Review of The Quarry by Iain Banks

The Quarry is Iain Banks’s last ever novel. He died shortly before it was published in June 2013. The book is about Kit, the narrator, a young man whose father, Guy, is dying of cancer. Banks apparently didn’t know that he, too, was dying of cancer until he’d nearly finished the first draft.

“If I’d known it was going to be my last book, I’d have been quite disappointed that I’m going out with a relatively minor piece.”

And yet how apposite a final book The Quarry is, despite it being neither really finished nor one of his best.

Kit and Guy live in an old house that is pretty much literally falling apart – like Guy’s body – and which is located very near the edge of a quarry, whose expansion is due to cause the demolition of the house – like Guy’s cancer. A bunch of Guy’s university friends – apparently the only friends Guy ever made – come to the house for a long weekend, to have a kind of living wake for Guy and to look for a certain tape.

The tape is a video tape – the friends were all film students and they made their own amateur productions – that none of them want to see the light of day. The plot – inasmuch as the book has a plot – concerns the search for this, as well as the slow revelation of old tensions and jealousies.

Guy is an embittered, prematurely aged, grumpy old man. He affects an attitude of despite towards everything. The unfairness, pain and grottiness of a slow death by cancer is never far from the page. One of the most moving parts of the book is towards the beginning when Kit is helping his father wipe himself in the bathroom.

‘Is there blood?’

‘There is a little blood.’

‘Well, what does that mean? What does “a little” mean?’

‘It means there is a little blood.’

‘Don’t be fucking smart, Kit; just tell me how much blood there is. And what colour? Red? Brown? Black?’

‘Are you sure you can’t turn around and take a look?’

‘Not without going out into the fucking hall, waddling, with my trousers round my ankles and my cock hanging out, so, no.’

‘If I had a smartphone I could take a photo and show you.’

‘I’m not buying you a fucking smarthpone. Will you shut up about the fucking smartphone? You don’t need one. And you’ll just post the photos on Facebook. Or find a way to sell them in your stupid game.’

‘Course I wouldn’t,’ I tell him. ‘Though you could have Faecesbook, I suppose,’ I add. Well, you have to try to lighten the mood.

‘Oh, Christ.’

‘There’s only a smear,’ I tell him. ‘And it’s red.’

‘Good, fine. Look, just, just, you know, wipe me off and … Christ, this is … Just, would you? Okay?’

This doesn’t happen all the time but, sometimes, I have to wipe my dad clean after he’s moved his bowels. He can’t stretch round or underneath any more to do it himself; even on the opiates the pain is too much now that the cancer has moved into his spine. Often Mrs Gunn will do this. She is paid to be a carer now, though I’m not sure this whole arse-cleaning thing is really within her remit. Guy cried following the first time she performed this service for him. He doesn’t know that I know this; I heard him through his bedroom door, afterwards.

The book doesn’t really go very far after this gut punch. The friends hang out, drink, take drugs, look for the McGuffin and argue. It feels like a first draft. The arguments are repetitive and nothing really different from what Banks had done before. Apart from Guy and Kit, the characters are rather two-dimensional; Haze, for instance, is a cardboard cut-out middle-aged stoner without an ounce of self-discipline or common sense; his main function in the story is to shoot party poppers out of his nose – and maybe to exemplify an extreme of the fucked-upness that afflicts all the older characters.

Kit is supposed to be a high-functioning autism sufferer, and this makes him suitably dry, analytical and naïve as a narrator – but it doesn’t really ring true. Kit is more of a surrogate Banks – as is Guy, actually, with all his verbal abuse against religion and capitalism and popular culture. Kit is far too knowing, too similar to the other characters, too unphased by their middle-aged licentiousness. He even makes a pass at one of them in quite an accomplished and briefly, initially successful way – even though he’s supposedly never so much as kissed a girl.

The book’s conclusion is deliberately bathetic. The search for and discovery of the tape is underwhelming – in much the same way that Guy’s life has been underwhelming – in much the same way that all our lives are underwhelming. All the characters are disappointments to themselves – apart from Kit, who spends half his time (when he’s not putting up with his father and surrogate aunts and uncles) playing an MMORPG. Kit seems to have the best life, is the only one is solvent, hasn’t sold out and has no skeletons in his closet; and yet he’s partly disengaged from reality and doesn’t know how to cope with it. Will he end up being a forty-year-old-fuck-up like the others?

I’ve been reading Iain Banks’s books since the early nineties (at a guess); I own all his novels and the whiskey/travel book he wrote. The first one I read was Use of Weapons, which I picked up from the library because I liked the cover. It’s one of his best books and the ending forced me to do an immediate re-read of the novel – the only time I’ve ever done that. I’d been holding off on reading The Quarry – for no good reason, really; well, reading Le Morte d’Arthur recently took a lot of time and willpower. The Quarry is a good enough book – as eminently readable as anything he wrote, but not really classic Banks.

