Just Beast

Evernight, by Claudia Gray

2008-11-25T11:28:00.000-08:00

Do you know the expression, "damning with faint praise"?

I think, in this case, I will be doing more the reverse, i.e. praising with faint damns.

You see, I just finished Evernight, by Claudia Gray. I can confidently pronounce that it's the best vampire novel I've ever read.

On the other hand, it's the best vampire novel I've ever read.

I understand that the genre has its fans. I was one of them. When I was sixteen, my first website, a paean of worship to my favorite writers, was about equally divided between Anne Rice and Madeleine L'Engle. Hell, I even "get" Twilight in a "come not near me" sort of way. You can get something--grok it, if you will---without liking it.

In the case of Evernight, I think I liked it without grokking it.

The plot, briefly: seemingly average high school student Bianca has just moved with her parents to Evernight Academy, an exclusive boarding school, where Bianca is a student and her parents are teachers. No sooner has she clapped eyes on the crumbling Gothic monstrosity housing the school than she's decided it isn't for her, so on the morning before her first day of classes she decides to run away. There follows one of the more original first-meetings between the heroine and the hot guy she's eventually going to fall in love with---she runs away from Lucas because he's creeping her out, and he gives chase and eventually full-on-tackles her ass to the ground. Turns out, he thought she was running from something other than him, and he wanted to know what, so he could help her. In other words, it was exactly like the ending to this.

They bond, obviously, a task made all the easier by the fact that neither of them are "Evernight types", which in this book is code for "popular" and also something else that is a spoiler. Things are proceeding more or less as you expect, until Chapter Seven, at which point we find the school is crawling with spoilers. And one them just bit Lucas! Who, in what is possible the biggest twist of the book, turns out to actually just be a human dude that is good looking. ABOUT TIME, GENRE. And this is where the book went from "yeah, okay, this is good, competent writing with no unintentionally icky subtext, I like the fairly realistic approach to teen sexuality, points for making the girl the aggressor for once---OMG WAIT THIS IS HILARIOUS."

I will now quote my absolute favorite passage from the whole book. The vampires are taking a class in Modern Technology.

"If the information inside the iPod actually re-creates the song," Balthazar said thoughtfully, "then the sound quality would depend completely on what kind of speakers or headphones you used. Right?"

"Mostly, yes...Anyone else?" Mr. Yee looked around the room and then sighed. "Yes, Ranulf?"

"What spirits animate this box?"

"We've been over this." Putting his hands on Ranulf's desk, Mr. Yee slowly said, "No spirits animate any of the machines we've studied in class. Or will study, moving forward. In fact, no spirits animate any machines at all. Is that finally clear?"

Ranulf nodded slowly but didn't look convinced...After a moment, he ventured, "What about the spirits of the metal from which this box is made?"

Mr. Yee slumped, as if defeated. "Is there anyone from the medieval period who might be able to help Ranulf with the transition here?" Genevieve nodded and went to his side. Evernight (hardcover), p. 165

R. J. Anderson is my witness that I literally called her on the phone "incoherent with glee" as she put it when I first read that scene in the book. That's the point at which I said "This is EVERYTHING I want out of a vampire novel."

Further on the topic of things I loved: Balthazar. My "TEAM BALTHAZAR" shirt is being printed as we speak. He represents the "immortal erudite Puritan" requirement I have for all novels with ageless characters. Kudos for there being a rival love interest in this story without it making anyone behave like dicks. Actually, there is a general lack of dickish behavior in this book, and since my biggest beef with books, TV shows, and movie published commercially is that they have a really bad habit of glorifying and excusing stupid, selfish, irresponsible, unkind behavior in the name of LUURRRVVEE (or at least in the name of "We can't tell morally ambiguous from sexy evil") this scored hugely with me. And that was before I got to the Modern Technology class.

My only beef with Evernight is that the book ends in a way that is obviously meant to set up a sequel. I realize this is a time honored gimmick, lots of people do it, hell, the editors probably talk you into it because nothing gets the tweenies stirred up like a ~*cliffie*~, but as far as I'm concerned, there's a right way and an annoying way to leave a story unresolved. Right way: lovers parting, running down the platform, hanging head out the window, waving, throwing kisses, will they ever meet again? Annoying way: Bring up a question that the reader's been asking herself ever since the Spoilers showed up but don't answer it---just leave it dangling there. Meh. Whatever. I'll be reading Stargazer, the next book in what's looking like a quartet, whenever it comes out. In fact, maybe I'll go read the excerpt on Gray's website now.

Evernight, by Claudia Gray, is solid red with black writing on the front and white writing on the spine which made it hard to read on the bookshelf, but, you know, just look for a block of solid red, you'll be fine.

