Book Review: Embassytown by China Miéville

Embassytown by China Miéville

This latest book by the British sci-fi phenom is a special blending of his superb urban fantasy world building techniques and a didactic pondering on what it means to speak and to be heard. Most of the book exists in a kind of inbetween state, it could be told in a short story and get all the plot in there pretty easily. But doing so would limit what makes Miéville such an interesting writer. Before this book he's created several versions of London: Bas-Lag, a world that mixes old-school magic and new-school technology, the mixed cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, the place where all of London's disused goods go to live a second life, and a London controlled by various factions and cults and religions, each praying to a different god and working towards a different apocalypse. Embassytown is the first book where he moves beyond alterations of London and into an entirely alien world. The planet is far on the outer edges of explored space, the natives are strange to the point where they don't even recognize humans as beings, and the little human outpost in the middle of the alien city has come under siege by aliens craving a new drug.

There's a complex situation going on (so complex that, should I put the book down for any given amount of time, it took a bit to readjust into such an alien landscape) involving the Hosts (aliens) which speak with two mouths and can only say absolute truths. They throw lying competitions to see who can get closest to telling a not-truth. They use humans and objects as similes to talk about other things. They can only communicate with humans through Ambassadors (twins that, through some technology, are able to sync their thoughts and speak with two voices to say one thing) until a new Ambassador shows up that isn't twins and whose speech becomes a drug to the Hosts. After all of this gets set into motion - and it takes a bit to get there, and a bit to understand what's going on in the first place - not much happens until the last 50 or so pages of the book. There's a term Miéville invents for people that just kind of do what they need to do to get by, no more and no less, "floaking." Our hero, Avice, a woman born on this alien outpost who gets away and returns for love, is a master floaker and as she goes so goes the narrative. The middle 150 pages meander as one person dies but is replaced and the situation just gets a bit worse every day. Of course, all of this floaking around serves a greater purpose, developing the idea of Language and language.

The fundamental difference between the humans and the Hosts is their inability to understand each other. This can, of course, operate as a metaphor for people's general lack of communication but there is so much more Miéville wants to say. The Hosts speak Language with their dual mouths and similes like "The Girl Who was Hurt in Darkness and Ate What was Given to Her," (this being Avice, who, as a child, was taken and beat and then fed because the Hosts can't say something that isn't explicitly true) and are trapped within this shell of absolute literalness. When a flawed speaker, the new Ambassador, is introduced and seemingly speaks with not one mind but two the Hosts are literally drugged. One of the best aspects of the book is how Miéville describes the descent of the Hosts into their addiction. Because the entire city is bioengineered to be partially living even the houses fall prey to the language-drug. If the people, Host and human alike, are to be saved there must be a paradigm shift away from the exacting nature of Language and into the glorious complexity of language. 

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!

The book really comes into its own when Avice figures out that the similes must be transformed into metaphors. Instead of the Hosts being like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given to her they must be the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her. It's the difference between being "cool as ice" and "ice cold". By drawing such attention to this seemingly insignificant idiosyncrasy of our language Miéville expounds in great detail how important it is to communicate and understand language. Everything means something and by paying attention to how we say something we can better utilize our language to mean exactly what we want to mean. Exactly because we can lie by saying we are an emotional wreck (taking the visceral reaction to a car accident and applying it to our inner self) we are able to say so much more than talking in plain truth would allow. That breakthrough is presented wonderfully in the book and works both intellectually and emotionally. The previous floaking allows for the full impact in both head and heart of the revelation and switch between simile and metaphor. 

END THE SPOILERS!

While this book isn't nearly as exciting as, say, Kraken nor as wild a ride as Perdido Street Station, I think that Mieville has something important to say which, for the first time, aligns perfectly with the created world and the characters and the emotions they stir within the reader. It's the first time everything works, I'd say. I probably would, however, not go to it for a re-read any time soon. It doesn't have the almost Indiana Jones-y nature which will propel the reader back into its world over and over again, unlike those two books I listed earlier in this paragraph. There's just something missing which keeps this book from being his best, even though all the pieces work better than they have in his previous books. I'd probably call it "fun."