And there will be no more Banks novels – no more Culture books (except, I’ve just discovered, a volume of his poetry will be published next year). It’s hard to say how I feel about this. It seems like his fiction novels as a group and his science fiction novels as a group didn’t really go anywhere much. If you’d read one of either group, you would have had a strong idea of what the others were like (apart from a couple of oddballs like The Bridge and A Song of Stone). I’m very sorry he’s dead (let’s not mess around with namby-pamby euphemisms – he wouldn’t), but I don’t have a sense of work unfinished like in the case of Robert Jordan.

But there are still nearly thirty novels ripe for re-reading. Sometime.

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Review of Fortress of Eagles by C J Cherryh

I read the first book in this series a few years ago – I picked up my copy of Fortress in the Eye of Time at a street-side secondhand bookshop in Bombay (or Mumbai, if you prefer) and enjoyed it a lot. Although I think I knew there were successor books to it, I don’t think I thought of them as direct sequels. It was only fairly recently that I got Fortress of Eagles from What the Book? in Seoul.

The story follows on directly from what happens in the first volume – and as it’s a while since I read it, and my memory for story details isn’t that good anyway, so I was a little bit lost at first. In Fortress in the Eye of Time, Tristen is called into being – Shaped – by an old wizard called Mauryl. He apparently has lots of knowledge, and even memories of a previous life, locked away inside him, but he is pretty much a naïve tabula rasa. He befriends the crown prince, Cefwyn; there’s a big fight with a dark wizard called Hasufin Haltain; Mauryl dies (apparently), and Cefwyn becomes king.

Fortress of Eagles concerns the aftermath of these events. There’s lots of contemplation of intrigue; the courtiers of Ylesuin have varying levels of support for Cefwyn’s choices – his betrothed, Ninévrisë, is due to become the ruler of the neighbouring enemy nation, and Tristen is widely seen as an abomination, a product of sorcery who doesn’t follow the established religion.

The book is very contemplative and very talky. Until the last third or quarter, it moves at a very sedate pace with not much happening. This is a flaw, but it was a also a nice change of pace. It was never boring to read, as the two viewpoint characters – Tristen and Cefwyn – are both well realised and engaging, Tristen especially. Tristen has lots on his mind, not least of which is the nature of his own existence, and there were plenty of clues that much more would be revealed about this in future installments of the story. Cefwyn has a fractious court to balance, which is interesting enough, and one of the best characters is his adviser and military chief, Idrys (whom, naturally, I kept visualising as Idris Elba), but Tristen was always the more interesting.

Cherryh’s writing is very readable and she can write very good dialogue – which is good, because the characters have long conversations full of long paragraphs. It’s not necessarily realistic dialogue – the characters talk about things that are going on in the world and that are relevant to the story in a way that is basically infodump, but feels pretty natural – it’s the kind of thing a king would talk about, for instance.

She has also developed a particular style of writing and dialogue that somewhat mimics pre-modern writing without being heavy-handed or unreadably dense. Take this bit of banter between Ninévrisë (speaking first) and Cefwyn at a ball:

“Am I the prey tonight or is it Tristen? Policy must attend this festive mood. You are stalking someone.”

“Good lady!” He laid a hand on his breast, above the Marhanen Dragon, worked in gold. “I am suspect?”

“Today since dawn you have held close converse with the captain of your guard, the Patriarch of the Quinalt.” One finger and the next marked the tally. “Your brother the duke of Guelessar, and your brother’s priest, besides a converse again with Idrys, with Captain Gwywyn, and with Captain Kerdin – I discount your tailor -”

“Your spies are everywhere!”

“You ensconce me in this nest of women all with ambitions, all wishing to persuade me to confide in them, and wonder that I know exactly the object of your inquiry, who was riding to Drysham today -”

“Cressitbrook. You don’t know everything.”

“- with his guard. It is he, is it not? Has Tristen done something amiss?”

“Tonight,” he said with a glance at the women in the distance, and with his voice lowered.

“I hear it all, you know. The Warden of Ynefel [Tristen] is out spying on the land. He converses with the horses, quite dire and lengthy discourses, and likely with the sheep. His birds fly over the land and bring him news from every quarter …”

The writing style may not be to everyone’s taste, but I think this is almost exactly how fantasy novels should be written. There is absolutely no reason for characters in a fantasy world based on Earth cultures of centuries past to talk like people from the 21st century, still less for characters in a fantasy world based on Earth cultures from before the colonisation of the Americas to talk like 21st century Americans.

In the last section of the book, a lot happens – and although it’s very clear how this fits into the overall scheme of things in Ylesuin, it also comes as a bit of a surprise, given the slow pacing of the earlier part of the story. For 450 pages, I did feel that more could have happened; as a result the book feels very much like an episode rather than a self-contained story. You get the feeling that the arc story is just getting started.

Despite this, Fortress of Eagles was a great pleasure to read, and I hope it won’t be long before I secure a copy of Fortress of Owls.

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Review of Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory

It took me about six months to read this book. I’m not happy about that fact – but I was also reading it during quite a stressful time in my life when I was feeling distinctly under-energied. But that’s all done with now. I also haven’t written anything for my blog in a long time; hopefully this might be the start of a re-ignition of my interest in it, but I also have lots of things on the go. Anyway; the book.