OH BTW Y'ALL nothing is funnier than coming back to your book blog after like, two years, and discovering that apparently a high school English class looking for help with their homework lit like flies on my review of burned by Ellen Hopkins. This is just to say thanks for ten minutes of reading that was largely hilarious. I AM SORRY GUYS YOU ARE RIGHT THE BOOK IS ~*EMOTIONAL*~ AND I NEED TO STFU. Except that I will never shut up about how bad the ending of that book is. I may doubt the loyalty of my cat and the love of my mother, but my position on burned will never waver.

The Onion Girl, by Charles de Lint

2006-09-17T01:26:00.000-07:00

Up to this point I've been pretty consistent about reviewing books I actually like here in this blog. My logic being, who would want to hear me rant for the space of three thousand words when they could be reading a mature and reasonable evaluation of a deserving piece of literature instead?

Then, in a fit of literary rage, I posted my review of burned. And saw my customary readership triple. While it's clear that I've been mistaken about my audience, I'm not yet sure whether I've underestimated: a) your desire to avoid bad books, or b) your appetite for mockery.

For my own peace of mind, I will assume it's some happy blend of the two.

*

The Onion Girl by Charles de Lint is, like burned and ttyl, one of those books I got gussied into buying because of the gimmick. (Inference: avoid buying books because of clever gimmicks. Also, with improperly capitalized titles.) The gimmick, in this case, was the beautiful cover illustration, which, combined with the title, suggested a careful and nuanced work of characterization. In case this makes me sound like a schmoe with no resistance to marketing, de Lint's writing in general (though not The Onion Girl in particular) had also been recommended to me by several people whose opinions I trusted—and so, swept away by some mad impulse, I added this book to my library.

I realized I'd made a mistake—from a financial point of view, at least—on the second page, after I read the following paragraph:

I'd always been aware of the otherworld, of spirits that exist in that twilight place that lies in the corner of our eyes, of faerie and stranger things still that we spy only when we're not really paying attention to them, whispers and flickering shadows, here one moment, gone the instant we turn our heads for a closer look (de Lint 14).

There is no precise grammatical term for a sentence like this, aside from "Argh, my eyes," or possibly "Help! Help! I'm drowning in commas." The length is unacceptable, for starters—unless you're Anais Nin, your sentences never need to run longer than three lines, at least not without the structural reinforcement of a semi-colon or two.

And then there's the content.

The fact that de Lint is comfortable referring to his fantasy realm as the "otherworld" in itself tells you practically everything you need to know about the quality of his writing in this novel—he works in cliches, but they aren't the cliches of an unoriginal mind. Rather, they read like the cliches of an immature writer with promise, like a teenager who hasn't yet learned that precision, more than flowery adverbs, is the mark of truly poetic writing. I'm fairly certain de Lint is anything but a teenager, but that's the impression I'm left with, and that's why I persisted in reading this novel to the end—he came so *close* to being good so many times that I held out hope he would eventually attain it.

(He didn't.)

There are three elements at odds with each other in de Lint's writing—his story, his prose, and his characterization. His story is fairly solid. The protagonist of The Onion Girl is Jilly Coppercorn, a painter, recovering in the hospital from a hit and run accident. She has a deep spiritual connection to faerie, the "otherworld," and as the emotional and physical effort of recovering from her injuries becomes more taxing, the farther into faerie she allows herself to slip. In the meantime, Jilly's friends are trying to figure out who ran her down in the first place, and a mysterious woman called Ray, inhabiting a darker (and, I daresay, more interesting) story of her own, moves nearer to the center of Jilly's tale, in a plot twist that is alone very nearly worth the price of admission. (If, you know, that price is a trip to the library.)

De Lint has one sterling quality which all too many authors, strong in prose and characterization, lack—he has a deft command of structure. The plot is well constructed, no holes or badly resolved plot threads, and the "what happens next" suspense is gripping enough to numb a determined reader to the fact that de Lint is one of those writers who can't trust the reader to make any intuitive leaps or logical connections of her own, but spells out every last detail, to the extreme detriment of the description and the dialogue. Most of the book is told from shifting first person points of view, but none of the characters talk like real people—rather, they talk the way a person who wishes to be perceived as mysterious and poetic might talk (but without putting this quality to work in the service of characterization—it is not only the characters, but de Lint himself, who is mistaken about the profundity of their dialogue.)

Which brings us to the greatest failure of this book.

Characterization is always the deal-breaker with me. Absurd plots and gauche metaphor, though distressing, will not rouse nearly as much of my ire as they deserve if my attention is distracted by a sufficiently riveting piece of characterization. And as I am a just beast, I only ask for a bare minimum of one brilliantly delineated character per book. For the sake one Gregory House, I will put up with any number inconsistent and muddled Camerons and Wilsons.

