A tree of immense girth grows from a tufted shoot; a terrace of nine levels rises from a clump of soil; a journey of a thousand miles begins under the first tread.
--Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 64
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I will be out of town for the next two weeks, so while reading will no doubt continue, logging probably will not. Most likely no new updates to the log until the middle of November. Later.
A Game of You (Sandman V), Neil Gaiman (1993), 186 pp (gn).
I really enjoyed this one; it feels like Sandman has really hit its stride and is living up to the very high reputation that it enjoys. A Game of You, like Season of Mists before it, is a single volume-length story, told over the course of six chapters. It has elements of a quest story, and also of the "lost sovereign returns to confront usurper" trope, but it uses them in ways that are not at all tired or clichéd.
The story is centered on Barbara (Barbie), a young woman living in an apartment building with a number of somewhat quirky neighbors. She also happens to be the reigning Princess of a particular Dreamland, created long ago by the King of Dreams. The Land is now threatened by a usurping Cuckoo (more a symbol or a metaphor than a literal bird), and Princess Barbara's retainers (who started life as her childhood toys) conspire to pull her back from our world into the Land. A cohort of her quirky neighbors follows her to try to help, as agents of the Cuckoo search for Princess Barbara....
A Game of You is by turns dramatic, amusing, and moving. All of that, but mostly, it's just the stuff of great storytelling. Well worth a look.
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Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons (1987), 384 pp (gn).
I'm not a comic book afficiando; I know little about the various histories, stories, lines, forms, and conventions that make up the comic book milieu. Even so, whenever I happen to wander by a discussion on comics, one of the titles that always seems to bubble to the surface as an example of a "modern classic" is Alan Moore's Watchmen. The title itself is linked to the famous quote from Juvenal: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" ("who shall watch the watchmen?"). (Parenthetically, I first encountered that particular epigram as a teenager reading Heinlein's short story "The Long Watch," where, as I recall, it's rendered "who will guard the guardians?").
Watchmen is a compilation of twelve chapters, each one advancing the overall story arc. In many ways, it's a reaction to or critique of the traditional super-hero story. It takes place in an alternate-history version of our world, one in which costumed figures--real people, with no real "superpowers"--dedicated to "fighting crime" started to show up around the late '30s and early '40s. History diverges even more from our own as a certain freak technological accident takes place in the post-WWII time period, and as a result, the U.S. wins in Vietnam and Nixon stays in office for over a decade. The central story arc is set in 1985, and involves several of the superannuated masked crime fighters (who have been put out of business by anti-vigilantism legislation) trying to solve a mystery involving the lone legitimate "superhero" of the piece, an insidious plot, and a bona fide evil genius super-villain.
There's a lot going on in Watchmen, as various threads are woven into the tale--flashbacks, stories-within-the-story, different scenes happening concurrently, etc. There's some good writing and a lot of food for thought. I think I might have got more out of it were I more familiar with the genre conventions that it's either drawing on or attacking; but then, I'm also proof that familiarity with those conventions isn't absolutely necessary to appreciate what's being done here. I really don't buy the central premise of the evil mastermind's "solution"; I think only by comic book logic would it possibly work out the way it is shown. And the pervasive feeling of nuclear annhilation paranoia that is portrayed is hard to recall to mind with the same immediacy now that the Cold War is a fading memory and new bugaboos have crept on the world stage to replace it. In that sense, it's a bit dated. Nevertheless, Watchmen is an impressive bit of work.
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The Bell Warden (LW&C IV), Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima (1995), 308 pp (gn).
The fourth volume of Lone Wolf and Cub. Four episodes in this one, fairly decent but not really standout. The first episode is almost as much history lesson as it is narrative. It outlines the history of the nine bell towers that were erected in Edo (Tokyo) at the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate (including one at Asakusa, which I've actually been to, although I don't remember the bell tower specifically). The bell warden, a post of some responsibility, hires Ogami to take on the warden's potential successors, and then sends them out, one by one, with orders to try and kill Ogami, on the theory that the bell warden must be tough and tested (the three candidates also happen to be his sons. Oops). That turns out about as well as might be expected when facing Mr. Super Samurai, and the history lesson concludes with the wry observation that that particular bell warden was the last fill that post, after which the bells were entrusted to monks.
