despised me for not being born here. He despised me for living down Kingfisher Meadows. That’s a hate you can’t argue with. No more than you can argue with mad Dobermanns.” The casual racism flung about by Jason’s older relatives, pompously waffling on in the assumption that their younger audience agrees with them, felt very familiar: “The fact of the matter is” (Uncle Brian doesn’t hear what he doesn’t want to) “the Japs are still fighting the war. They own Wall Street. London’s next. Walking from the Barbican to my office, you’d need… twenty pairs of hands to count all the Fu Manchu look-alikes you pass by.” And when the council proposes a permanent gypsy settlement next to Black Swan Green, the villagers assemble an “emergency” meeting to protest it. Jason is repulsed by their violent prejudice, but when he encounters some gypsies himself, he finds that they too hold similar prejudices against the townfolk, and uses the same metaphor twice to describe their narrow minds and blinkered eyes.
It is a cruel world we live in. And there’s nothing we can do about that. For the October edition of The Atlantic magazine, Andrew Sullivan wrote an open letter to George Bush, urging him to personally take responsibility for the countless acts of torture that occurred during his administration. (It is beautifully written and worth your time.) Sullivan was formerly an advocate of prosecution, arguing that Cheney and Bush and their ilk needed to be held fully accountable for their actions if the United States was to truly live up to its ideals. Now he argues that this would “tear the country apart” (a cop-out excuse used during every season finale of 24, but each to his own). Instead he urges Bush to take personal responsibility, to apologise, to demand an independent inquiry and to admit that he was wrong.
We all know that Bush will never do this – even this, this small and tiny thing, far easier than what he truly deserves, which is to be tried in the Hague as a war criminal. He will remain encapsulated in Texas, living amongst the 20% of the American population who still think he was a great President. He will deny even to himself that he ever did the wrong thing.
A reader wrote in to the Sullivan shortly afterwards:
What I saw was the final summation of a very fine attorney – an attorney for the defence of this nation and our deepest values. It was a summation made not to a jury and a courtroom, but to everyone in the nation, and to history; a summation made in the clear knowledge that no actual indictments will ever be brought against these men in the real world, no verdicts entered, no sentences handed down. It was left to the power of the pen and the pixel to render judgement – which you did, brilliantly… You indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced them all in one grand piece.
This is how I feel about David Mitchell, not as an author or an entertainer, but as an observer of the world around us. It is a world of unspeakable cruelty, of barbarity and violence, from the sickening taunts of bullies in Black Swan Green to the savage rape and murder perpetrated by Kona tribesman in Cloud Atlas, to the very real torture inflicted on detainees of questionable guilt in CIA black sites all over the world. It is a world full of hatred and prejudice, which Jason aptly describes as “poison.” As infuriating as the poison itself is, the most frustrating and heartbreaking part is its inexplicable nature – the lack of a why. This will never change. But as long as we have writers like David Mitchell (and Andrew Sullivan), gifted wordsmiths and good people, to at least acknowledge and decry the poison, we’ll be okay.
I just hope that in the future, Mitchell will return to combining this with the imaginative, exotic adventures I came to love in his previous novels.