But de Lint, I am sorry to say, does not write characters so much as he makes vague gestures in the direction of characterization. The Onion Girl is populated with a background cast of indistinguishably fluttery women, who exist merely to cosset Jilly and reinforce her status as a fragile flower. The only exception to this is Ray, his ostensible villain, who exists to foil Jilly's delicacy. And as for Jilly herself—well, with a title like The Onion Girl, surely layers aren't too much to ask for? But de Lint's notion of "layering" is to contrast the older Jilly, a respectable member of the community, with the child Jilly, a victim of sexual abuse, while at the same time giving her an unnaturally clean bill of mental health. The only hint of real darkness in a background carefully constructed to flatter his heroine is the fact that, as a teenager, Jilly ran away from home and left her younger sister behind in an abusive environment—and even in this, Jilly is carefully removed from all blame, so that her guilt and self-recrimination become yet another platform for de Lint's inauthentic glorification of her.

It really is an unfortunate title. Possibly it should be The Rutabaga Girl.

The Onion Girl was published by Tor in 2001, which means that any day now the glue in the binding is going to give way and all the pages are going to fall out. Silly Tor.

burned, by Ellen Hopkins

2006-09-08T02:29:00.000-07:00

I hate being betrayed.

In a way, it’s better to be betrayed by people than by books. If I’m betrayed by a person, I can console myself by means of a variety of socially approved coping mechanisms—alcohol, recriminating midnight phone calls ~~stabbing them in the gut with a rusty screwdriver~~. Being betrayed by a book, though, is an entirely different matter. Where are the outlets for this kind of distress? Do I call up my best friend, an artist, and rant about plot expectations and inconsistent characterization? Do I hire a therapist to listen as I describe the early, halcyon days of our relationship, before I’d read past page two hundred and fifty? There is no real place, even in this post-Oprah society, for genuine book angst.

And so I have no choice but to blog about it. ~~Technology is my only real friend.~~

*

I’m going to make a confession right here at the beginning of this review.

I am a great big old snob when it comes to poetry.

The
fact
that the l i n e b r e a k s
a
r
e

reallyweird
does not
automatically
make this a poem.

Poetry is not defined by a) the line breaks or b) rhyme schemes. The flagrant abuse of both, however, is the most obvious identifier of a ~~talentless~~ amateur poet.

burned, by Ellen Hopkins, is a YA novel written in verse format.

...I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

In the interests of fairness, I must say that I knew about the verse format when I bought it. (I did actually buy it, by the way, brand new and hardcovered ~~for twenty bucks, which probably explains why I’m so mad at it now~~.) The reason I bought it, despite the fact that I knew at a glance that it was a failure as a poem, was that I read the first twenty pages standing in the bookstore, and made an interesting discovery: what failed as poetry succeeded marvelously as prose. The capricious line breaks were annoying as hell, but Hopkins’ attempt to write something poem-shaped had the salutary effect of producing incredibly tight and evocative sentences, not a word wasted.

And then there was the story itself.

The hero of burned is Pattyn, seventeen, the oldest of six girls in a strict Mormon family. Her father is an abusive alcoholic with delusions of patriarchal largess, and her mother stays at home, producing baby after baby in an attempt to replace the two sons her husband lost, along with their mother, in an accident years before. Bounded on every side by the needs of her younger siblings and the role prescribed for women by Mormonism, Pattyn begins to seek her own autonomy, writing in a secret journal and dating a boy outside her church. Conflicts with her father, however, impel her to break a window in the school library, and she gets suspended; at the same time, her mother discovers she’s pregnant with the long-awaited boy. Pattyn is packed off to the Nevada desert to live with her father’s estranged sister, but instead of this being a punishment, Pattyn finds a kindred spirit in her aunt (and falls in love with a local hunk.) More significantly, she becomes strong and confident. So much so that when her sister writes, telling Pattyn that their father has started beating his younger children, you fully expect that Pattyn is going to kick ass and take names.

Only that’s not quite how it goes.

I have nothing against jaw-dropping, stomach-churning plot twists in books. In fact, I rather like them. Similarly, I don’t demand happy endings of all, or any, of the books I read. But I do demand that the plot twists, especially the drastic ones, be explicable upon careful re-examination of the story, and that tragic endings be justifiable, thematically, philosophically, geographically, whatever. Just so long as there’s a reason.

Just so long as the pain and suffering you inflict on your characters isn’t gratuitous and calculated merely to shock.

Just so long as your ending doesn’t feel so completely out of place that your readers are left wondering if you actually died a week before submitting the manuscript and your agent, in a panic, stole the existing pages from your desk while your relatives were eating potato salad in the parlor and tacked on an ending five minutes before going to press.

The ending of burned fails at all these things.

