Ornate and surprisingly subtle picture of the Scots Borders during the Reformation. Mystery novel without a detective. Went into this with unfair scepOrnate and surprisingly subtle picture of the Scots Borders during the Reformation. Mystery novel without a detective. Went into this with unfair scepticism but was impressed by his making boring theological debates dramatic, and by his unsentimental nature prose. I also learned lots of words. ...more
Prose is a delight, very free-flowing . There's a sarcastic wizard, a torturer for a protagonist, a corrupt feudal society. 'The blade itself' is fromProse is a delight, very free-flowing . There's a sarcastic wizard, a torturer for a protagonist, a corrupt feudal society. 'The blade itself' is from Homer - a rare moment where he recriminates about war. Good details - the torturer's inner monologue is always asking questions, casting doubt - the amputee waggling his stump thoughtfully, scared people forgetting where their sword is (when it's in their hand). Addictive.
So yeah it's about a big siege, a big battle and a big quest, but somehow new and uncliched. The heroes, about their quest: "What are we doing here?";So yeah it's about a big siege, a big battle and a big quest, but somehow new and uncliched. The heroes, about their quest: "What are we doing here?"; "Got nowhere better to be". ...more
Enormous, 3 kilo, 150-piece jigsaw-comic about ordinary desperation at varying physical scales (from anthropomorphised insect up to anthropomorphised Enormous, 3 kilo, 150-piece jigsaw-comic about ordinary desperation at varying physical scales (from anthropomorphised insect up to anthropomorphised house).
I actually resented the format at first - it's a unwieldy doorstop that cannot be read outside - but by the end it's a pleasing experiment: that Ware has succeeded in making the order of reading more or less irrelevant is of course incredible. ...more
Post-apocalyptic Morayshire folk do Cold War survivalism before the Cold War? I was of course primed to love this, but it's a lead ball of a book, draPost-apocalyptic Morayshire folk do Cold War survivalism before the Cold War? I was of course primed to love this, but it's a lead ball of a book, drab and flattened. This probably makes it a brilliant picture of the era's background of vast fear, but that doesn't make for a good read. The three characters are just scared, and though their hardships are harsh indeed, they're oddly unaffecting. The political economy that drove them out there is completely absent, only represented by sketched armed thugs. Nor is the world-justifying love of the central couple convincing, either. So it's tragic, but in no meaningful or honourable way.
The prose does sometimes have a lovely Doric lilt - "We were but young in stealth. As we drove along the Spey, the silent night was full of ears that harkened to our passing. It was midnight when our second journey ended, and dark, dark." - and local loons will get a kick out of it. ...more
Enormous steampunk social commentary dressed in gorgeous nasty prose (think Nabokov on America). His dank, evil city, 'New Crobuzon', is a dark rebootEnormous steampunk social commentary dressed in gorgeous nasty prose (think Nabokov on America). His dank, evil city, 'New Crobuzon', is a dark reboot of Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork (itself a funhouse mirror of Elizabethan London) without its animating sense of fun and justice. Instead, it has class consciousness; satires on academic, tabloid and political speech, misogyny, and a tainted political economy of science/capital/government.
Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof.
What I take to be the central metaphor: one of the oppressed races are found to have a native power - the 'potential energy of crisis' - which, with a scientific harness, could revolutionise the world: i.e. Classical Marxism. Our heroes are not especially heroic....more
Meditation on consequentialism and moral progress, only more fun than that sounds. ("Consequences are everything.") Spends 300 pages setting up its thMeditation on consequentialism and moral progress, only more fun than that sounds. ("Consequences are everything.") Spends 300 pages setting up its thirteen protagonists into like seven plot threads. As a result, he has to repeat a lot of exposition to keep us - including, in one instance, a full page of quoted dialogue which we'd heard 50 pages back. Oddly simplistic despite its fifth-order intentionality, then.
Surface Detail fills out some of the mechanisms and organisation of the Culture; throws his usual bucket of ideas at the plot (graphic descriptions of Hell, a first-person account of an aquatic, hair-thick species, an extended section in a Medieval convent) and keeps a good amount of tension and mental strain going. Good, full of simple dramatised philosophy. ...more
This entry's mostly set on a C17th world, the rest given over to barely interesting galactic politics. The Culture novels feel free to wave away technThis entry's mostly set on a C17th world, the rest given over to barely interesting galactic politics. The Culture novels feel free to wave away technological plot devices with talk of "energy grid!" or "nanotech!", but Banks shows off hard-scifi cred here, giving a few lovely, moving images based on meteorology and astrophysics. On the current-affairs blogosphere:
A rapidly expanding but almost entirely vapid cloud of comment, analysis, speculation and exploitation...Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying the wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths,our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.
Ending is good and brutal, made me stop and infer for ten mins afterward. So, yeah, Banks has been playing the same "ooh, neo-colonialism", "ooh, consequences", "ooh, angst in utopia" note for a while. But hey it's a good note.
Comic novella about raping famous men for money. So, one of the first real person slashfics in history. Actually scandalous; one can only imagine the Comic novella about raping famous men for money. So, one of the first real person slashfics in history. Actually scandalous; one can only imagine the ruckus if it was published today.
