Book | The Black Letters

Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville (2007) E

Date read: 7.17.10
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

What is Un Lun Dun? It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up… and some of its people, too – including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion; and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book.

When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong.

Un Lun Dun is basically Neil Gaiman‘s Neverwhere meets The Phantom Tollbooth, and owes debts – some playfully acknowledged in the text itself – to many other classics of children’s and fantasy literature, including A Wrinkle in Time and, of course, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s a cleverly crafted and delightful book: Miéville lets loose yet again with his famously phantasmagorical imagination, filling out his alternate London with topsy-turvy architecture (houses constructed of obsolete technology, a ghost town whose buildings constantly flicker through various historical incarnations, a web-cocooned “Webminster Abbey”), a lovingly detailed bestiary, and a vast arsenal of puns (some of my favorites: UnLondon’s sister cities include Parisn’t and Lost Angeles). All of these are complemented by Miéville’s appropriately inky, energetic illustrations. For fans of his adult fiction, there are also plenty of touches of eerie, deeply unsettling dark fantasy, some of which could have come straight out the New Crobuzon books – I couldn’t help feeling that the Black Windows of Webminster Abbey might be lesser cousins of Bas-Lag’s Weavers. With his usual anti-authoritarianism, Miéville also takes a good amount of pleasure in dismantling and inverting the tropes of the fantasy quest, so that we get a very unintended heroine who quite literally refuses to go by the rules of the (talking) book.

For all its delights, though, Un Lun Dun somehow failed to really surprise and engage me. It felt a bit like a themepark ride: there’s plenty to see, but it all goes by rather quickly, and you’re not sure how much it really meant to you at the end of it all. The characters are all likable enough, including the quick-thinking, occasionally snarky heroine, but few are really memorable enough to be lovable, and I had about the same feeling about the book as a whole. Its pleasures lie more in its ingenuity and dazzling wordplay than in any real emotional connection. I also had a little difficulty with the writing style, which is heavy on short, bluntly declarative sentences. And though I appreciated the plot’s pro-environmental, pro-literacy bent, the messages were shoehorned in a little awkwardly and obviously.

So, like Kakaner, I’m going to have to make a conditional recommendation for this one: try it out if you’re a big Miéville fan, are looking for pure entertainment, or have a younger reader of strong constitution to share it with. I would have loved this so much more had I read it when I was about twelve – too much younger and I think certain scenes might have kept me from sleeping at night, though I would have read them with relish anyway.

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China Miéville
Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville (2007) K

The Innkeeper’s Song, by Peter S. Beagle (1993) E

Date read: 5.7.10 (or thereabouts)
Book from: University library
Reviewer: Emera

After witnessing the resurrection of his dead love from a riverbed, a village boy sets off in wild pursuit of the cloaked women in whose company she now rides. One is a sailor-swordswoman-storyteller; the other, a soldier-nun on the lam from her convent. Under the roof of one inn in a distant land, all of these stories interweave with those of a varied cast of characters, including a fox who’s not always a fox, a stable-boy dreaming of adventure, and a cantankerous innkeep.

Alas. I’m a Peter Beagle fan to the end, primarily on the basis of The Last Unicorn, but The Innkeeper’s Song was a dud for me. Wondrously imaginative concepts, compelling characters – but only in summary. In execution, the rapid multi-character narration distracts from the action, and while Beagle does an impressive job of differentiating the various voices, I found most of them – and I really hate to say this – unbearably irritating, with “folky” or “lilting” speech patterns that came off as stilted and artificial.

About the same sentiment applied to the plotting. While there are moments of incredible emotional intensity and sublime, twilit weirdness, they were by far outnumbered by the points at which I had to put the book down and say “REALLY? Did that really just happen?” (Also – for one of the most awkward sex scenes I have ever had the displeasure of wincing through – “was it really just described in those terms?”)

Considering my reaction more carefully, it’s not so much that the events in question (most of them) were that outrageous. Rather, the affected narration left me disengaged, fenced outside the story and its characters by a barricade of theatricality. Half the time I felt that I had no idea what the characters were doing, or why – and not in the good, pleasurably mystifying kind of way; I was just left squinting in skepticism/confusion as this massive cast frantically played out acts of obscure significance. Even worse, I didn’t really care, despite all the potentially thrilling setpieces, like a showdown between Nyateneri (the soldier-nun) and a pair of ninjas assassins in the inn’s bathhouse. The only sequence that I wholeheartedly enjoyed was the second-to-last chapter, in which one of the characters undertakes a nightmarishly intense descent into death – as in many of Beagle’s works, mortality is a chief concern of The Innkeeper’s Song.