The ending was so wrong, so incredibly unjustified by the story preceding it, that it made the verse-format look like the greatest structural innovation in novels since the first person narrator.

Back to the subject of my betrayal and lingering pain: I wouldn’t have bothered to review this book at all if it weren’t for the fact that the first two hundred pages were really quite brilliant. So here’s what I suggest you do.

1) Read up to page 500.

2) Write your own ending.

3) It can’t be any worse than the one between the covers.

burned was publish by McElderry Press, who really should have known better, in 2006.

Freaky Green Eyes, by Joyce Carol Oates

2006-08-31T11:42:00.000-07:00

You know, the original plan for this blog was to review a book every Sunday.

That didn’t happen.

So, about today’s review. I lied at the end of the last one. About reviewing short stories, I mean. There was this one story I really wanted to talk about forever and ever, and so I thought I could find some other short stories to accompany it, and then it turned out that I couldn’t. So it’s a book again this time.

But there is nothing wrong with that. Nothing. You know why? Because Joyce Carol Oates is writing YA horror fiction.

Oates’ Freaky Green Eyes is the story of fifteen year old Franky Pierson, whose father, a famous sportscaster, is obsessed with turning his family into the perfect accessories to his glamorous public image. Conditioned by years of abuse into acting the part of an obedient daughter, “Freaky Green Eyes” is the name Franky gives to the strong, rebellious side of her personality that questions her father without fear for the consequences.

When Franky’s mother takes refuge from her father in an isolated cabin, Franky blames her for abandoning them. But when her mother dies in a mysterious accident and her father is charged with the murder, Franky has to decide which of them deserves her true loyalty. And it’s not as easy for her as you might think.

I’ve read other reviews of this book that claim that the plot is too obvious—that you can deduce from the first chapter what’s going to happen and who’s to blame. I don’t think this is a particularly fair assessment. True, the jacket blurb tells you that Franky’s mother dies mysteriously, and within minutes of meeting Franky’s father you can only draw one conclusion how it happened. But I disagree that this makes the book weak. It’s not a mystery—who killed Franky’s mother isn’t the point. It is a suspense story, but the suspense centers, not on the fact of her mother’s murder, but on what Franky is going to do about it. And the answer to that question is not obvious. The novel is written in the first person from Franky’s perspective, and Oates manages something that is very difficult to achieve with first person narrators, particularly young ones, which is to conceal as much as she reveals without making the narrator unreliable. In order to survive life with her father, Franky’s thinking has become so guarded that her actions are hard to predict.

In fact, if the novel has any shortcoming, it lies in that very fact—-because Franky is so guarded, there is a lack of emotional immediacy in her narration, and thus the first half of the novel depends on the suspense created by her father’s dangerous and unpredictable temper to carry the reader along. In my case, that alone was enough to suck me, but Franky didn’t really come to life for me until later, and that might turn some readers off.

On the whole, Freaky Green Eyes achieves a near perfect balance between the demands of the YA genre and all the elements a stringent formalist demands of literary fiction—gorgeous, spare language, faultless structure, and sleight-of-hand characterization. I’d expect no less of Joyce Carol Oates at her best, but it’s gratifying to me that she obviously takes YA lit seriously, where another writer descending from on high to grace the genre with her literary credibility might have treated it as a soft option.

Freaky Green Eyes was published by Harper Collins in 2003, and is it just me or does the cover art remind you of Dave McKean?

A veritable cornucopia of verbiage.

2005-11-26T05:08:00.000-08:00

Jeepers. Been a few months, hasn't it? I've read way too many books in the interim to pick just one, so today I'll be introducing a new feature here at the Blog o' Bleariness: the thumbnail review! In which I dispense opinion and invective with brevity, alacrity, and possibly even speed.

Tori Amos: Piece by Piece by Tori Amos and Ann Powers

Not your daddy's rock-star memoir, Piece by Piece is an explication of the personal mythological structure behind Tori Amos' songwriting. Part biography, part spiritual memoir, there is much here of interest even to newcomers to her music. Most of the writing is done by Amos, which is fortunate, as Powers' writing, though it makes use of the same vocabulary, lacks Amos' lucidity and authenticity. Piece by Piece is worth buying in hardcover if you're a Tori Amos fan; others might want to get it from the library. (Or drop whatever you're doing and buy all of Tori's albums. Not that I have an opinion on the matter.)

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

Even if you didn't like the movie, you should read the book. Why? The animated Rankin-Bass production is a lovely fairy tale, but it doesn't do justice to the poetry and art of the novel. Just when Beagle has you convinced that you're reading a conventional, rather twee fantasy, he sidles up and gooses you with his sly, absurd, brilliant sense of humor. The Last Unicorn is the best of the grown-up fairy tale genre I've ever read. It's hard to find in bookstores these days, or at least it was when I went looking for it, but I was able to find a cheap used copy on Amazon with no difficulty. Even if you have to do the same, it's entirely worth the effort.