The version I read is based on a 1485 edition – but, thankfully, with modern spellings of words. My Penguin edition comes in two volumes, each of about 450 – 500 pages (I picked them up a few years ago at a secondhand English language bookshop in the little underground shopping precinct near Seoul City Hall). The novel is presented in 21 books, each book consisting of anything from six to 86 chapters, each chapter being generally only two to four pages long. Each chapter begins with a short synopsis; the books don’t – which is quite annoying when you want to find out which characters feature in which books.

One of the first things I noticed about Le Morte d’Arthur is that, on a word by word or sentence by sentence basis, it’s actually not that difficult to read. There is quite a number of archaic words employed, most of which are footnoted when they first crop up in addition to being listed in a glossary, and sometimes the syntax can be tricky to figure out, but it’s nowhere near as dense or complex as Shakespeare, for instance.

NOW leave we there [the matter of the previous chapter] and speak of Sir Launcelot that rode a great while in a deep forest, where he saw a black brachet [hound], seeking in manner as it had been in the feute [track] of an hurt deer. And therewith he rode after the brachet, and he saw lie on the ground a large feute of blood. And then Sir Launcelot rode after. And ever the brachet looked behind her, and so she went through a great marsh, and ever Sir Launcelot followed.

Compare this paragraph (there were no paragraphs, originally) from Book VI with the original:

Now leue we there & ſpeke of ſyr Launcelot that rode a grete whyle in a depe foreſt where he ſaw a black brachet / ſekyng in maner as it had ben in the feaute of an hurt dere / And ther with he rode after the brachet and he ſawe lye on the ground a large feaute of blood / And thenne ſyre launcelot rode after / And euer the Brachet loked behynd her / and ſoo ſhe wente thorou a grete mareyſe / and euer ſyre launcelot folowed /

That would not be fun to read.

Mind you, the updated version was also not that much fun – and yet it was still strangely fascinating. For a modern reader like me, there were several things that got in the way of enjoying the stories presented in Le Morte. It’s quite repetitive in places – especially when it comes to fighting, of which there is a fair amount. Battles are generally a series of knights or kings getting knocked off their horses and being re-horsed. Contests between knights almost always have them jousting with their spears (the word ‘lance’ is not used once in the book), one or both of them getting unhorsed and then fighting with swords; the two basic variations are the number of hours the fight takes and how much blood is shed on the ground.

Then they hurtled together as two wild bulls, rashing [rushing] and lashing with their shields and swords that sometimes they fell both over their noses. Thus they fought still two hours and more, and never would have rest, and Sir Turquine gave Sir Launcelot many wounds that all the ground there as they fought was all bespeckled with blood.

The text is also strangely pedantic – often every single king and knight taking part in a war or tourney will be listed individually, like so:

Then there swore King Lot, a passing [exceptionally] good knight, and Sir Gawain’s father, that he would bring five thousand men of arms on horseback. Also there swore King Uriens, that was Sir Uwain’s father, of the land of Gore, and he would bring six thousand men of arms on horseback. Also there swore King Idres of Cornwall, that he would bring five thousand men of arms on horseback. Also there swore King Cradelment to bring five thousand men on horseback.

That’s about a quarter of the swearing.

Another problem – which was exacerbated for me by the length of time it took me to read the thing – was the number of characters and stories contained within the whole book. The presence of Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot (Launcelot, in my text), Gawain, Gallahad, Mordred and others was a given, but you also have the whole story of Tristan (Tristram, according to my edition) which takes up two long books right in the middle and feels very shoehorned in (which it was). There are also a range of much lesser known knights like Lamorak and Palomides (who, along with Lancelot and Tristan, comprise the top four knights in Britain (and therefore the world; actually, Sir Palomides is an unchristened Saracen and one of the more interesting characters)) and the cowardly Breunis Saunce Pité. King Arthur is barely in the most of the stories – excepting the very first and last books.

Sometimes the text treats characters in a bizarre way – Sir Lamorak and Sir Tristan both die off-page, for instance, despite being major characters. To be fair, many of the other protagonists refer back to Lamorak’s treacherous murder by Mordred and his brothers, as this simmering conflict contributes to Arthur’s ultimate downfall. But Tristan’s demise is greeted with little more than, ‘Oh, right – that guy.’ Merlin – having been instrumental in hiding the young Arthur’s identity and then revealing his identity as heir and telling the young king exactly what to do in the early days – gets imprisoned by Nimue at the start of the fourth book and therefore takes no part in the remaining seventeen books.

Time passes strangely in the course of Le Morte d’Arthur. As it’s really a collection of stories about different characters, sometimes an older version of a knight will appear earlier in someone else’s story, before his younger days are recounted later in the book. I didn’t really notice that happening too much, as I tended to forget a lot of those details. There’s an episode, though, where Lancelot has been tricked in to believing the maiden Elaine of Corbenic (not to be confused with Elaine of Astolat, who also falls in love with Lancelot, but who doesn’t have such sorcerously helpful relatives) is Guinevere and he begets a child on her – Galahad. In the morning, when he realises what he’s done, Lancelot jumps out of a window and runs off to spend two years roaming the wilderness. When he comes back, Galahad is a strapping young man of fifteen years old.