One episode is probably the most Daigoro-centric so far. Ogami hasn't shown up for a rendesvouz, so Daigoro goes looking around the local temples. He's observed by a wandering swordsman, who quickly surmises that Daigoro is a "child of destiny," who has shishogan (swordsman's eyes). Ogami shows up on the last couple pages to demonstrate his own pair of shishogan.... The final episode is a lengthy one, and shows once again the co-mingling of assassin's code and samurai morality. A young woman of a lower class--originally a street performer--is taken in by a lord and trained in the sword. She's shamed and humiliated by one of the lord's senior retainers. She begins to call out the lord's men-at-arms, killing them and then cutting off their top-knots (apparently quite the desecration) and sending them to their families, in the expectation that eventually the one she wants will be sent to face her. Right before her quarry arrives, she encounters Ogami, who as it happens has been hired by the families of the disgraced men-at-arms. He holds off fulfilling his contract until she's had her revenge, then completes his task and gives her an honorable funeral. Like I said, samurai morality.
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Season of Mists (Sandman IV), Neil Gaiman, 218 pp (gn).
Season of Mists is the fourth compilation of the Sandman series, and the first to cover a single, on-going story arc, rather than loosely related or unrelated episodes. It's also the first to formally introduce the Endless (unless they all show up in Preludes & Nocturnes which I still haven't read). The Endless are incarnations of abstractions: Destiny, Dream, Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium (they also refer to a brother who has voluntarily absented himself, but don't mention his name, unless I missed it). The opening episode takes place in Destiny's halls, as he summons his siblings to a council. The real purpose of the gathering relates back to the opening episode of The Doll's House, in which Dream, in a fit of wounded pride, condemns his mortal lover Nada to Hell. Prompted by Desire and Death, Dream realizes that he was wrong, and resolves to go to Hell (where he is currently in a rather bad odor) and win her freedom.
Quibbles: I had a problem with the whole notion that Dream would have had power to condemn someone to Hell in the first place, particularly given that when the story actually shifts to Hell, it seems to be implied in at least a couple of places that most of the Damned are there because they've condemned themselves. And Dream's realization of his error seems rather sudden; after all, Nada has been languishing in Hell for 10,000 years already, give or take. I suppose this is meant to indicate that events in recent years have wrought a change in Dream's ability or willingness to empathize. As for the art in this volume, it strikes me as serviceable at best, except that I didn't really like the way Thor was drawn, and I quite disliked the way Death was rendered.
Quibbles aside, Season of Mists is pretty good stuff. It contains a lot of mythical elements, as representatives of various pantheons assemble in Dream's demesne to petition him for a favor. It's an interesting story, with some interesting conclusions; the resolution of Nada's fate in particular was rather moving. I'd say the series is getting incrementally better with each compilation so far.
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The Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber, 835 pp (hb).
The Crimson Petal and the White is a lengthy slice-of-life chronicle set in Victorian England. My familiarity with Victorian Age literature is minimal, to say the least--I have vague memories of bogging down 50 pages or so into Bleak House a decade or so ago, but that's about it. Nevertheless, the description of this (from the jacket blurb: "...the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter") picqued my curiousity enough to pick it up and give it a go.
The Crimson Petal and the White tells the story of Sugar, a young woman who is forced into prostitution at the age of thirteen by her own mother. When the narrative commences, she is nineteen, and has moved up somewhat in the world, only in that she works out of a slightly less run-down establishment than the vile hovel where she got her start, and that she can afford to wear reasonably nice clothes. Atypically for her class and occupation, Sugar is quite literate, and in the privacy of her room, once she can remove the mask of gentle complaisance with which she caters to her gentleman callers, she is working on a novel that is little more than an episodic and bloody revenge fantasy. Her journey really begins when her path intersects with William Rackham, heir to a medium-sized perfume and toiletry company. William is something of an immature author wannabe, unwilling to take up his duties in business, and provided only a slim allowance by his disgruntled father as a result. Meeting Sugar effects a major change in William's attitude, and he throws himself into the task of becoming a respected captain of industry. The broad arc of the narrative follows Sugar as she is installed in lodgings as William's mistress, and then later is brought into his household to serve as governess to his only daughter Sophie.
Revolving around the two central characters are a number of secondary characters. There is William's older brother Henry, obsessed with religious piety and being good. He wants to take orders and be a minister, except he doesn't think he's worthy enough. Then there's Henry's lady friend, Mrs. Fox, a widow who is heavily involved in the Rescue Society, a group of society ladies who try to convince prostitutes to reclaim their fallen virtue and turn from prostitution. And there's Agnes, William's wife, a woman whose erratic personality and utter sexual naïveté lead to some eccentric and unpredictable behaviour. Agnes's various pathologies cause her to wander into some rather unorthodox theological flights of fancy:
Now Agnes stands at her bedroom window, wishing that her guardian angel would materialise under the trees, just there outside the Rackham gates. Her hand itches to wave. But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God, Agnes has decided, is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach. So, They tolerate each other, and take care of the world as best They can.
