Book Review: Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009) 650 p.

The entire time I was reading this I was trying to think of which book it reminded me of, a piece of literary fiction featuring both impenetrable prose and extreme tedium. It wasn’t until the home stretch that I realised Wolf Hall is strongly reminiscent of The General In His Labyrinth. Both books are historical fiction novels with an unconventional take on a historical figure, both are written by literary heavyweights (Marquez has a Nobel Prize and Wolf Hall won the ’09 Booker) and both were tiresome and difficult to follow, books that I forced myself through and remembered very little of upon completion.

Wolf Hall is a fictionalised account of the life of Thomas Cromwell, an English statesman in the 16th century (not to be confused with his great-great nephew Oliver Cromwell, also a prominent statesman one hundred years later). He was a close advisor to Henry VIII, whom I was somewhat more familiar with for having six wives, one (or more?) of whom he beheaded. That’s about the limit of it. I have a solid understanding of Australian and American history, but Britain has too many goddamn centuries under its belt.

In any case, the story of Thomas Cromwell is a promising one: a blacksmith’s son, born into relative poverty, who rose up through the British class system on nothing but his wits. That has potential. Unfortunately, I didn’t care for Mantel’s writing style in the slightest: foggy and murky, prose clinging to the random thought paths of various characters, and the novel rarely making concessions to a reader who is already having a difficult time keeping up with the story, since he has no prior knowledge of the period and the characters are all named either Thomas, Henry, Anne or Mary.

Looking back over my review of The General In His Labyrinth, I began it with the sentence: “This is one of those difficult books that was objectively good, and I know it was objectively good, and yet I didn’t like it.”

Was it, though? Just because something is held up to wide acclaim by the intelligentsia, does that make it “objectively good?” I’m not railing against literary fiction. There are plenty of prize-winning, highly regarded novels that I’ve read and loved (like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Life of Pi). But those books were entertaining as well as having literary merit.

I think a book like Wolf Hall, that sits in the “literary merit” circle of the Venn Diagram of Fiction, well away from the overlap, is just as guilty of wasting my time as a book by Matthew Reilly or Clive Cussler, which would sit in the “entertaining” circle but be equally as far away from the overlap. There are so many great novels in that overlapping slice, so why should I force myself through something that is brimming with artistic credentials, but an absolute drag to read? Certainly, there are occasional flashes of beautiful clarity: the death of Cromwell’s wife and children, the downfall of his patron, the burning of a Lutheran… but the vast majority of Wolf Hall is an unpleasant slog through a dreary landscape.

I’ve made up my mind: just because a book is widely acclaimed does not neccesarily mean it is worthwhile. Last night I was trying to print off a list of every Pulitzer and Booker winner so I could blu-tac it to my bookshelf and cross them all off as I go, but my printer malfunctioned. Maybe that was a sign.

Book Review: Wolves of the Calla

The Dark Tower Volume V: Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King (2003) 925 p.

There are a lot of things that are great about the Dark Tower series, and a lot of things that are not so great, and some things that are downright awful. One of the bad things is that King wrote it over a very long period of time, beginning in the 70’s and ending in 2004. It’s impossible for an iteration late in a series to be anything like an iteration early in a series, and it’s usually for the worse. Example: the first Die Hard movie and the fourth Die Hard movie, the first Indiana Jones movie and the fourth Indiana Jones movie, and so on. With Wolves of the Calla, I’m entering the stretch of the series that King wrote in a frenzy after a near-fatal car accident in 2001.

Fortunately it’s not as bad as it could have been, although it has its fair share of bullshit. The basic premise for the novel is excellent: Roland and his gunslingers come across a town called Calla Bryn Sturgis, located at the very edge of the world, near the roiling darkness of “Thunderclap,” where evil things reside. The Calla is also peculiar in that nearly every human birth is that of twins. Every generation or so, masked riders known as Wolves emerge from Thunderclap, ride into town wielding futuristic weapons that make them nigh invincible, and abduct one child from every set of twins below puberty age. A few days later the children are sent back across the desert from Thunderclap on flatbeds behind an unmanned train, crying and sunburnt, and rendered mental retards by whatever the Wolves did to them – they have become what the folks of the Calla call “roont.” As they age, they grow to a huge size, disfigured and in pain, and generally die young.