Despite its many quirks and flaws, I still enjoyed reading Le Morte – despite the fact that it was a huge slog. You get used to the idiosyncracies of the writing, learn a slew of new (ie, very old) words and get a fuller picture of the Matter of Britain than is presented in modern portrayals. There is quite a lot of good, or at least entertaining, characterisation – like the fact that many knights turn a blind eye to Lancelot’s affair with Queen Guinevere and support him against the psychotically angry Gawain; or like the Dame Lynet’s continual verbal abuse of Gareth as he defeats a series of colourful knights.

So it was certainly worth the read and I don’t regret it, but it wasn’t easy and I regret the fact that it took me so long to trudge through it. Now I’m interested in reading more up to date interpretations of the story of king Arthur and his knights – probably also in writing something inspired by it (but when I’ll find the time the time for that, I don’t know).

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Review of The Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien

I’ve been pretty lazy when it comes to my blog lately, so it’s been a while since I finished reading this – and an even longer while since I started reading it (which is a logical necessity, when you think about it). We read The Lord of the Rings in my friend Steve’s Tolkien and the Inklings group in Seoul; it was the culmination of a year of Tolkien reading. In fact, it was most of the Tolkien reading as we read it one book at a time for our monthly meetings and the novel is divided into six books (but often published in three volumes). So this review is pretty much a year in the making – and, as I don’t have the books with me right now, it will probably end up being rather vague.

I read The Lord of the Rings first when I was a teenager, I believe – during that period of my life when I often visited Shopping City Library. I don’t have any particular memory of it though – so I actually may not have read it then at all. I did read it (again – or possibly for the first time) when I was at university in my mid-twenties. This was the time when Peter Jackson’s films were coming out; I picked up a nice boxed set with the whole thing divided into seven volumes – one for each of the books and one for the appendices. I remember being impressed by the invented world and history and the rather post-modern structure, and less than impressed by the writing style.

In particular, I remember reading the very end of the story in a gazebo next to one of the ponds at Bath Spa University and pretty much breaking down in tears at the sadness of the conclusion.

All throughout the months of reading it this time around, I wondered if it would affect me quite as much. It didn’t.

One of the great attractions and flaws of The Lord of the Rings is its simplicity. The writing is quite naïve; none of the descriptive writing is especially literary or challenging by mondern standards. The characters are generally quite two-dimensional – with the exceptions, perhaps, of Boromir and Frodo (one of whom dies a third of the way through, the other is not present on page for large portions of the rest of the novel). This makes the story seem a little less like the struggle of individual characters than a dance of paper dolls.

But, of course, Tolkien wasn’t trying to make something comparable to modern literature – he was writing a fairy tale, a myth. I remember thinking, when I read the story in the 2000s, that the childlike simplicity of the text allowed it to somehow slip through the reader’s critical defences, to operate on a more primitive level. I didn’t necessarily feel that this time – I found it more of a constant distraction.

Probably one of the reasons why The Lord of the Rings is so popular is because it is not at all challenging, literarily or morally. It’s a bit like a warm, unconditional hug from a parental figure. Nature and rural life is unconditionally good and meet and beautiful; the good guys are always ultimately good – even if sometimes troubled or tempted – and all their actions turn out for the best; evil will always be defeated.

The Lord of the Rings is too important and influential a book – personally and globally – for me to dismiss it. There is much that is genuinely beautiful about it. In particular, the sense of a world changing, becoming less than it once was, personified exceptionally in the age-long melancholy of the elves and their eventual passage to the West … and less exceptionally in the industrialisation of the Shire. Gandalf is a wonderful character – a wise and benevolent, yet reluctant leader, who, despite his utter trustworthiness, still has his secrets and is not a stranger to losing his temper (‘Fool of a Took!’).

The narrative structure is one of the most interesting features of the novel. The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring is the most conventional part, but thereafter it alternates, book by book, between focussing on Frodo and Sam on the one hand and the rest of the characters on the other. This works very well for building suspense about what is happening to Sam and Frodo – especially as Aragorn, Merry, Pippin et al have no idea how their friends’ unlikely quest is proceeding. There are a couple of parts where first Merry and Pippin’s adventures and later Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli’s are glossed over in flashback (the sacking of Isengard by the Ents and the ghost army’s routing of the southern corsairs) somewhat unsatisfactorily – but that may just be because we’ve already seen these things in the films.

There is more that could be said – and we discussed a lot of these issues and more in our book group over the months we were reading The Lord of the Rings – but I would rather this review stayed reasonably concise. In short, many of the core elements of the story are archetypally powerful and it’s a masterpiece within its own terms. In the contexts of twentieth century literature and contemporary fantasy, it’s a little lacking. I couldn’t help thinking many times what it might be like if the same story were written by a more ‘grown-up’ writer like Stephen R Donaldson, George R R Martin or R Scott Bakker (fantasy writers having an ‘R’ initial in their name is a old charter or a tradition or something). Nevertheless, I’m sure this is far from the last time I will read The Lord of the Rings.