Probably the book's greatest strength is that it's very well written. The prose is rich and chewy and complex. Few if any of the characters are truly compelling (Sugar might qualify), although I never felt near wandering into Eight Deadly Words territory ("I don't care about any of these people"), but I think the prose and the facility of the descriptions actually make most of them more interesting than they otherwise would be. On a paragraph by paragraph level, it's just a pleasure to read:
Morally it's an odd period, both for the observed and the observer: fashion has engineered the reappearance of the body, while morality still insists upon perfect ignorance of it. The cuirass bodice hugs tight to the bosom and belly, the front of the skirt clings to the pelvis and hangs straight down, so that a strong gust of wind is enough to reveal the presence of legs, and the bustle at the back amplifies the hidden rump. Yet no righteous man must dare to think of the flesh, and no righteous woman must be aware of having it. If an exuberant barbarian from a savage fringe of the Empire were to stray into St James's Park now and compliment one of these ladies on the delicious-looking contours of her flesh, her response would most likely be neither delight nor disdain, but instant loss of consciousness.
The Crimson Petal and the White is not for the prudish or the faint of heart; matters sexual and biological are described matter-of-factly and with no glimmer of sentimentality or eroticism. Often such descriptions are rendered fairly humorously, and I had marked several for potential quoting, until an attack of conscience and/or good sense hit. I know. But I just have to share that the phrase "the snot of male ecstasy" made me giggle. As did this parenthetical: "(Before she fell from virtue, Caroline could be entranced by embroidery or the slow blinking of a baby for hours at a time: these days she can barely keep her attention on an orgasm--admittedly not hers--happening in one of her orifices.)"
The ending is a bit of a disappointment; although the author explicitely intended it to be abrupt and open-ended, I would have preferred just a little bit more in the way of closure. Still, it's generally quite an interesting journey that the narrative takes us on, and the prose definitely makes The Crimson Petal and the White worth reading.
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The Flute of the Fallen Tiger (LW&C III), Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima (1995), 311 pp (gn).
Third volume of Lone Wolf and Cub, this installment contains five episodes. The first gives the volume its name, and involves Ogami Itto taking on a trio of reknowned ninja enforcers. Its most notable feature is the last of the trio's death speech:
M-my neck...it sounds...like whistling....Worthy of...the Shogun's executioner...my blood spurts forth...the diagonal cut across my neck...keens like wind in the bare trees....They call it...mogari-bue...Flute of the Fallen Tiger...I always dreamed of making a cut that would sing...and now...I hear my own...such irony.... [falls over dead; The End]
In another episode, Ogami protects a young girl who has been sold into prostitution by her family from the yakuza gang that has bought her. Although he does have (as is usually the case) somewhat ulterior motives, it's still a brave course of action he undertakes. Another of the episodes fills in more of Ogami's history. Back in the final episode of The Assassin's Road, we learned why Ogami was on the run. Now we see his wife giving birth to Daigoro, and the plotting of the Yagyu clan that claims her life, frames him for sedition, and forces him out of his hereditary post as kogi kashikunin, the Shogun's executioner.
In yet another of the episodes, Ogami runs into a master swordsman who has become weary with the constant fighting and killing of a samurai's life. He remonstrates with Ogami to give up the assassin's road, and when Ogami says he can't, the swordsman decides that he has a moral duty to stop him. This episode reminded of something I'd observed in the earlier volumes. I like the artwork in these--black and white, with various shades of charcoal gray, figures and landscapes drawn quite precisely and with good detail. But the action scenes reveal the limitations of the medium in the arena of portraying complex movement. Often for the fights, there are panels and panels of straight action, and they have to be frozen snippets of a dynamic event. It makes it confusing to follow just what's going on sometimes, at least until the action has slowed down and someone (more often several someones) is slumped on the ground. Then it's possible to go back and reconstruct just who got hit and how.
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The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson (2002), 658 pp (hb).