The Liar by Stephen Fry

I was surprised to discover that this was Stephen Fry's first novel, because I consider it a far superior creature to other books that he's written and I've read: those being Revenge and Making History. But there's a reason for that, so caveat lector; I like character more than plot, and while Revenge and Making History are miracles of clear, witty, well plotted story-telling, The Liar is essentially one long foray into characterization, the result being one Adrian Healey, whom, by all rights, I should have despised, and nonetheless adored. Stephen Fry wrote it, so I don't have to tell you that it's terribly funny, but there are moments that are quite painful as well---as the British public school experience so often seems to be. Highly recommended, but have some patience with the plot, as it unfolds very slowly.

Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Yee

I'm a sucker for good YA novels, especially when they have a sense of humor and deal somehow with a child who is isolated by her giftedness. I enjoyed this one in particular because of the strength of Millicent's narrative voice. Yee writes as though she actually remembers being eleven years old, which is a rarer quality among YA authors than it ought to be. The conflict between Millicent's genius and her social obliviousness inspired many sympathetic winces from this aging wunderkind. It's worth the read to anyone interested in YA literature or anyone who has an hour to spare for revisiting the agonies of their childhood.

The Gun Seller, by Hugh Laurie

Would I have ever picked this book up in a million years if I weren't a long time fan of Hugh-Laurie-the-actor? Probably not. Does it have anything to recommend it other than a peculiar glimpse into the mind of said actor? Absolutement. The reason I wouldn't have picked this one up blindly is that it parodies a genre I have limited interest in and familiarity with, namely spy novels. But it's ever so much more than that, namely a tremendously funny yet bone chillingly plausible and terrifically plotted story of political intrigue. The Vaguely Familiar Grouse is reason enough to give it a few hours of your time; the devastating irony of the last five pages is an excuse to love it. If you need one.

TTYL by Lauren Myracle (I hope to God that's her real name, because otherwise it's the lamest pseudonym in the history of the world.)

What to say about this book? I totally get why it was published. The gimmick is downright irresistable---a novel about three teenage girls, told entirely through Instant Messenger chat transcripts? Sold! I had to take a look. Unfortunately, the gimmick is practically all this book has to recommend it. Behind the cleverest marketing device in the history of YA literature lies a yawningly conventional story about three "best friends forever" girls in high school who go on dates, vie for popularity, and complain about their parents. These elements are the bones of many far better stories, but in Myracle's hands they compose a story with all the emotional depth of an episode of Saved by the Bell.

The Bridheshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter

Despite the fact that this book is apparently so un-chic as to fail to yield a single result from Google image search, it's a fine read. If, you know, you're interested in Oxford in the thirties, Evelyn Waugh, the 'tween the wars generation in England, Nancy Mitford, Etonic romances, and that peculiar brand of misogynistic homosexuality for which the artists of the era were famous. And that can't just be me. It's a scholarly tome, and it does its job; Carpenter (whose biography of Tolkien I can also recommend) constructs lives and personalities and relationships with eminently readable flair.

And those are the highlights of my library expenditures over the last few months. Next week, join us as the Blog o' Bleariness reviews some wonderful, horrible, very good, excrescent short stories.

A Slight Trick of the Mind,by Mitch Cullin

2005-09-04T09:49:00.000-07:00

Witness the awesome power of this blog. No sooner do I review a book set in New Orleans than a GINORMOUS FRIGGIN' HURRICANE blows in and wipes it off the face of the earth.

Maybe I should start taking requests for specific targets, eh?

I know, tasteless joke. I've spent the week venting as much sorrow and spleen as I can spare and still have energy for breathing in my regular blog, and now come Sunday I'm reduced to the level of petty self-aggrandizement. Pity me, a tempest in my own tea pot.

The inherently pitiable quality of the human condition is a primary theme of Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind. A more painful book I have not read in recent memory. Speaking of pain, by the way, is this an appropriate moment to observe that the dust jacket blurbs of newly published books are getting stupider and stupider? Because I don't think I could have been more misled by the summaries I read of this book if they'd promised naked chorus girls and free beer for all comers. A Slight Trick of the Mind is the story of Sherlock Holmes at the age of ninety-three, coming to the slow, somewhat bemused realization that his memory is failing him. Having outlived Mrs Hudson, Dr Watson, and his brother Mycroft, he lives now with a young housekeeper called Mrs Munro and her fourteen year old son Roger. And while it is true, as the jacket blurb says, that Roger discovers an unfinished account of one of Holmes' unpublished cases, and while it is also true that the case features a woman who aroused Holmes' personal interest, the book is not the story of Holmes' unrequited passion for another man's wife, as some sensationalist peon at Doubleday seems to want us to believe. It is the story of Holmes the man, hidden for a lifetime behind Holmes the legend, Holmes the analyst and logician. The story, in short, of the Holmes whom his greatest admirers have always known him to be, but who is revealed only in the briefest unguarded moments in the Arthur Conan Doyle episodes.