Unfortunately, the novel’s stagy, borderline sententious quality undercuts the obvious care with which it’s crafted. Under all the bluster, I could still dimly glimpse all of the things that I normally associate with Beagle’s works, the bittersweetness and the playful lyricism and the dusky, mysterious feel. Here, they just left me all the more bummed that I didn’t actually enjoy the book.

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Peter S. Beagle

The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell (2000) K

Date Read: 6.27.10
Book From: Personal Collection
Reviewer: Kakaner

Malcolm Gladwell is a seasoned journalist and a staff writer for the The New Yorker, as evidenced by his tight, logical, and compelling writing. The Tipping Point explores the socioeconomic phenomenon of its namesake, “The Tipping Point,” or the point at which some product, behavior, or idea suddenly becomes a sweeping epidemic in a population. As demonstration, Gladwell explores a variety of fascinating and relatable social processes– the teenage smoking epidemic, the sudden wildfire popularity of certain products, and the sudden decline in New York City crime– homing in on product, concept, and process development, marketing, and testing. He boils down the process for these phenomena to three common factors, linking together epidemics which we would have otherwise found unrelated.

Not being trained in any field of socioeconomics, I cannot offer insight or criticism into the technical elements of the book. All I can say is that this book provided an incredibly rigorous learning experience for me. Gladwell assumes a reasonably intelligent audience, and lays out his arguments and evidence concisely with appropriate depth. Gladwell lays out the “Law of 150”, a concept that proclaims that 150 is the maximum number of people that work and network together thoroughly and efficiently, and not only uses anecdotes and interviews to support his findings, but even digs a little deeper into anthropological studies on villages that support this law. It was refreshing to see an author work harder than usual to find his evidence and argue so fervently for a claim. And this is not the only case– he uses genetics and psychology to support his case study of teenage smoking, and specific, irrefutable examples of how predicting trends helped the Airwalk campaign.

Continue reading The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell (2000) K

Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett (2001) E

Date read: 6.8.10
Book from: Borrowed from my brother
Reviewer: Emera

Since I’ve been wasting too much time trying to write summaries and not enough actually reviewing, I’m deploying a back-cover summary here:

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxane Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening – until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.

So my main difficulty with Bel Canto laid in the fact that it’s halfway a rapturously romantic fable about the power of art – opera in particular – and love, and halfway a grim tragedy. Now, that’s basically the story’s selling point, that the author plays on the tension between romance and realism, but it left me feeling a little cold and mostly troubled throughout. The romance reaches such giddy heights, with character after character discovering hidden talents and unexpected love, that my suspension of disbelief (which is notoriously generous) just gave up and wandered away about halfway through, leaving me reluctant to be really convinced and moved by any of it. (I still teared up at the ending, though.)

This despite Patchett’s coolly, dreamily elegant and often funny prose, the artfulness of the entire set-up, and my wanting to really care for the characters, all of whom are very human and carefully drawn. There’s a French ambassador who just wants to go home to his wife, a vice president who throws himself with increasing satisfaction into his role as maid to captors and captives alike, a translator who’s forced to find words of his own for the first time in his life, a weary Red Cross negotiator who watches the breakdown of the hostage-terrorist divide with growing unease… I did think that their development suffered from the fact that the cast is so large, so that many don’t get much further than sketches, even if those sketches are evocative.

All in all, I found the book pleasing in style and admirable in craft, but as a whole it just didn’t click for me.

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Ann Patchett

Just a Pilgrim: Garden of Eden, by Garth Ennis, art by Carlos Ezquerra (2002) E

Date read: 5.5.10
Book from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

On an Earth whose surface has been scorched into uninhabitability by the expanding sun, a lone, gun-toting traveler arrives at what may be humanity’s last outpost. At the bottom of the former Marianas Trench, a group of scientists have established a settlement complete with gardens and a space shuttle equipped for escape from the burned-out planet. The new arrival, who simply calls himself the Pilgrim, is at first welcomed as a much-needed defender against the various mutated beings that prowl the trench, but his fanaticism-fueled taste for destruction may bring unwanted consequences.

This mini-series (a sequel to the 2001 Just a Pilgrim, which I realized only belatedly) got a big meh from me. While the concepts and imagery are gratifyingly ambitious, the overall direction of the plot is way too obvious if you know anything at all about Garth Ennis and his pet topics, i.e. have read Preacher. As much as I love Preacher, Ennis’ expression of his anti-Christianity is so extreme and lacking in nuance that I had no interest in swallowing it twice. Just a Pilgrim was pretty hilarious to read shortly after seeing the recent film The Book of Eli, though, which is diametrically opposed in its message and about as lacking in depth – I think if you put a copy of Pilgrim and a recording of Eliin the same room, they’d explode each other.