I've only read one book by Robinson prior to this, Red Mars, which I hated. So I wasn't exactly champing at the bit to pick up more of his stuff, at least until I read John Novak's review of Robinson's latest, which made it sound quite interesting. I'm glad I picked it up, though, because in many ways, The Years of Rice and Salt is an impressive accomplishment--and I don't necessarily mean that in a damning-with-faint-praise sort of way (as Chad puts it). It really does have some impressive stuff. Nevertheless, I have a few quibbles, which I'll get to in a bit.
The Years of Rice and Salt takes as its opening premise the notion that the same Black Plague that devasted Europe in the our 14th century, rather than killing off a large-but-manageable percentage of the population as in our history, instead wiped out pretty much the entire population, leaving all of Europe empty. It then proceeds to speculate on what the development of the world would have been like from that point. The story is divided into ten sections, each of which moves a bit farther forward in time, with the final section taking place a few years past our own current date of 2002. As a general rule, I dislike fragmented narratives that jump to a new time and new characters in each successive section (one reason I could never get into a James Michener book when I was younger), but it's a technique that actually works fairly well here.
One thing that makes it work is that, although each section has different characters, they are also the same. How, you ask? Robinson adopts the idea that this is a story about a "family" of souls (called a jati) that are stuck on the wheel of reincarnation. As they are continually passing from the stage and then being spun back into the world, their fates draw them back into contact with each other, even though their roles and relationships, on the surface at least, fluctuate. They may be mentor-student, parent-child, husband-wife, etc., but underneath they are the same souls, and each soul's general "personality" or characteristics gradually become evident over the course of the whole story. This would be quite confusing if Robinson didn't provide a life-line, in the guise of having each soul's new character designated by a name that starts with the same initial letter each time. Hence (for the three central figures), we have a K (the revolutionary), an I (the thinker), and a B (the stolid laborer). In addition, at the close of many of the sections, the jati congregates in the bardo (the afterlife) to do a post-mortem (heh) on the most recent turn of the wheel.
Another nice touch that Robinson throws into the mix is stylistic variation. Several of the sections are written to follow a certain type of actual historical writing. For instance, the opening section (which opens with a quote from Monkey, aka The Journey to the West) is in the style of a traditional Chinese novel, like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Water Margin. It has same the opening couplets at the beginning of each chapter, the tendency to break into verse without warning, and the episodic "if you wish to know more, you must read on" closing for each chapter. Another section seems to mimic more scholarly Chinese writings and commentaries, by having little interlineal comments sprinkled through the text--the sort of thing that makes up, say, the Lü Shi Chun Qiu (i.e. Mr. Lü's Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals). It's an interesting device, and although I wasn't entirely sold on it at the outset, I eventually came around to the view that this should count in the "impressive accomplishment" column.
The thing about alternate history is that it's hard, not only to get the speculation on what's changed right, or at least make it plausible, but also to know what isn't likely to have changed. It's on this latter point that Robinson's story brought me up short a few times. For instance, in the opening section, the characters are brought to China as part of one of the great admiral Zheng He's treasure fleets, and they later have an encounter with the Yong Le emperor, son of the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty. This is all well and good, and played fairly straight--the changes have not yet rippled out enough to affect what would have been happening in China at that point. In a subsequent section, though, he has a huge Chinese expeditionary fleet prepared in order to conquer Japan (it's blown off course and ends up discovering the west coast of North America). This supposedly occurs at the instigation of the Wan Li emperor, which was hard for me to swallow. The Wan Li emperor was the beginning of the end for the Ming dynasty; during his reign he refused to meet with court officials for decades at a time, and imperial administration went to pot. There are other examples, too--anachronistic references to bits of Chinese literature (Shen Fu's "Six Records of a Floating Life" and Kang Youwei's "Great Peace") that come too early in his alternate timeline.
These are, admittedly, quibbles. A larger point is that I often had the feeling that what I was reading was an admirable technical composition, precise, intellectually stimulating, but in some sense chilly and distant. Perhaps in the end Chad is largely correct: The Years of Rice and Salt is definitely worth reading, I'm glad I did read it, and I would recommend reading it once. I'm not sure, though, that having read it once, I'd read it again.
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The Oracle Glass, Judith Merkle Riley (1994), 507 pp (hb).
This is the second book that I've read by Riley, the other being The Serpent Garden. All in all, I think The Oracle Glass is the better book of the two, although in its favor, there were individual elements of The Serpent Garden that I liked better--the most obvious being that I found the main character of The Serpent Garden to be a more fun, likeable character than the protagonist of The Oracle Glass. Which is not to say that the main character of The Oracle Glass is unlikeable or unsympathetic, because she's not.