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Review of The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

I’ve read a few books by Eco, now – The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and now this. While I didn’t think The Prague Cemetery was as good as the first two novels in that list, it was much, much better than the third.

The premise of this book is quite daring – on several levels. Using a wide array of historically accurate sources, Eco creates a fictional character who almost single-handedly, it seems, creates the vitriolic anti-Semitism of fin de siècle Europe, which culminates in the Russian creation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which then, of course, leads to the terrible events of the 1930s and 40s.

Daring, because the subject matter is so sensitive; and because Eco’s narrative pretty attributes it all to one man; and because, except for the main character, it’s all – apparently – historically accurate: all the other characters (with a couple of minor exceptions and conflations) are real historical personages, all the events really happened. Daring also, because the main character develops two personalities, whose diaries and notes form letters to each other.

(Fictional) Simone Simonini, inspired by his (real) grandfather’s anti-Semitism as expressed in a (real) letter to (the real) Abbé Barruel, embarks on a career as a dishonest notary; he becomes a cunning forger first in his native Italy (Piedmont, actually, as there was no Italy as we know it in the mid-nineteenth century) and later in his adoptive France. He gets caught up in various historical events – Garibaldi’s battles in Sicily, the Fourth French Revolution, sensational exposés of Masonic rituals – and all the while develops his plans to discredit the Jewish people by concocting a fanciful story of a group of rabbis meeting in the Prague cemetery to discuss their plans to take over the world by such dastardly means as infiltrating governments and banks, introducing freedom of speech and social reforms and promoting republicanism.

Many long stretches of the book are fascinating reconstructions of historical intrigues. The sub-plot regarding a false persona that was created through psychological trauma is very promising at the beginning, but quickly becomes little more than a foil for Simonini’s amnesiac search for his own history. The depth of his hatred for Judaism – and for Jesuits, women, Germans, the French, Italians – in fact everyone except himself – is also quite entertaining. The various guises and ploys, plots and actions that Simonini is involved with make him a very appealing anti-hero. The milieu of late nineteenth century history-making and hysteria is expertly recreated.

And when I was old enough to understand, [my grandfather] reminded me that the Jew, as well as being as vain as a Spaniard, ignorant as a Croat, greedy as a Levantine, ungrateful as a Maltese, insolent as a gypsy, dirty as an Englishman, unctuous as a Kalmuck, imperious as a Prussian and as slanderous as anyone from Asti, is adulterous through uncontrollable lust – the result of circumcision, which makes them more erectile, with a monstrous disproportion between their dwarfish build and the thickness of their semi-mutilated protuberance.

I dreamt about Jews every night for years and years.

A few facts make the narrative drag. The join-the-dots approach to constructing a plot means that the whole thing is rather meandering and it ends very suddenly. The double-narrative (actually, it’s a triple-narrative, as there is a Narrator-with-a-capital-N, too) doesn’t quite work; the mystery as to whether the secondary personality is a figment or a real person isn’t that mysterious. And lists – throughout his work, Eco cannot resist a good list, and they do start to seem like he’s showing off his impressive erudition.

We decided that the Grand Master of the Supreme Council of Charleston bore the titles of Brother General, Sovereign Commander, Master Adept of the Grand Symbolic Lodge, Secret Master, Perfect Master, Intimate Secretary, Provost and Judge, Master Elect of the Nine, Illustrious Elect of the Fifteen, Sublime Knight Elect, Chief of the Twelve Tribes, Grand Master Architect, Scottish Grand Elect of the Sacred Visage, Perfect and Sublime Mason, Knight of the East or of the Sword, Prince of Jerusalem, Knight of the East and West, Sovereign Prince of the Rose Croix, Grand Pontiff, Venerable Master ad vitam of all Symbolic Lodges, Noachite of Prussian Knight, Grand Master of the Key, Prince of Libanus and of the Tabernacle, Knight of the Brazen Serpent, Knight Commander of the Temple, Knight of the Sun, Prince Adept, Scottish Knight of Saint Andrew, Grand Elect Knight Kadosh, Perfect Initiate, Grand Inspector Inquisitor, Clear and Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret, Thirty-Three, Most Powerful Sovereign Commander General Grand Master Conservator of the Sacred Palladium, Sovereign Pontiff of Universal Freemasonry.

This was an entertaining and fascinating read, but it felt a little hampered by being tied to a range of historical events – albeit important and interesting historical events. So while this wasn’t my favourite Eco novel, it has restored my faith in him after the navel-gazing-fest of Queen Loana. I’m ready to read one of his other books, now – maybe Baudolino.

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Review of The Educated Ape and Other Wonders of the Worlds by Robert Rankin

This is the third in Robert Rankin’s steampunk trilogy (the fourth and fifth books of which will be published later this year and next year) featuring Darwin, the talking monkey butler – upgraded to eponymity for this volume (although the conflation of apes and monkeys is quite annoying). As with The Mechanical Messiah and Other Marvels of the Modern Age, the detective Cameron Bell is, in truth, the main character.

