I always find reading great writers' juvenilia instructive. I revisited Eliot's Poems Written in Early Youth the other week, and found them remarkably unremarkable. I read straight thru Yeats's early books a while back, & found them strangely comforting – some lovely lyrics, but an awful lot of flatness and decorative imagery – the engine running, but the gears disengaged. It's good to know even the greats started out not so great.
I'd read a fair amount of '70s Ballard lately, so was pleased to come upon a copy (in a book club edition) of his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (bound with The Drowned World, his second and "breakthrough" book). Ballard later pretty much disavowed Wind, calling it a piece of "hack-work" done simply to break into the paperback market (previously he'd only published short stories). Apparently he had just turned 30, had a family to support, and felt that he'd never get out of his desk job unless he produced something novel-length. With a fortnight's holiday on his hands, he determined to crank out a 60,000-word novel in ten days of writing.
And he did – and boy does it show: paper-thin characters, reams and reams of far-fetched action sequences, and a basic plot mover (that the entire earth has been gripped by a high-speed wind that just keeps getting more & more devastating) that never even begins to get explained. It's a decent two hours' read, but one can't say anything more.
But then maybe I'm dismissing it too quickly, and out of hindsight: after all, it reads like a movie – like 2012, or The Towering Inferno, or The Day After Tomorrow, or any number of big-time disaster movies. And when it's compared to one of them – a team of scriptwriters, a zillion-dollar budget, etc. – it actually seems like a more than decent ten days' work.
Of course it's merely a dry run for Ballard's far more sociologically and psychologically interesting "disaster" novels (The Drowned World, The Crystal World, etc.). In those books he realized what he knows only in flashes in The Wind from Nowhere: that the big explosions and topographical changes of the disaster aren't nearly as interesting as the ways that characters react to them.
[5]
Showing posts with label novels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novels. Show all posts
Monday, September 02, 2013
Friday, August 23, 2013
returning to Neal Stephenson
I read The Diamond Age (19950 and enjoyed it, then promptly forgot most of it. I read Snow Crash (1992) and enjoyed it very much indeed, and even retained a bit of it. And then I read the Baroque Cycle – Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World (2003-4) – and was blown away by Stephenson's crazy recreation of the 17th century, this crazy pivotal moment when alchemy turns into chemistry, when all of our modernity is a-borning. Not that the Cycle isn't too long; like everything Stephenson writes, it's immensely detailed, full of a – well – baroque proliferation of details & factoids. But it sprawls in quite an agreeable manner, or at least its sprawl somehow agrees with me.
I picked up a copy of NS's next novel, Anathem (2008), not too long after the paperback was released (& the hardcover remaindered). And it defeated me, at least twice. The novum, that differentium that set the novel's work apart from our "mundane" world, was just to hard to wrap my mind around. So I made a couple of starts, got maybe 75 pages in, and laid the brick-like volume aside.
And then the other week I happened on a copy of Stephenson's latest novel, Reamde (2011). And on a lark bought it. And started reading it, almost absently, only to find myself drawn head over heels into one of those "gripping" "action" stories. Yes, it's too long, by maybe 300 pages; sure, there's too much loving detail; and ultimately, there isn't enough of the conceptual quirkiness that I like about NS. But boy Reamde is a readable book. And what's not to love? A Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that has found a way to actually harness and monetize gold farmers; a Chinese virus that ("REAMDE") that preys on players; Jihadist terrorists; Russian mafiosi; strangely likeable Christian survivalists; a cast of thousands.
At any rate, it sent me back to Anathem, and this time I stuck it out. By the time I was 150 pages in, I was loving it. By the time I'd slogged thru the entire 900+ volume, however, I was feeling pretty ambivalent. Ben – my Stephenson-reading buddy, with whom I talk thru the books on occasion – felt that there was too much philosophical talking over the course of the book. Indeed, the book's action (which takes its own sweet time getting off the ground) is repeatedly broken by long philosophical discussions, modeled quite obviously on Plato's Dialogues. (In fact, Stephenson includes as an appendix three "Calcas," or dialogic, graphed calculations, one of which is pinched directly from the Meno.) Now the philosophical discussions do indeed bear upon the convoluted plot of the novel, so they're not entirely extraneous: but they do indeed go on...
But my ambivalence wasn't quite that there was too much jaw and not enough event in Anathem. The amount of event, of actual action, in the end seemed about right. And while I was initially impatient with the philosophical disquisitions, by the end I found I was wishing for more of them, and at greater length. Stephenson seemed to rein himself in all too often – right when his characters were at the point where a discussion of Platonic Forms or something similar was about to break into something altogether profound, he'd break off the dialogue, and the next chapter would be something else altogether. One of two (or both of two) things was happening: 1) NS, a marvelous storyteller with a penchant for sidetracks, was consciously reining himself in before his readers went to sleep, jerking them back to some actual eventage; or 2) NS, very excited about philosophy but not a trained philosopher, was breaking off his dialogues before he got in over his head and embarrassed himself.
So I guess my disappointment in Anathem – which is still a pretty excellent book, better than Reamde or Diamond Age, not quite as great as the Baroque Cycle – is that the dialogues don't go on long or far enough, and that their ideas aren't quite as integrated into the conceptual structure of the novel as much as they should be.