The way King gradually introduces this concept is intriguing, and while it leads to a fairly predictable story (the townsfolk recruit the gunslingers to protect them against an upcoming attack by the Wolves, and they obviously prevail) there’s enough interesting stuff along the way to make it enjoyable. As well as roont children and the mystery of the Wolves themselves, the robots of Roland’s world – always its most fascinating aspect – are represented in the Calla by Andy, a spindly metal robot whose North Central Positronics chest-plate reads “Design: Messenger (Many Other Functions).” Andy is a relic of more advanced times who acts as a sort of servant around the village:

He sang songs, passed on gossip and rumour from one end of the town to the other – a tireless walker was Andy the Messenger Robot – and seemed to enjoy the giving of horoscopes above all things, although there was general agreement that they meant little. He had one other function, however, and that meant much.

That other function is to warn the townsfolk a month in advance before each attack of the Wolves. He seems to be a cheerful and stupid thing to the townsfolk, and a convenient plot device for the author, but in actual fact he is much more than that, and is probably the novel’s strongest element – particularly his conversations and encounters with Eddie.

“Tell me about the Wolves,” Eddie said.
“What would you know, sai Eddie?”
“Where they come from, for a start. The place where they feel they can put their feet up and fart right out loud. Who they work for. Why they take the kids. And why the ones they take come back ruined.” Then another question struck him. Perhaps the most obvious. “Also, how do you know when they’re coming?”
Clicks from inside Andy. A lot of them this time; maybe a full minute’s worth…
“What’s your password, sai Eddie?”
“Huh?”
“Password. You have ten seconds. Nine… eight…seven…”
Eddie thought of spy movies he’d seen. “You mean I say something like “The roses are blooming in Cairo” and you say “Only in Mr. Wilson’s garden” and then I say-”
“Incorrect password, sai Eddie… two… one… zero.” From within Andy came a low thudding sound which Eddie found singularly unpleasant. It sounded like the blade of a sharp cleaver passing through meat and into the wood of the chopping block beneath.
“You may retry once,” said the cold voice. It bore a resemblance to the one that had asked Eddie if he would like his horoscope told, but that was the best you could call it – a resemblance. “Would you retry, Eddie of New York?”
Eddie thought fast. “No,” he said, “that’s all right. That info’s restricted, huh?”
Several clicks. Then: “Restricted: confined, kept within certain set limits, as information in a given document or q-disc; limited to those authorised to use that information; those authorised announce themselves by giving the password.” Another pause to think and then Andy said, “Yes, Eddie. That info’s restricted.”

Another enjoyable part of the book was the “Priest’s Tale” (deja vu), the story of Father Callahan, a character from King’s early novel Salem’s Lot (which I haven’t read) who has somehow found himself in Roland’s world. After a quick recap of his unfortunate experience with vampires in Salem’s Lot, Callahan regales the gunslingers with an extensive tale of what happened after he fled: his time killing vampires in New York, realising they were hunting him, discovering his ability to travel through alternate versions of America, being hunted by the “low men” and eventually the event that brought him to the Calla. It’s pretty good, and probably deserved its own novel rather than being shoehorned into Wolves of the Calla.

But now… the problems. What I love about the Dark Tower series is its fictional world: a post-apocalyptic land of ruined cities, ancient robots, machinery incongruously stamped with brands from our own world, demon circles and radioactive mutants and artificial intelligences run amok. It’s a great blend of science fiction and fantasy, and endlessly fascinating.

What Stephen King loves about the Dark Tower series is quite different: rambling cosmology, fate, destiny, signs and portents, visions and hallucinations, Susannah’s irritating split personalities, representations of chaos and order, good and evil, a whole bunch of stuff I couldn’t give a flying fuck about and find very irritating to read. There’s a section early in the book where the characters (always certain that the mystical force of ka is driving their quest) are discussing the importance of the number 19 in all the omens they’ve been seeing. King then expects us to get excited about the eeeerie fact that many of the supporting characters have names with exactly nineteen letters! Coincidence? Fate? Or the fact that King himself is the one naming the goddamn characters?

There’s also a few annoying interdimensional expeditions to New York City, where a rose that sits in a vacant lot – somehow representing or containing the Dark Tower – is under threat from developers, and Roland’s posse needs to protect it through exciting real estate acquisition adventure. This rose has pissed me off ever since it was introduced in The Waste Lands. Unfortunately, like most things about the Dark Tower series that piss me off, it’s apparently pivotal to the story and shows no sign of going away.