There are three stories in A Slight Trick of the Mind: that of Holmes' beekeeping and his friendship with Roger, his journey to Japan and the enigmatic bee fancier he meets there, and that of the Glass Armonicist, the unpublished case Roger discovers while rifling through Holmes' papers. The structure of the novel is uniquely suited to the challenges of Holmes' failing memory; we wade gently into each new development, the stories overlapping one another as Holmes remembers details he had forgotten a chapter ago, and what initially appear to be three strangely discordant narratives dovetail in a heartbreaking study of Holmes' failures and regrets at the end of his life. The traditional Holmesian pastiche is narrated by someone other than Holmes, generally Watson, and presents a mystery in straightforward imitation of the Doyle stories; but there is no mystery here, or at least no criminal investigation of murder or theft, not even in the fragmented text of "The Glass Armonicist." The great mysteries, though, the ones that lie at the back of every investigation Holmes has ever undertaken and remain after the culprits have been identified and punished are very much at the heart of the place where the three narratives intersect. "Why'd it have to happen, sir? I must know why---" Mrs Munro asks Holmes at one point, echoing a question he has already been asked twice; Holmes, of course, can only repeat the answer he has given to others before. "I don't know. I haven't a clue."

A Slight Trick of the Mind is one of those books that you cannot precisely like but that you can't help praising and recommending to others; you are bound to the story by the very pain it inflicts as you read it. While not an unpleasant read, Holmes' struggles are deeply sad and very real, taking advantage of none of fiction's manifold opportunities to cheat reality. It is not a book I would recommend to every Holmesian, but it is one I would recommend to every non-Holmesian; the Holmes of Doyle is in Cullin's story, but only if you were paying very close attention to the Doyle and, like me, read for moments found occasionally in stories like "The Three Garridebs" and "The Devil's Foot," where the great heart behind the great mind was revealed, if most unwillingly. Cullins' Holmes displays emotion as reluctantly as ever, but as we have the advantage of riding along in his head for 250 pages, we can be excused a peep or two. There is much here for the reader meeting Holmes for the first time, however. And even there is plenty of room in this story for those who have no interest in Holmes as a figure of legend; at the heart of the pastiche is a universal story of a man sifting through the vagaries of memory to take stock of his life.

And one last quibble before I end: I don't believe Holmes and Watson ever referred to each other as "John" and "Sherlock." I simply don't.

A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullins was published in 2005 by Doubleday Press, who really should let me write the copy for their dust jackets, as I promise never to make a dignified tome sound like a pulp novel, or vice versa.

A Free Man of Color, by Barbara Hambly

2005-08-28T22:26:00.000-07:00

Persepolis 2 and Embroideries are both fantastic. When I am no longer poor, I will own everything Marjane Satrapi has written.

Until I am no longer poor, and undoubtedly long after, I will continue to haunt the East Regional Public Library, whose longsuffering staff has yet to notice that I tend to confuse my library card with my credit card. You laugh; when I was in high school I accumulated something like $1500 in library fines. In July of 2000, I got a letter from the state of North Carolina threatening to send ninja librarians after me if I didn't surrender their books, at which point I promptly moved to the other side of the state. I have been good since coming home, however. I hardly ever rack up any fines, and when I do I pay them promptly.

And it's not just because everyone on the staff has fangs. No sirree.

A Free Man of Color, by Barbara Hambly, is the first title in a series of mystery novels centering around Benjamin January, who is, as the title suggests, a free man of color living in New Orleans in 1833. From that sentence alone, you can probably infer what I'm about to tell you: it hurts to read these books. I'm not a particularly emotive person, but my progress through this novel was seriously impeded by the number of times I had to put it aside and bang my head against the nearest wall. Benjamin January is a wonderfully complex and real character, the sort of person whose progress you are eager to follow from one book to the next, whose personal drama is compelling enough to make up for the fact that the mysteries he investigates are, at times, implausible, contrived, or poorly paced. But the very reality you are plunged into by riding along in January's head for 400 pages is enough to drive anyone crazy.

The story begins with January's return to New Orleans after fifteen years of practicing medicine and music in Paris. Unable to sustain himself in practice as a surgeon, he plays music at Creole society balls. It is at one such gathering that a prominent courtesan is murdered; faced with the awkwardness of prosecuting the likeliest suspect (the son of a rich Creole planter) the police decide to hold January responsible. January is forced to investigate the murder to clear his name, with the help of what appear to be the only two fair and upright white men in the whole city: a musician and opium addict called Hannibal Sefton and police lieutenant Abishag Shaw.