The eponymous rogue teams up with a livestock scientist and a beautiful accomplice ("Yasmin Howcomely, a girl absolutely soaked in sex") to date-rape the great men of early C20th Europe. Then blackmail them, and steal their semen to sell off. Drugging Freud, Monet and Proust with a psychotic aphrodisiac, the three conspirators collect a Nobel sperm bank. Most of the men are disposed of in one pithy paragraph, with only comic details supplied.
It's scandalous because of its levity. The plot has more in common with A Serbian Film than Carry On, yet it keeps up the latter's matey banter. At one point Yasmin comes across Picasso, who promptly rapes and dismisses her, without need of the "Sudanese blister beetle" drug. Needless to say, this is tremendous sport:
"Do you know what he did afterwards?" Yasmin said. "He just buttoned up his trousers and said, ‘Thank you, mademoiselle. That was very refreshing. Now I must get back to my work.’ And he turned away, Oswald! He just turned away and started painting again!" "He’s Spanish," I said, "like Alfonso." I stepped out of the car and cranked the starting handle and when I got back in again, Yasmin was tidying her hair in the car mirror. "I hate to say it,” she said, "but I rather enjoyed that one." "Tell me," I said, "is Monsieur Picasso a genius?" "Yes," she said, "it was very strong. He shall be wildly famous one day."
The sexual prowess of the drugged men is a means for Oswald to reflect on their overall quality. (The volume they produce is shorthand for his esteem of them, e.g.: "Fifty straws from Kipling.") It leaves Dahl room to propound a general ranking of the giant personalities of the eC20th. For instance, Einstein and Freud are able to resist their inverted rape for some minutes, earning both respect and suspicion. And of Freud:
"You should have seen his face, Oswald. You really should have seen it. The Beetle was hitting him and the sexcrazy glint was coming into his eyes and he was beginning to flap his arms like an old crow. But I’ll say this for him. He didn’t jump me right away. He held off for at least a minute or so while he tried to analyze what the hell was happening. He looked down at his trousers. Then he looked up at me... He was really very decent about it all. As soon as he’d had his first explosion... he jumped away and ran back to his desk stark naked and began writing notes. He must be terrifically strong-minded. Great intellectual curiosity."
The low point comes in the treatment of Shaw, by this stage a celibate disabled old man. They drug him three times the dose and:
"Who is there?" shouted a voice from behind the hut. It was a male voice, but high-pitched and almost squeaky. Oh God, I though, the man is a eunuch after all...
[after]... I heard a yell from the garden and in the half-darkness I saw this tall, ghostlike, whitebearded figure charging down upon us stark naked and yelling, "Come back, you strumpet! I haven’t finished with you yet!"
I saw Mr. Shaw capering about on the sidewalk under the gaslight, white-skinned all over save for a pair of socks on his feet, bearded above and bearded below as well, with his massive pink member protruding like a sawn-off shotgun from the lower beard. It was a sight I shall not readily forget, this mighty and supercilious playwright who had always mocked the passions of the flesh, himself impaled now upon the sword of lust..."
He is made into a real man - no more humourless vegetarian prude. Sad and standard in "one of [Dahl's] lightest comic works".
Oswald is not Dahl; some of Oswald's opinions of his victims are cartoonishly snobbish; its idiotic, Lawrentian theory of virility is only used because it is very funny; and Oswald receives a brutal comeuppance for exploiting Yasmin that it's implied he never recovers from.
A dazzling and ridiculous book, and as far as I can tell it evaded all opprobrium because it was published in the gap between the sexual revolution and the rise of PC. From the above you already know if you should avoid it....more
Features befitting a great book: stunning detail, well-historicised prose, engaging characters, intricate narrative structure, embrace of multiple genFeatures befitting a great book: stunning detail, well-historicised prose, engaging characters, intricate narrative structure, embrace of multiple genres. But it's too clean, somehow.
Though it depicts predation by the worst of us; though its dystopia is one Pop-Hegel extrapolation from our current world-system, it's not as challenging as it thinks it is.
It consists of ten sudden narrative shifts, moving back and fore four or five centuries. These sections are connected by each having a 'reader' (the opening sea journal is read by the second narrator, the Romantic composer, whose letters are obsessed over by the journalist, whose memoir is seen by the hack editor, whose tale is seen in an ancient film by the saintly clone, who is remembered as a god in the post-apocalypse story that is as far forward as we see. (They are also connected by a reincarnation overlay - but, apart from giving brutal history more chances to be brutal to the same people, I don't really get it.)
The bit with the composer, Frobisher, is my favourite: he transcends his cheeky bohemian archetype and becomes horribly tragic despite his pig-headedness and camp pretension.
The last line, returning to the original Victorian narrator, is a good summary of the book's wounded, pessimistic collectivism:
He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!’ Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?
An elegy written during the defeat of France; I've never found anything this nationalist moving before. Probably because it is about the nation's failAn elegy written during the defeat of France; I've never found anything this nationalist moving before. Probably because it is about the nation's failure rather than shining destiny.
The central thought is that war is futile and absurd but that he must continue. The existentialism can get kind of leaden in comparison to his other stuff. ...more
Couldn't resist this after reading the blurb - Kant solving murder mysteries in wintry Konigsberg - but gave up after 80 pages of samey dirty Gothic bCouldn't resist this after reading the blurb - Kant solving murder mysteries in wintry Konigsberg - but gave up after 80 pages of samey dirty Gothic blah. Crime fiction is rarely compassionate, fantastic, or realistic - three ways fiction can impress me.
Loading...