The last negative mark I want to jot down is the size of this book. King used to write very tight novels, like, say, The Gunslinger. These days they’re hundreds and hundreds of pages long, and the thing is, they don’t need to be. They’re not epic, just bloated. A good deal of Wolves of the Calla involves the characters sitting around testing weapons, talking to the townsfolk, and preparing for the attack itself (which is over in less than 50 pages). There’s a lot of redundancy, which Wizard and Glass suffered from quite a bit too. His writing style has gone from being sparse and concise, to dripping with detail and focusing on every character’s most inconsequential thoughts. It’s a real shame.

Overall, Wolves of the Calla is appropriately representative of the Dark Tower series itself: it does a lot of things wrong, but there’s enough intriguing stuff to keep you reading. Unfortunately, I got the feeling towards the end of this book that the next installment will involve a lot more mystical destiny bullshit and a lot less of Roland’s awesome world. Including but not limited to an uber-meta meeting between Roland and Stephen King himself, which, if it really comes to pass, may cause me actual physical pain.

Book Review: Hyperion

Hyperion by Dan Simmons (1988) 482 p.

I love reading good science fiction. It’s a shame that with genre fiction Sturgeon’s Law is closer to 99% than 90%, because I know I’ll have to read about twenty mediocre sci-fi books and five awful ones before reading another one I enjoyed as much as this. Hyperion is an excellent piece of writing, the only flaw being the shitty, frustrating non-ending.

The novel revolves around the world of Hyperion, a planet at the edge of mankind’s interstellar empire, where there dwells a creature called the Shrike: a three-metre tall bladed killing machine who is nigh-invincible. Fortunately it never ventures beyond a small series of structures called the “Time Tombs,” a tiny slice of the planet’s territory, and so the rest of the world has been settled.

The book opens on the eve of a war between the Hegemony of Man and the post-human Ousters who live beyond their reach. The Church of the Shrike (for there are those who worship it) has selected seven apparently unrelated non-believers to make a final pilgrimage to the Time Tombs and meet the Shrike, apparently in the hope of stopping the war. Ordered by the Hegemony government to obey, apparently as a last-ditch “what have we got to lose” effort, the reluctant pilgrims set off on their journey. Along the way they agree to tell each other their stories in order to learn more about why they have been sent and how they might survive meeting the Shrike.

And so the novel is modelled after Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: we have the Priest’s Tale, a creepy journal-style story of mystery and horror that had me hooked on the novel in the first 50 pages; the Soldier’s Tale, of epic sci-fi space battles; the Poet’s Tale, a disturbing story of the first settlement on Hyperion which made the mistake of establishing their first city too close to the Shrike’s territory; the Scholar’s Tale, a heartbreaking story about a father who loses his daughter Benjamin Button-style; the Starship Captain’s Tale, which doesn’t actually get told and left me quite annoyed; the Detective’s Tale, a hardboiled private eye story where the client is an AI; and the Consul’s Tale, a romance.

Nearly all of these stories are excellent on their own terms, but the story in between is fascinating too, even though it’s mostly journeying. The party lands in the largest city on Hyperion to find it swamped by refugees desperate to escape, because “the Shrike has begun ranging as far south as the Bridle Range…. at least twenty thousand dead or missing.” There is a sense not just of impending war, but impending Armageddon. As the pilgrims travel overland to reach the Time Tombs, they find chaos and disorder, ruined towns and deserted villages, and while they don’t actually encounter the Shrike itself (though some of them do in the stories they tell) it builds up a great amount of suspense.

And so, with all the tales told, as the pilgrims finally climb the last sand dune and see the Time Tombs laid out in the valley before them, bathed in the light of an orbital battle above their heads as the first Ousters reach the system, they descend into the valley to meet their fate… and the book ends.

I felt like throwing it in the fucking lake. It’s the equivalent of ending Star Wars just as they make the final run on the Death Star, or ending Watchmen just as they arrive in Antarctica. I know this is the first book in a series, but what I don’t know is whether the next book will deal with the same plots and characters or simply be set in the same universe.  I really hope Simmons wraps this story up properly, because apart from the lack of an ending this book is great.