Book Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

I've cried plenty of times at movies, songs, and even TV shows. They're able to reach that level where the emotions are high enough quickly and effectively through the combination of sound and (in the case of movies and TV) pictures. It almost seems like cheating. A book has never made me cry though a few have come close, including Roald Dahl's Danny the Champion of the World and Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. But for whatever reason they never quite reached that point to turn words into tears. It's probably not their fault, I don't blame them any. It has as much to do with my investment as it does with the quality of the writing. There's just something about the way books work which makes it harder for me to get attached enough to shed a tear. All of this was true until I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a book about a young boy dealing with his father's death on 9/11 and looking for a lock to match a key. There was not one but two moments in the book that made me cry in addition to the countless others where I laughed and exclaimed in shock. What I'm saying is that this books is not only extremely well written and incredibly emotional but that those two combine to vault it into my short list of the best books I've ever read. 

Before September 11th, 2001, Oskar Schell's life seemed to be pretty great. A loving mom and dad and grandma and an active imagination would provide him with a pretty idyllic childhood had his father not died on that horrible day. But after that day he withdraws into himself and invents gadgets like a microphone that projects everybody's heartbeats so that they would eventually sync with each other and everybody could be together in that way. He is, understandably, devastated. Then he finds a key hidden in an envelope with the word "Black" written on it. He goes on a quest through the five (or is it six?) boroughs of New York City to find the lock that the key will unlock and maybe put an end to his grief about his father's untimely and unexpected death. Sprinkled throughout his story we get the story of his grandfather and grandmother (his dad's parents) and why they could never quite work out how to live with each other. This part, told through their autobiographies and diaries, contains the first moment that made me cry. When the grandfather leaves his wife after she told him she was pregnant he brings her two hands closer and closer and closer to each other until there was but a "dictionary page's width" between them. This wordless (he lost his ability - or will -  to speak after the emotional trauma of the Dresden firebombings so vividly captured here and in Slaughterhouse-5) expression of a love that almost was but could never be is so well conceived that I had to stop reading for the night and wipe away some tears. The second moment comes when Oskar reaches the end of his quest. It's oddly anticlimactic in a plot sense but the way that scene incorporates the father-son theme that runs throughout the book is what earns the waterworks. 

There are also a few moments where Oskar believes certain happenings to be about one thing which are later revealed to be about something else entirely that are both shocking and enlightening. Much like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, there's a sense of the age-old idea that "all of this has happened before and will happen again." There are echoes and reverberations throughout the novel, even in some of the photographic imagery that is incorporated (mostly as a part of Oskar's book of Things That Happened To Me) the lock and key being of great importance along with the power of books, writing, and words along with the difficulty of using them to communicate. At one point the type runs together for pages because Oskar's grandfather runs out of paper to write on but must continue to write. It's a powerful image that is more than just gimmickry that some have called it out for. In fact, this book has received some not-insignificant amount of criticism. This piece encompasses most of the criticisms the book has endured, including the lack of originality and the precious nature of the characters/story/style. And the thing is that I can't really argue against that article because it's mostly right. The style is different from the normal novel. The characters are more like fairy tale characters dealing with real issues than fully real people. And it's not really original. Nobody will deny that it is just taking things that worked from others and incorporating them into this story. What I will deny is that all of these things are bad. All too often we require our art to be developed in a void where nothing else can possibly influence the artist. Does it really matter if this story was told by somebody else about some other happening and in some other way? Not if this one works. Please do identify sources but don't become beholden to them. Steal as long as you do something with your stolen goods. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close does plenty with its pieces, whether they were stolen or sprung fully formed from Foer's head. That's all that matters.

Book Review: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The Name of the Wind owes a lot to Harry Potter. There's the school for learning magic, the dead parents, the snooty aristocrat arch rival, the wandering Big Bad enemy, the teacher with a grudge against our hero and the teacher with loopy but seemingly knowledgeable insights, and there's the girl that is kinda strange but makes a connection with Kvothe, the hero of the tale. Yes, there's a lot of overlap there but what The Name of the Wind does with these characters and ideas (which I recognize weren't exactly invented for the Harry Potter universe but the popular girl get's all the dirty looks, I guess) makes it a great story. This, the first book in the Kingkiller Chronicle series does a lot of heavy lifting as we hear about the first 15 years of Kvothe's (pronounced like "quoth") life. The framing story is a clever conceit in this tale because the Kvothe we know in the present is quite different from the Kvothe at the beginning of his life (and he doesn't even come close to old Kvothe's melancholy by the end of this book, the first day of his recitation of his life). We know Kvothe will end up as an innkeeper and bartender somewhere in the middle of nowhere hiding from his previous life as a hero but as of the end of this book he's still riding pretty high. Only at the end of the book do we get a hint of what happened to him to turn him against the world when his two audience members - one a faerie and the other an author recording Kvothe's tale of woe - have a midnight conversation about how sad Kvothe has become in his later years. It's a telling scene and told well as we get some talk of masks that would please Oscar Wilde.