The Educated Ape and Other Wonders of the Worlds expands on the universe developed in the other two books. Ernest Rutherford joins Tesla and Babbage as minor characters, but his creation of a time machine has a profound effect on the story (it also turns out that he has created a Large Hadron Collider under London – during the day it is disguised as the Circle Line). The narrative takes Bell to Mars, where he meets Princess Pamela – Victoria’s secret twin sister and spare queen.

Pamela is just one of several strong female characters – one of the best developments in Rankin’s writing in these most recent books. There are two good girls and two bad girls, most of whom have interesting stories, but not much page time as viewpoint characters (if any).

As I tend to expect from Rankin, this book is very entertaining – especially in the first two-thirds; it started to drag a tiny bit towards the end – it’s full of silliness and strange covolutions of plot; it has some heart-warming moments and some tragedy; overall, it’s not too challenging, but it is a lot of fun.

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Review of The Hobbit by J R R Tolkien

The Silmarillion with my Tolkien and the Inklings group the previous month, for June, we were supposed to read The Hobbit – so that’s what I did.

Of the three main Middle Earth-based works, The Hobbit is the one most squarely aimed at children. It has quite a Victorian children’s tale feel to it – the style of narration reminded me of Alice in Wonderland, of which I read a little recently. It has a definite narrator – an ‘I’ that pops up now and then, usually to profess its ignorance (‘I don’t know how Bilbo ever managed to …’, ‘I never heard what happened to [x] after that …’ etc). By today’s standards, the style is a little clunky and patronising, but it works well and is perfectly suited to the story being told.

That story is, of course, about Bilbo Baggins and his employment by a band of treasure-hungry Dwarves, at the behest of Gandalf the Wizard, to assist in stealing into the Lonely Mountain – once a Dwarven capital, now the lair of Smaug the dragon – and stealing it (or all the gold and jewels therein) back. On the long trek into the east, they are beset by various difficulties – goblins and wolves, an almost endless forest, a stream of anaesthetic, spiders and haughty Elves.

Bilbo’s character arc, from being a timid, stay-at-home Hobbit who’s most concerned with personal comfort and keeping up appearances, to becoming a wily, brave – even arrogant – thief/fighter, is one of the best elements of the novel. His presence in the Dwarven party and Gandalf’s recommendation of him is not so believable and you just have to put it down to Wizardly intuition; in the context of the larger Middle Earth narrative, we know that Gandalf is, in fact, a Maia, one of the second tier of divine beings created by Ilúvatar at the beginning of time, so his prescience is understandable.

Some of the other characters’ performances seemed a little off – namely the Dwarves. Dwarves’ legendary love of gold and other treasure comes through admirably towards the end of the story and makes for the most interesting conflict of the book. Before that, however, these supposedly doughty warriors often seem buffoonish and even cowardly. When, for instance, the band finally gains access to the halls of the Lonely Mountain, the Dwarves are content to huddle at the door while Bilbo alone goes to spy out the dragon and its hoard. Admittedly, by this time, they’ve come to trust and rely on the Hobbit a lot, but it didn’t quite ring true for me.

Another thing that bothered me is the dispossessed king syndrome. In The Lord of the Rings, it’s Aragorn who is destined by his heritage to play a major part in events. In The Hobbit we have not only Thorin Oakenshield – whose quest to recapture what his family lost is understandable – but also Bard, a seemingly random Man and minor character who pops up towards the end of the story more or less happily living in obscurity until Bilbo et al turn up. He then plays a pivotal rôle in defeating Smaug. Bard just happens to be descended from the kings of Dale, a city that was destroyed by the dragon. Part of this love of the idea of noble kingship, that kings are just better than the rest of us, is idiomatic of the early fantasy genre, and part of it is simply because Tolkien lived in a more deferential age, but I don’t much like it (I also, as it happens, don’t care for the more recent inversion of this, that those in authority are worse than the rest of us).

All in all, The Hobbit is an entertaining, if slightly slight, novel. Having now read the first book (not volume) of The Lord of the Rings – parts of which rather dragged – I now appreciate the conciseness of The Hobbit, although the later work is decidedly less twee.

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Review of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Several years ago, my dad bought me a Penguin boxed set of twentieth century novels that included the likes of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Animal Farm, something by D H Lawrence; this is the first that I’ve read. I’d never read any Virginia Woolf; I won’t be hurrying to read anything else by her, I think.

First impressions of the book were quite good. It’s a portrait of a fairly disparate group of more or less socially awkward people all brought together by the Ramsays to stay on their summer home on a Scottish island, along with their various children. Mr and Mrs Ramsay are the focus of the novel (and are based on Woolf’s parents, the blurb assures me), but they are by no means the dominant viewpoint characters.

There is a strong sense, now that I think about it, of the fleetingness of life. The narrative does a lot of head-skipping – jumping around from viewpoint to viewpoint. I found it rather annoying, actually. There are various places where, for instance, there are two female viewpoint characters, maybe in successive paragraphs, each of whom may be thinking about the other or other women in the house, and too liberal use of pronouns, making it hard to identify exactly who is being referred to.