Artwise, I did like Ezquerra’s monumental vistas and Paul Mounts’ mucky textures and bruised, sweltering color palette of intense purples and oranges, although occasionally the color choices did end up being hard on the eyes.

For the record, I also tried to read the original series but couldn’t maintain interest, for about the same set of reasons that I had a hard time getting through Garden of Eden, but also because the art had a much cruder look to it, despite the artistic team being the same.

Conclusion: if you’re looking for Western grit, post-apocalyptic atmosphere, and fairly mindless violence involving mutant jellyfish and hammerhead sharks, you may like this. Just don’t expect depth or anything approaching meaningful commentary on… anything, really.

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Garth Ennis
The Boys, by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson (2006-200*) E

The Woman Who Loved Reindeer, by Meredith Ann Pierce (1985) E

Date Read: 6.10.09 (fourth[?] reread)
Book From: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Caribou is a dreamer of dreams, a solitary figure isolated from her tribe ever since the death of her father. One day her sister-in-law comes to her, bearing a strange golden child whom she begs Cari to conceal and raise. At first unwilling, Cari is nevertheless struck by the child’s beauty and takes him in, naming him Reindeer – for as she reluctantly comes to realize, he is a trangl, one who can take the form of both human and stag. Though she longs to keep him by her side, his blood will always call him to run with the wild deer that course the land. As the years pass, stirring spirits and strange upheavals in the mountains and hot springs send the tribespeople to Cari’s door for advice. From Reindeer, she learns that the world is being remade, and that if she is to save her people, she and Reindeer must guide them over the Burning Plains to the safety of the lands that lie beyond the Pole, where only the wild deer have run before.

Of all the authors I’ve read, I’ve most deeply identified with the work of Meredith Ann Pierce, for the longest period of time. I first read her books when I was eight or nine, and though there were many literary loves before then, and have been many, many more since, I always think of Pierce’s books – particularly her Darkangel Trilogy – as The Milestones. She’s most often written tales about strange, wise girls who become strange, wise women, fall in love with transfigured or supernatural lovers, and have adventures in worlds of beautifully realized mythology. Mythology, because her books often read to me like myths from alien planets: her images and language have a timeless, jewel-like purity to them, coupled with deliciously archaic diction and – this might be the part that most gets me – a deep, deep sense of yearning that encompasses both human and immortal desires.

This was the first time I’ve re-read one of her books in about eight years, and since a lot has changed in that time, this doesn’t have quite as immediate an emotional impact on me as it used to. I used to get a lot of vicarious rage and anguish on Cari’s behalf. The older me is both slightly more phlegmatic (though really not that much less romantic), and slightly savvier: this time around, I was a little squicked at Cari having a relationship with her foster child, despite Pierce’s care in emphasizing his inhuman nature and unfamilial relationship with Cari.

Regardless, I was still deeply affected by the wondrous and joyful imagery: gambling trollwives, rivers of silver caribou running, a sledge with belled harness and golden runners, firelords with lava-seamed palms… And while the younger me fumed (again on Cari’s behalf) when she read the inconclusive ending, the older me was pleasantly surprised to recognize its maturity and realism. This will continue to be a story, and a world, that I treasure, and that I suspect will still surprise me every time I re-enter it.

Meredith Ann Pierce’s works will very likely appeal to fans of Patricia McKillip and Robin McKinley; I’ve never entirely understood why she hasn’t become more well-known and widely read. Not that I’m biased or anything.

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Meredith Ann Pierce

“Summers at Blue Creek, North Carolina”

Apologies from both of us for the long hiatus in posting – I’m trying to get back into the swing of things, but there’s always so much to do… I’m still toiling away on a huge review backlog, but in the meantime, here’s a seasonally appropriate poem that’s been my most re-read poem for the past few weeks:

Summers at Blue Creek, North Carolina

There was no water at my grandfather’s
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people’s house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor’s cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.

– Jack Gilbert

—

The simplicity and precision of the language are so pleasing and effective. Like the narrator, we’re easily led into imagining the whole scene – dusty summer heat, the child’s methodical toiling – but can’t gain access to the interior of any of it, the inner life of the child who’s the kernel of the scene. And so at the end there’s this sudden, disorienting, frightening absence of even the outer signs of life (“the sound of me”). The empty shapes of the buckets, the burnt-out foundations, the well, all echo this absence. The adult narrator’s attempt to draw up or tap back into his earlier consciousness parallels the process of lowering the buckets into the well. Reading it this way, I can’t help but imagine “the sound/the bucket made hitting the sides/of the stone well going down” – a physical detail that confirms the reality of the scene while heightening the eeriness of the absence of consciousness – as a kind of plumbing, an attempted sounding of the depths.