The book moves at a quick pace (I finished the 672 pages in around a week and a half) and is well written, though there are a few issues. At this point in the story young Kvothe is a little too good at everything. Much of the middle of the book throws a bunch of seemingly minor issues at him which he solves quite easily. Part of his myth is that he can do everything and I guess that is on display here but it makes for a kind of uninteresting story at points. There's a lot of wheel spinning without much meaning outside of a couple of great scenes in the middle bits (the fire in the workshop and Kvothe's performance of a long and complicated song stand out as being particularly great). The last 100-150 pages, though, are stellar.

Perhaps the element that separates The Name of the Wind from Harry Potter the most is the love interest. I never really got anything from Harry's various romantic entaglements and in fact I thought he probably should have hooked up with Luna Lovegood because she was clearly the coolest of the girls hanging around Hogwarts. Kvothe's object of desire is Denna and she is a perfect match for him. They meet early on but the relationship only really gets going in the middle of the book. Denna, like Kvothe, has a mysterious past and nobody to rely on for food or money or shelter. Where these circumstances propelled Kvothe to become a master arcanist (magician, basically) they pushed Denna to a largely nomadic lifestyle, living off the attention she gets from men of all ages while never getting close to anybody for too long. She's an incredible alluring character and whenever she's around Kvothe can't help but admire her and the reader will likely follow his lead. The end of the book concerns a possible attack by the creatures that killed Kvothe's entire troupe of traveling performers. This drives Kvothe to the scene of a wedding day massacre where he finds that Denna is the only survivor. There's a lot of fun interaction between the two as they spend more time with each other than either has spent with another person for quite a while. The relationship grows as they find out why the Chandrian attacked this particular group of people and what attention they have brought on the little town. It's one big setpiece which includes a dragon and a harvest-time celebration. It's supremely well written and gives me hope for the next books in the series. Let's hope they spend more time on heroic antics rather than finding enough money to pay for another semester at school. One of these things is way more exciting and, though the other is important background information, I hope it has come to an end. This is a series with epic inclinations and if it can capitalize on those it could end up being one of the best series in the genre, if not the modern era.

Book Review: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

I've been away from this blog for almost two months. I've been reading Freedom for about half of that time, on and off. After a fantastic beginning where we get a brief sketch of the Berglund family of St. Paul, Minnesota the book slows down and investigates seemingly every little detail in the lives of Walter and Patty (the husband and wife), Joey (the son) and Richard Katz (the college friend and third side of the central love triangle). It is firmly entrenched in the every day of modern families and their first-world problems. If this isn't interesting to you or if you can't connect with the characters this book just won't work for you. However, if you can see a bit of yourself in each of these people there's a lot to get out of this book.

Depression is a specter that looms large over all of the characters here. After a bit of post-game reading it seems that Franzen himself has battled with depression and his particular insight to this aspect lends quite a bit of depth to the characters' individual problems. We see all kinds of depression and the ways that it embroils itself in each of the characters is slightly different. Patty's love for her husband crossed with her passion for his best friend. Walter's love for his wife crossed with the knowledge that he won't ever be enough for her and his firmly held beliefs about overpopulation. Joey's morals clashing with his need to get rich at the age of twenty. These are all very real people with very real problems and that tinge of depression colors the mood of the entire book.

That isn't to say that there aren't some bits of cleverness. Particularly enjoyable elements include the opening and closing chapters where we see the Berglund family from the outside. The opening chapter sheds some light on Patty who, according to the neighbors, would never call anybody something worse than "weird", though later we see that she has the capacity for a lot more than that. The final chapter sees the Berglunds not as a family desperate to hold together but rather a family torn apart by things left unsaid and things too readily said. It's all very sad but there is an element of hope. Joey and Jessica (the daughter who doesn't get much to say in this whole thing) seem to have learned from their parents' mistakes and their own. At one point we learn about Walter's father and grandfather and we begin to understand that a lot of the problems the Berglunds have come because they are trying to fix the mistakes that their parents made with them. Of course, this just leads to making even worse mistakes. It is, perhaps, not a new insight but it is well told and vividly detailed.