But where this technique does work, it shows a group of people who are all thinking about each other and who don’t really understand each other. However, you don’t necessarily get an in-depth portrayal of any one character – at least, until the end of the book.

The structure of the novel increases the sense of transitoriness. The main, first part of the book is as I’ve described; the second, very brief section shows time passing (it’s entitled ‘Time Passes’) and various events happening to the Ramsays and their friends; in the third part, some of the characters return to the house and revisit their earlier activities or intentions. This latter segment is quite melancholy, as various characters have died or moved on, and, while the viewpoint is more stable, alternating between just two characters for the most part, it’s quite dull; I missed some of the more interesting people.

Some of the writing is quite beautiful and evocative, like this from the second part of the book:

Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors…. And so, nosing, rubbing, they went to the window on the staircase, to the servants’ bedrooms, to the boxes in the attics; descending, blanched the apples on the dining-room table, fumbled the petals of roses, tried the picture on the easel, brushed the mat and blew a little sand along the floor. At length, desisting, all ceased together, gathered together, all sighed together; all together gave off an aimless gust of lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied; swung wide; admitted nothing; and slammed to.

There were a couple of moments when the characters’ reactions and motivations struck me as being perfectly realised – such as James Ramsay’s hatred for the father whose pronouncements about the weather deny him the chance of a trip to the lighthouse (and who, much later, takes him and a sister). Charles Tansley’s pride at holding Mrs Ramsay’s bag made me stop reading and think, Wow – that’s exactly right:

… all at once he realised that it was this: it was this:—she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair—He had hold of her bag.

“Good-bye, Elsie,” she said, and they walked up the street, she holding her parasol erect and walking as if she expected to meet some one round the corner, while for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; a man digging in a drain stopped digging and looked at her, let his arm fall down and looked at her; for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He had hold of her bag.

In addition to the aforementioned head-skipping, the long sentences were often difficult to process and made reading the book an often frustrating experience. In this passage, the first paragraph consists of one short (or non-long) sentence and one incredibly long one (this excerpt comes just after the previous quote where Tansley realises his love for Mrs Ramsay, so the second paragraph not only clarifies the first, but also sets the young man’s thoughts in context):

But here, as she turned the page, suddenly her search for the picture of a rake or a mowing-machine was interrupted. The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, “How’s that? How’s that?” of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, “I am guarding you—I am your support,” but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.

They had ceased to talk; that was the explanation. Falling in one second from the tension which had gripped her to the other extreme which, as if to recoup her for her unnecessary expense of emotion, was cool, amused, and even faintly malicious, she concluded that poor Charles Tansley had been shed. That was of little account to her. If her husband required sacrifices (and indeed he did) she cheerfully offered up to him Charles Tansley, who had snubbed her little boy.

What I’ve cut and pasted from the text into my review show some very noteworthy writing. Ultimately, however, the lack of narrative focus and drive and the deliberately anti-climactic latter parts of the book made finishing it a real chore, even though it’s a mere 230-odd pages long. The last section, only a third of the book, with Lily Briscoe agonising over her painting and Mr Ramsay, oblivious to their spite, taking two of his children to the lighthouse, seemed interminable.

To the Lighthouse is not a terrible book, by any means, but it’s not an easy one to enjoy or appreciate.

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Review of The Silmarillion by J R R Tolkien

The Silmarillion is a curious book, in various ways. While many (though not all) love The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, not so many of those who do have a great liking for Tolkien’s part mythology, part history of Middle Earth. It is a book that could only be published on the coattails of a massively successful fantasy series – The Wheel of Time and A Sonf of Ice and Fire, for instance – and would probably only be of interest to people who really liked the original story.

It’s also strange in its narrative focus. The early part of the volume is distinctly biblical in its style of writing and concerns the pantheon gods and lesser primordial beings – the Ainur – which gives it very classical Greek overtones. After that, though, the story gradually expands to become more novelistic in style – events are described in increasing detail and characters are given more dialogue.

Some of those who have read the book prefer the later parts for exactly this more character-centred stle. However, I first read it a long time ago and it was the earlier, mythopoetic part of the volume that always stuck in my imagination; it shaped my attitude towards fantasy cosmogony in my own creations. That said, the tale of Beren and Lúthien also got lodged in there, although less inspirationally so.

Reading The Silmarillion a second time – for the Tolkien discussion group I attend – I was struck by a few things. Firstly, my memory is not very good for lots of the details of the various sub-plots and characters that occupy various chapters of the Quenta Silmarillion – the long central part of the book that deals with much of the history of the Elves. This is largely due to the nature of the narrative being related.

It was the story of Fëanor, his jewels, his family and his people that especially interested me, but their story is dispersed throughout the Quenta. This arc story is interrupted by various notable episodes. There are a few chapters – that concerning Beren and Lúthien and the one about Túrin Turambar – where the narrative becomes rather more detailed than usual – and these are admittedly some of the best tales within the larger story. But, in some ways, they feel rather irrelevant, especially that of Túrin; Beren and Lúthien have a direct impact on the fate of the Silmarils, at least. It also occured to me that, if all three Hobbit films are successful, these individual tales from The Silmarillion might make excellent money-spinning successors.