I’ve been particularly fascinated with this poem because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about development of self-knowledge that comes with the formation of an adult personality, and the corresponding distance that it’s created between my earlier self and the self (I think) I know now. I can remember a lot of the things that I thought when I was younger, and why I arrived at those thoughts, but not really how I arrived at them – I’m so hyperconscious now of my thought processes that I have trouble imagining now how it would feel to not be constantly running over them and teasing the wires apart and trying to trace them back to their sources. Younger self was not a very self-analytical beast, for the record. It’s temptingly easy to imagine a semi-verbal, unreflective little animal still hunkering down somewhere in the middle of me.

Really, though, it’s quite probable that I haven’t changed as much as I think I have, and that I’m still running on almost all of the same basic processes and impulses, it’s just that I’ve learned to recognize and suppress or manipulate a significant-seeming subset of them, enough to fool myself into thinking I’m a lot more self-aware and self-civilized than I actually am.

I’m not sure that this train of thought ended up going anywhere, perhaps appropriately…

– E

“The Confessions of Prince Charming,” by Kelly Barnhill (2009) E

Date Read:4.4.10
Read from: Fantasy Magazine
Reviewer: Emera

If I wasn’t such a sap, I wouldn’t be sent on these damn errands, but some mother is sobbing for some lost daughter and a father gritting his teeth and saying “half my kingdom” and the mama saying “please” through tears and snot, and I want to say “yeah sure, lady, everybody’s missing someone”, but instead I gallop away because they expect it, and let the rain worm its way into my boots.

Kelly Barnhill‘s “The Confessions of Prince Charming“ is the story that got me started on a cruise through most of her Web-published work. I’d never heard of her before, but “Confessions” ended up being the first short story I’d read in a long while to actually surprise me with how much I enjoyed it.

The title made me wary since it’s been done so many times before, but Barnhill paints a Prince Charming who’s painfully believable: a secretive little boy with mommy issues grows up into a flippant, self-absorbed, regret-eaten man who’s always reaching and never attaining. His moments of tenderness and introspection serve to highlight all the hurt oozing up through the cracks. He’s backed by a cast of equally wounded and intriguing cameo characters, including a witchy divorcée Rapunzel and a lovelorn wolf. There’s a moment of homoeroticism that came off to me as over-the-top – too many social-commentary buttons being poked at in one small space – but apart from that, I loved it. And lest it sound like it’s just a big Freudian sob-story, there are numerous moments of luminous description, as per usual for the author, and the traditional elements that she weaves together are playfully reimagined. Also, it’s pretty funny – Barnhill does levity and gravity equally well.

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Kelly Barnhill
“Princess,” “Homecoming”
Tales of madness and depravity

“Princess,” “Homecoming”

Reviewer: Emera

Err, couldn’t think of a semi-clever conglomerate title for this string of short story reviewlets, but onwards!

—–

Jeanne Desy‘s “The Princess Who Stood On Her Own Two Feet” (1981; read 4.19.10) is an obvious but not uncharming feminist fairy tale about a tall princess, her faithful (talking) Afghan hound, and a prince with questionable values.

For a bit of background, this apparently first appeared in Ms. magazine in 1981, became quite popular, and has since been frequently republished. Also, someone pointed me to it when, on behalf of a friend, I was trying to find out the title/author of a story (not this one) about a prince who thinks he’s a dog, and ends up having to be wooed by a princess who also thinks she’s a dog. If anyone’s read that one, let me know! The source remains elusive – the friend’s not even sure if it’s a short story or a side episode within a longer novel.

—–

Kelly Barnhill‘s “Homecoming” (2008; read 4.4.10, from Underground Voices) is a vignette about return from war, and small mercies. The prose often feels over-labored (“They tilted their faces to the ground and held their weapons weak, as though they were a great weight that they alone must bear”), but I like the earthy little details of the moment of hedgewitchery on which the story turns.

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Jeanne Desy
Kelly Barnhill
Tales of madness and depravity

“Song of Wandering Aengus”

Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

– W. B. Yeats

—

No real commentary, just some Yeats love. I love the coolness and silvery-darkness of all of the images in the first and second stanzas contrasted with the “fire in [his] head,” and the way the meter and slant rhyme/consonance of “hollow lands and hilly lands” echo the rolling, repetitious feel of the image itself.

– E