There are, of course, some things that aren't so great. For a book so cleverly and carefully constructed there are some parts that overstay their welcome. After that corker of an opening there's a hundred or so pages of Patty's autobiography. No other sections go on as long as this one and, though it is important and there's not a whole ton that could be cut out or trimmed up, I got a little tired of it. And there's another problem with that section: I don't think it is differentiated enough in terms of style from the rest of the book. It still seems like the narrator and not a character's personal recollection. Late in the book the autobiography is revisited and that additional bookending device is clever and makes sense (and is thankfully shorter than the first segment) but I wish there was a greater separation between the two storytelling aspects. It's almost as if Franzen is afraid to write in a "lower" style for a character who wouldn't be as good as writer as he is. Franzen's writing isn't particularly hard to read and I rarely had to go back and reread a sentence or paragraph for lack of understanding on the first pass. It's all very easy to read, which is good, but there were also very few sentences that stood out to me as beautifully constructed. I guess that's kind of the point, these people are normal and the writing reflects that. I just generally like a bit more flavor in my reading.

This brief review can't possibly capture all of the intricacies of the book. And I won't profess to fully understand all of the implications of the book right now or in the future. However, coming relatively soon I will be talking about the book with my friend, John, on our new podcast, Canon Fodder. There we'll likely talk about all of these elements and more (I'm particularly interested in the construction of the book and the fact that, besides the autobiography, we only get male-driven sections) and the potential lasting impact of the book. Should it be considered part of the New Canon? At this point, I don't know. I will post a link on this blog whenever we record that podcast for your perusal and pleasure.

Book Review: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Imagine a world where kids are picked at random to compete in an all out fight to the death which is engineered and broadcast by the government. Imagine an arena that is booby trapped and filled with implements of death with which the young contestants can maim and kill and monitored by hundreds of cameras. If you're thinking of Battle Royale you aren't wrong. However much The Hunger Games borrows from the concept of that novel/manga/movie - and it borrows a lot - it totally works on its own right. The idea isn't original at this point but it is supremely well executed and hits all of the right emotional buttons.

Don't think, though, that Battle Royale is the only influence here. There are heavy dystopian future elements with a government that forces its people from each of the 12 districts to play by their rules both in and out of the arena. One of the best elements of this book is the sense of hunger that Collins conjures throughout. Obviously in the beginning we see Katniss outside in her daily life where she must illegally hunt just to feed her family and the hunger is right there on the surface. As the story goes on and Katniss learns how to survive in the arena the hunger becomes something different. It's a hunger to survive and get back to her family while trying to maintain her sense of humanity. It's this central conflict between survival and her human nature which drives the story and kept me reading raptly as Katniss tries to win and subvert the rules at the same time.

Of course, there's a twist. Each district sends two contestants, one male and one female. Peeta, Katniss' counterpart, is also a really interesting character. He seems to be in love with her but it might just be a strategy to win the game. As these are two young people thrown together by circumstance and under intense pressure some kind of attraction must arise. What it means to each of them drives the second half of this book and Collins brings them through quite a few interesting circumstances. The emotions are very real and complex, an element I didn't expect from such a book.

This book is, of course, very violent. There are all kinds of death and destruction and gore which makes the events seem very real. The deaths are emotional and thrilling at the same time. It's being filmed soon and is aiming for a PG-13 rating. I don't know how they're going to do some of the more intense sequences unless they really push the ratings like the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (and probably Part 2). I hope they stay true to the intensity and if we must sacrifice some of the blood I guess that's alright. The book is one of the most exciting books I've read in a while and I look forward to reading the remaining books in the trilogy.

Book Review: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman made his name with the His Dark Materials series of kid lit. That series is, for me, among the best of the kid lit genre, if not the entirety of literature. He gets so much heart and so many ideas out of a really interesting idea. It did, however, inspire a lot of controversy among those in the religious community. In Pullman's follow-up book he doesn't shy away from that controversy. He full on embraces it.

TGMJatSC (which is a long title even when abbreviated!) is a retelling of the story of Jesus with a couple of twists thrown in, the most important of which is Jesus' twin brother, Christ. Jesus follows his path as we know it and his brother follows him around to record his deeds. But he doesn't just record the "history", he records the "truth". For example, the "feeding the multitude" story is really Jesus' generosity and hospitality inspiring the rest of the crowd to share their food, thus multiplying the food in a figurative sense if not a miraculous one. It is only in the recording of this story by Christ that the miracle appears fully formed so that Jesus literally feeds thousands of people with only a few fish and loaves of bread.