(God, I hate plot summaries. I suck at them, I really do. I'm much better with opinion.)

To wit: it is my opinion that A Free Man of Color is not a well-written mystery. This was, I believe, Hambly's first mystery novel (I knew her primarily as a science fiction/fantasy writer before this) and she falls down on the pacing of the murder investigation; January settles on one likely looking suspect almost immediately after the murder, and three-quarters of the novel is taken up with the problem of tracking this suspect down. Only after January has risked everything, including his status as a free man, to come face to face with the suspect does he realize that his theory of the murder is wrong. In the last hundred pages of the novel several more suspects are presented in bewildering succession, none of whom function as red herrings so much as slimy prop mackerels that smack us repeatedly across the face until we're so stunned that we just sorta...go with it.

It's a testament to the power of the real story Hambly is telling---that of January and how he copes with the OMGCRAZY world he lives in---that the cluttered up ending didn't bother me any more than it did. It comes down, I think, to the difference between an author who manipulates her characters like puppets on strings, and an author who creates characters that are so much themselves that they outpace all the author's careful planning. And while I think Hambly would have done well to work with an outline, it is also worth mentioning that the later books in the series don't have the same problem with pacing. A Free Man of Color is very much a foundational novel for the rest of the series; most of the energy (and most of the book's appeal) is in the world building. To be honest, trying to wrap a 21st century mind around the sheer WTFness of the racial dynamic of New Orleans in 1833 requires a whole novel, to the extent that the slighting of the mystery seems almost justifiable. I'm not exaggerating this, by the way. You may think you know your history, and you probably feel a dim, intellectual outrage at the concept of slavery already. But Hambly---and this is what makes this series stand apart from any other mystery, or any other historical fiction I've ever read---never for a second excuses you, the reader, from the worst. Because January has just returned to New Orleans after fifteen years in Paris, where he was treated, certainly not with all the respect he deserved, but like a human being, all the outrage that might have been muted by a lifetime of custom is fresh in him, just as it is fresh to the reader. You feel every slur, every injustice, every stream of tobacco juice hitting the back of your neck. Which is just as it should be. And that's what makes these books amazing.

A Free Man of Color by Barbara Hambly has a paperback cover designed in the same style as Carol Nelson Douglas' Irene Adler mysteries. It was published in 1997 by Bantam paperbacks.

Tipping the Velvet, by Sarah Waters

2005-08-21T15:53:00.000-07:00

Just got back from the library with a heaping new stack of books, fifteen in total, which are due back on September 11th. Join me for a moment of O_O. At least I'm not likely to forget, eh?

Persepolis 2 and Embroideries, both by Marjane Satrapi, are among my new temporary acquisitions. I shall share my thoughts on them next week. And I shall probably find myself hurrying a bit through this review, as I am eager to go and read them.

A lightning-fast review of Tipping the Velvet, by Sarah Waters, would be highly appropiate, considering that is the speed at which I read the book. My edition runs to 472 pages, and I read straight from the beginning to page 285 on the first night I had it. Some low minded persons might insinuate that I was just eager to get to the dirty parts. To them I say...good call.

Only that's not entirely true. One of the novel's major strengths is the clearness and relative simplicity of the narrative voice. It is an eminently readable book; no polysyllabic metaphysical meanderings here. The narrator is Nancy Astley, who in 1889 was a working class girl from a coastal town whose family makes their living off the local oyster trade. A habituee of the local music hall, there she meets Kitty Butler, whose male impersonation act is turning everyone's heads. They meet and fall in love, then move to London together. Hijinks ensue.

At the risk of revealing my massive cultural ignorance, I was under the impression that Tipping the Velvet was a much older book before I glanced at the copyright date. Turns out it was published in 1998, when I was sixteen. Which makes a certain amount of sense; that was just about the time I started paying attention, and would explain why I've always perceived Tipping the Velvet as this ubiquitous symbol of lesbian/gay literature. (In other words, it's the title you mention with a shrill undertone of, yes, it exists. Phillistines, when people look at you confusedly and ask, but what would you read in a queer literature class?)

Now that I've finally read it, I'm inclined to think that the only reason Tipping the Velvet "stands alone" in the world of literature is because it...well, stands alone. Fiction of over 5000 words featuring lesbian love stories is so rare that a book like this has to loom prominently. But, for my money, if it had anything in the way of competition, it wouldn't occupy that place for long, because as a story it's rather slight. It is essentially 500 pages of sentimental claptrap, detailing the various ways in which Nan, our protagonist, is love's bitch. Which is an old, old story, and somehow miraculously still manages to be interesting in the hands of some authors. But not here. At least, not evenly.