The Oracle Glass is another historical drama, this time set in Paris during the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV (ca. 1675). It centers around what was apparently a historical occurrence, the Affaire des poisons, where a cabal of women were arrested for providing poison to members of the court who wished to dispose of inconvenient husbands or lovers. This novel jumps into the center of that sisterhood via its main character, a young woman named Geneviève Pasquier.
Geneviève is the second daughter of a bourgeois family with pretensions to minor nobility that happens to be down on its luck. Small and considered ill-favored, especially next to her beautiful older sister, Geneviève grows up reading the classics with her father. Through her unpleasant, scheming mother, she comes in contact with Catherine Montvoisin, aka La Voisin, a wealthy, well-connected fortune-teller who also happens to be the acknowledged Queen of an underground society of witches, alchemists, and abortionists. La Voisin is an imposing, practical, ruthless woman:
Madame never did anything for free. And yet, I suppose, there was a certain bizarre honor in her. She never stole, either. That was more than you could say for any number of respectable people. Murder, now, that was different. There she did just as everyone else did. Except, perhaps, more neatly. She would never leave a head beneath the floorboards. It would offend her craft. That is doubtless, I mused, the way one differentiates the professionals from the amateurs in this world.
When things blow up in Geneviève's home, she is whisked away by La Voisin, who is interested in her because Geneviève has a genuinely useful skill--she is able to receive visions of the future by looking into a bowl of water. Geneviève is re-invented to become the Marquise de Morville, an old woman with a life-span of over 150 years, preserved (supposedly) by her deceased husband's alchemical creme. She plunges into the world of court ladies, where fortune-telling is all the rage, and plots of various dimensions and flavors are as natural as breathing. Amidst it all, she has to retain some integrity and humanity, find love, and see if she can one day escape her dangerous situation with skin intact. It makes for interesting reading, and Riley has done quite a good job with it. Whether one likes this sort of story is, I think, very much a matter of taste, but I enjoyed it.
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Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (2002), 331 pp (hb).
As a general rule, I don't read a lot of short fiction, but when I saw that Ted Chiang had a newly published collection of stories, I was eager to make an exception. I first read "Story of Your Life" several years ago, and was blown away by its virtuosity. With a calling card like that, it doesn't matter if the other stories in the collection aren't quite at the same level of excellence; if they're even some fraction of the quality, they're guaranteed to be pretty darn good. And so it is. The collection contains eight stories, and although none of them can quite equal "Story of Your Life," they are all of them thought-provoking, in their varied ways, and several of them are very good indeed.
"Tower of Babylon," the first story in the collection, was Chiang's first published story, and it won the Nebula Award for novelette in 1991. It tells the biblical story of men building a tower to pierce the vaults of heaven. It soon becomes clear that the world of the story is somewhat different than our own--I'm no structural engineer, but even I know that load-bearing walls that high made of clay are impossible--but the central idea is well-realized. I think the ending is a bit of a let-down, but not enough to mar the overall story.
"Story of Your Life" is not only thought-provoking, dealing as it does with notions of free will and inevitability, but it also tells a story that I find very, very moving. To say much more about it would be to mess it up for those who haven't read it. It has orbiting space aliens, but they're really not the point of the story, just a convenient plot device. Chiang does just about everything right here, from his subtle use of verb tenses, to his interleaving of narratives, to his speculations on physics and linguistics. It doesn't matter that what he postulates couldn't actually happen; I find that doesn't affect the strength of the story at all. This story won the Nebula for novella in 1999, and since I was actually curious about why it didn't also win the Hugo, I went and read the story that won in its place, Greg Egan's "Oceanic". It left a bad taste in my mouth (atheistic tracts wrapped in a SF package tend to do that), and suffice to say I think "Story of Your Life" is a much superior story.
There are other fine stories in the volume, although I won't describe all of them. Well, okay, one more..."Hell is the Absence of God," which just won the 2002 Hugo Award for best novelette, is a very uncompromising, disquieting tale that asks what would happen if the existence of Hell, God, and periodic angelic visitations were a verifiable fact of life, rather than something to take on faith (or not). Not a happy, optimistic story, but a fairly interesting one.
Ted Chiang is a real talent, and this collection is well worth reading.
(Chad Orzel, Mike Kozlowski, John Novak (scroll down), and Nathan Lundblad all have reviews of the collection)
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