Towards the end of the book, the attention shifts away from the Elves and towards Men. To me, this felt very anti-climactic. Men are lesser beings than Elves, having been given the crappiest gift imaginable – short lives and actual death – by Ilúvatar, the Creator. Even the villain of the latter piece, Sauron, is basically a cheap knock-off of his erstwhile boss, Morgoth. Much of what Sauron does has already been done by the disgraced god.

This relates to one of the overall themes of all the Middle Earth works – that of continual decline, a slow, inevitable fall from grace. The poignancy of this comes across extremely effectively in The Lord of the Rings, I think, but here, the sweep of history – and especially Man’s role in the latter parts of that history – render it a rather annoying kind of nostalgia.

My attitude towards the Ainur – the Valar, in particular – changed a lot over the course of reading the volume. At the start, they seem wonderfully noble and magical. By the end, however, they are distinctly haughty and uncaring – especially when it comes to Men. Their ban on anyone sailing west beyond sight of Númenor seems little more than divine racism and then tearing the world in two, punishing Elves and Men for the sins of Sauron is a fit of pique a two-year-old would be proud of.

Which observation segues into one of the more profound (and yet somehow irrelevant) critiques of Tolkien’s work: that it propounds a deeply reactionary message: some people are just better than others, some people’s ancestry gives them the right to rule their fellows. This is countered, of course by the fact that Frodo Baggins, a simple Hobbit from the Shire, saves the world in The Return of the King – but Frodo is also accompanied by his unquestioning servant, Sam; and, while Frodo sails off to retirement in the sky, Aragorn, descendant of the Kings of Númenor – a land that no longer exists – becomes king of Middle Earth (a large part of it, anyway).

All that being said, there is much that is good in The Silmarillion. The writing style, while antiquated – in different ways at different places – is carried off with an authority that makes you feel that you really are reading the collected myths and legends of a world. Many of the motivations of the human-scale characters are thoroughly believable and their often unpleasant ends have a sense of justice to them. And in terms of killing off characters, Tolkien definitely out-George R R Martined George R R Martin long before Westeros had been thought of.

I don’t think The Silmarillion is perfect, by any means, but anyone who’s enjoyed The Hobbit and TLotR should find their appreciation enriched by reading it. Or, given that the published form of the book was put together after Tolkien’s death by his son Christopher and Canadian fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay, they may just find it an example of barrel-scraping.

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Review of The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia A McKillip

I picked this book up recently at What the Book? in Seoul. McKillip is not one of the more well known authors, but I’ve read one of her previous works, The Riddle-Master Trilogy, and remembered it as interesting, low-key, well written, but a little slow and dull. Like that previous story, The Book of Atrix Wolfe is short, gentle, thoughtful, but less than totally gripping. Even at less than 250 pages, it took me a long time to get through it – I had other things that just seemed to demand my attention more.

However, I still liked the novel.

The story starts with a prologue set twenty years before the main narrative takes places and shows how one of the land’s most powerful wizards – Atrix Wolfe – is persuaded, coerced – tricked? I’m still not entirely clear on the motivation – into working some sorcery to facilitate a war of conquest. The resulting magical entity is uncontrollable and kills many and ends the war. The Hunter is awakened a couple of decades later when the prince born on the night of the slaughter discovers a paradoxical spellbook written by the wizard. The spell that created the Hunter turns out to have wreaked devastation beyond the world of mortals; the fey Queen of the Wood has been seeking her lost daughter for two decades.

The main character, Prince Talis Pelucir, is a bespectacled trainee wizard whose parents were killed (one directly, one indirectly) by a malevolent magical being when he was a baby. Remind you of anyone? This book was published a couple of years before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, though, so it’s OK.

Another main character is called Sorrow – or Saro (in an American accent I suppose they’re homophones) – and sorrow is a major theme of the novel. Everyone’s lives have been overshadowed by the murder committed by the Hunter – and, inasmuch as the Hunter is his proxy, by Atrix Wolfe himself.

Another theme is the paradoxical nature of the spells written in the eponymous book. When trying to extinguish a candle flame, Talis instead shatters every nearby mirror. The ambiguously named Saro is unable to speak, and yet she is capable of magic, although the spells often rely on language. I suppose you can read into this the message that language is a kind of magic – why else do we read fiction, if not to be enchanted by things that are not real and yet somehow true?

I enjoyed reading the shapeshifting battles of Atrix against the Hunter. Wolfe changes himself into animals, leaves, stones, stone, water in his efforts to evade his overly puissant creation. The mute version of Saro has lived her life in the Pelucir castle kitchen, working as a pot scrubber. The environment and social hierarchy of the kitchen is also fascinating; the place is populated with a head cook, a tray mistress, undercooks, pluckers, spit boys, mincers, peelers, musicians (who announce meals with a fanfare) and more.

I think The Book of Atrix Wolfe is a better story than The Riddle-Master books, and I really wanted to be more engrossed by it than I was. It has a uniquely gentle and subtle but definitely high fantasy feel to it. I’m going to try to pay better attention to the next Patricia McKillip book I read.

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