Nan reveals herself, at critical junctures, to have no character whatsoever. In fact, approximately half-way through the story, she becomes downright unlikeable. And there isn't enough distance between the narrative voice and the story being told to hint that we're supposed, or even allowed, to feel uncomfortable with the fact that we're apparently trapped inside the head of a sociopath. Part One, the rise and fall of Nan's relationship with Kitty Butler, is as charming and poignant a love story as I've ever read. But Nan either changes drastically from the person she was in the beginning, or---creepy thought---is simply no longer able to hide the fact that she's been a pathetic, manipulative person all along. Which, considering how much the reader invests into her story in the first section, is a bit jarring.

Upon exhaustive research into the novel's background (read: a 2 minute visit to the author's website) I learned that Sarah Waters wrote this novel while working on a Ph.D. into lesbianism and erotica in the Victorian era. And something clicked for me. If you read Tipping the Velvet, not as a postmodern literary novel, but as a modern treatment of the Victorian pornographic novel, everything suddenly fits. Which is not to say that the story is merely a vehicle for smut Although there is quite a lot of sex, most of which does not retreat gracefully behind the usual fade-to-black screen of novels. But if the story is at all light, and the examination of sexuality promoted at the expense of the plot, then that is probably why. It would also explain why the oyster trade that supports an entire English village unravels into one giant metaphor for cunnilungus.

And it's not a bad excuse.

My trade paperback copy of Tipping the Velvet, which has a lovely cover photo of two girls on a swing, was publish in 1998 by Riverhead Books.

Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi

2005-08-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

Can I just preface this post by saying how much I love the fact that, during my five year hiatus from public libraries, the entire philosophy of their management seems to have changed. Graphic novels! Right there between sci-fi and horror! I've been all a-twitter ever since I found out about this. And I found out a full year ago.

Persepolis is a graphic novel. Evidently this month is "be kind to comic books" month at my library, or something, because there's a little display table by the door with various graphic novels propped up on book stands. Persepolis was one of them, and though I should feel bad for snatching it and leaving a gap in the nice display, I figure that's kinda what they're there for. Written and illustrated by Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis is the story of the author's childhood in Iran during the religious revolution and the years that followed. The daughter of progressive Marxists, Marji grows up navigating the difference between her life at home, where her bedroom is decorated with posters of Iron Maiden, and life outside the home, where she might be stopped and arrested at any moment by "Guardians of the Revolution" for the crime of wearing jewelry, or listening to Western music. Although Persepolis is, on the one hand, the story of lives, families, and nations torn apart by war, it is anything but relentlessly grim. Marji is the perfect mediator between the reader and the world she lives in. You feel that her victories, though childish, are hugely significant, like mice set loose to climb up the feet of lumbering war elephants. Which, of course, is the real truth of life under any totalitarian regime.

I hesitate to call attention to the political function of any piece of literature, because other people do that better than I do, and because I wouldn't be writing about a book if its only function were political. But Persepolis is undoubtedly a work of timely cultural significance, at the same time that it is a sad, charming, brilliant blend of personal memoir and comic book storytelling. It is, to address the obvious comparison, a bit like Maus---the immediacy of the first person narration, the autobiographical connection to a painful piece of history, and the simplicity of the images to convey heavy truths. But overall, Persepolis is only like Maus in the way that Rosalind is said to be the female Hamlet; there is joy and heartbreak in Persepolis, where in Maus there is mostly just the massive weight of inevitability. There's no saying that one is more or less necessary than the other, but the stories have less in common than most reviewers seem to imply.

My favorite part of the story is quite near the beginning, where Marji is explaining that, at the age of six, she whole-heartedly approved of a religious revolution, being enthusiastically religious herself. She was, in fact, convinced that she was the last prophet of Islam, which makes me sigh nostalgically more than giggle, because when I was six I too was convinced that God had chosen me to be a prophet. The panels which illustrated Marji praying and talking to God about her destiny are incredibly sweet, without being at all cutesy; the child Marji is born up in the vast arms of a huge, kindly, white bearded old man who, as she later points out, bears a disconcerting resemblance to Karl Marx. When Marji banishes God from her life, after the political execution of a beloved uncle, the dejected, grandfatherly figure hangs his head and goes obediently.

I felt really bad for him. I think I was supposed to. I felt bad for Marji too, which I suspect was the point.

Persepolis: Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi is translated from the French and published in America by L'Association, Paris, France.

Not that anyone is yet in a position to care, but...

2005-07-08T13:18:00.000-07:00

this is yet another book review blog. I have no excuse for starting it, except that I read a lot of books, and this way I can pretend that it has something to do with real life. We aging English majors have to do something to preserve our dignity.