The idea that Pullman is getting at throughout this book is that Jesus never wanted an entire religion and church to be built around him. During his forty days in the wilderness it's not the Devil but Christ who comes and tempts him with the idea of fame and everlasting reverence. When Jesus rejects this Christ is approached by an "angel" - who is never identified but might be a certain fallen one - and is set the task of following Jesus around and recording not what happened but what should have happened. He's making a story here and he is free to warp and exaggerate what Jesus does and say in order to later use him as the foundation of Christianity. This can be best seen in the Sermon on the Mount segment (and they really are segments. Pullman writes the book as if it were one of the books of the Bible and his short chapters with clipped writing do well to get the reader in the feel of those books.) where Jesus uses phrases like "yakkety yak" and "blah blah blah" with Christ resolving to edit them later to seem more Messiah-worthy.

This book is short (I read it in a couple of hours) and the ideas presented within are really interesting to consider. A religious person will get as much out of it as a non-religious person because the story of Christ writing "truth" instead of "history" can be expanded to the act of storytelling in general. Late last year and continuing into this one there has been a lot of talk about The Social Network, a film that has dubious ties to reality but tells a compelling story. Here Pullman argues that it's not the thing that happened which matters but what it means and what we can learn from it. This book shows us what "actually happened" and our collective knowledge tells us the "truth" of the situation. As the great John Ford film says, "When fact becomes legend, print the legend."

Book Review: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde.

This book (thankfully denoted as "A Novel" for those of us that don't know how books work) is a departure from Jasper Fforde's popular Thrusday Next series. Instead of being based on an alternate England where literature crosses over with reality, Shades of Grey is the story of an alternate England where color perception denotes your social standing. There is a Colortocracy in place and it ensures that everybody is kept in their right place. Purples (those that can see, well, purple) are at an almost religious position and Greys are of such little importance that they don't even have to follow the Law of Munsell, the man that instated the Colortocracy after the Something That Happened. All of this is to say that it's kind of like a typical utopia/dystopia story like 1984, A Brave New World or Brazil. Everything seems pleasant at the beginning but the reader slowly learns about the way the world works and that it may be more sinister than we initially thought.

Ever since the 1-2 punch that is 1984 and A Brave New World there hasn't been much new in the way of dystopian fiction. They all follow the same pattern so you pretty much know what you're getting into story-wise. Luckily Fforde realizes this and makes the world more important than the story, at least in this first (and - so far - only) book in the trilogy. He throws the reader right into the middle of the action and begins by slinging terms like "wrongspotted" and "National Color" around with little explanation of what exactly those terms mean. He builds upon these terms and we soon realize that each person can see only one or two colors naturally and that the hero, Eddie Russet, is a pretty high perceiving Red. That he can see so much red makes him desirable to some and a threat to others in the Outer Fringes town he is sent to as a punishment for trying to improve line-queuing. This is a society where the Laws of Munsell are king and only through clever loopholery can on improve the way things work. In fact, through successive Leapbacks most technology and art have been destroyed in order to create a streamlined society so that the people can focus on chromatic improvement.

If all of this seems like a lot of ideas and no story you're kind of right. The book takes place over the course of a week or so and much of it is just Russet going around and figuring out how the town works and falling in love with a Grey named Jane. But he can't marry her because marrying for love and not chromatic improvement is the silliest of follies. Everything is done to set up your next generation to be of a higher perception. Fforde brings the lighthearted clever prose the Thursday Next series was known for over to this one and it's a good thing he does. The weight of explaining all of the new concepts here and telling the story might have been too much for the book to handle without the little laughs we get as the characters root around an abandoned city for spoons (which, of course, have postal codes on them which, of course, have been rendered close to useless through various Leapbacks that have all but destroyed the Postal Service as we know it) and marriage brackets and pools much like those that pop up at the beginning of every sports tournament. It's a clever book that moves quickly through its 400 pages thanks to Fforde's writing and plotting.

Of course, this is the beginning of a trilogy of books. As such there's a lot of build up and only a little payoff. I suspect that, much like the Lord of the Rings books, this first section's climax will look small in comparison to the end of the trilogy as a whole. That's not to say that Shades of Grey's Balrog fight isn't exciting. The climax brings several relationships to a head as well as opens the world wide open. Some things are explained but have little impact as of right now but seem like they will be of great importance later in the series. I'm alright with this as long as the payoff actually happens. As is the last section is much more exciting than the previous 300 pages and really sets up the rest of the series quite well. The book is certainly worth a read for those that like clever dystopian futures and fun - if a little light - writing. And, if you're not down with the French language, here's a little hint:

retroussé (comparative more retroussé, superlative most retroussé)

1. Turned up, as in describing the nose.