[3-4]
I picked up a copy of NS's next novel, Anathem (2008), not too long after the paperback was released (& the hardcover remaindered). And it defeated me, at least twice. The novum, that differentium that set the novel's work apart from our "mundane" world, was just to hard to wrap my mind around. So I made a couple of starts, got maybe 75 pages in, and laid the brick-like volume aside.
And then the other week I happened on a copy of Stephenson's latest novel, Reamde (2011). And on a lark bought it. And started reading it, almost absently, only to find myself drawn head over heels into one of those "gripping" "action" stories. Yes, it's too long, by maybe 300 pages; sure, there's too much loving detail; and ultimately, there isn't enough of the conceptual quirkiness that I like about NS. But boy Reamde is a readable book. And what's not to love? A Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that has found a way to actually harness and monetize gold farmers; a Chinese virus that ("REAMDE") that preys on players; Jihadist terrorists; Russian mafiosi; strangely likeable Christian survivalists; a cast of thousands.
At any rate, it sent me back to Anathem, and this time I stuck it out. By the time I was 150 pages in, I was loving it. By the time I'd slogged thru the entire 900+ volume, however, I was feeling pretty ambivalent. Ben – my Stephenson-reading buddy, with whom I talk thru the books on occasion – felt that there was too much philosophical talking over the course of the book. Indeed, the book's action (which takes its own sweet time getting off the ground) is repeatedly broken by long philosophical discussions, modeled quite obviously on Plato's Dialogues. (In fact, Stephenson includes as an appendix three "Calcas," or dialogic, graphed calculations, one of which is pinched directly from the Meno.) Now the philosophical discussions do indeed bear upon the convoluted plot of the novel, so they're not entirely extraneous: but they do indeed go on...
But my ambivalence wasn't quite that there was too much jaw and not enough event in Anathem. The amount of event, of actual action, in the end seemed about right. And while I was initially impatient with the philosophical disquisitions, by the end I found I was wishing for more of them, and at greater length. Stephenson seemed to rein himself in all too often – right when his characters were at the point where a discussion of Platonic Forms or something similar was about to break into something altogether profound, he'd break off the dialogue, and the next chapter would be something else altogether. One of two (or both of two) things was happening: 1) NS, a marvelous storyteller with a penchant for sidetracks, was consciously reining himself in before his readers went to sleep, jerking them back to some actual eventage; or 2) NS, very excited about philosophy but not a trained philosopher, was breaking off his dialogues before he got in over his head and embarrassed himself.
So I guess my disappointment in Anathem – which is still a pretty excellent book, better than Reamde or Diamond Age, not quite as great as the Baroque Cycle – is that the dialogues don't go on long or far enough, and that their ideas aren't quite as integrated into the conceptual structure of the novel as much as they should be.
[3-4]
Sunday, March 31, 2013
John Clute: Appleseed
Appleseed, John Clute (2001; Tor Books, 2003)
John Clute's known as perhaps the most learned and intelligent critic of SF/fantasy alive; he's sorta like Northrop Frye with a passionate love of the space opera form, an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire speculative canon, and a prose style that sometimes rivals RP Blackmur's for knotty insight. So you perhaps can imagine what Appleseed, his second venture into actually writing SF, is like. Or maybe not – the vision of the future here, the sheer technological and social otherness of Clute's world is so fantastically imagined that it's hard for a reader to get a grip of anything like the whole. I'm used to being off-balance for the obligatory opening 50-75 pages of an SF novel, getting used to its novum (or nova); Clute keeps you off-balance for pretty much all of this medium-sized book, not least in his astonishingly various prose, which shimmies from the technologically gritty to the lyrically visionary to the weirdest yee-haw vernacular, often in the course of a single sentence.
Appleseed, alas, is way short on fully realized characters – it's really a kind of verbally and conceptually souped-up space opera, after all – but its mind-blowing imagination of a future of cybernetically "augmented" human beings, shimmering artificial intelligences, and vast metaphysical / theological forces almost makes up for that. At the very least, it's worth reading just for the relentless baroque energy of its dialogue & descriptive prose.
[2]
John Clute's known as perhaps the most learned and intelligent critic of SF/fantasy alive; he's sorta like Northrop Frye with a passionate love of the space opera form, an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire speculative canon, and a prose style that sometimes rivals RP Blackmur's for knotty insight. So you perhaps can imagine what Appleseed, his second venture into actually writing SF, is like. Or maybe not – the vision of the future here, the sheer technological and social otherness of Clute's world is so fantastically imagined that it's hard for a reader to get a grip of anything like the whole. I'm used to being off-balance for the obligatory opening 50-75 pages of an SF novel, getting used to its novum (or nova); Clute keeps you off-balance for pretty much all of this medium-sized book, not least in his astonishingly various prose, which shimmies from the technologically gritty to the lyrically visionary to the weirdest yee-haw vernacular, often in the course of a single sentence.
Appleseed, alas, is way short on fully realized characters – it's really a kind of verbally and conceptually souped-up space opera, after all – but its mind-blowing imagination of a future of cybernetically "augmented" human beings, shimmering artificial intelligences, and vast metaphysical / theological forces almost makes up for that. At the very least, it's worth reading just for the relentless baroque energy of its dialogue & descriptive prose.
[2]
Monday, March 25, 2013
michael moorcock: the chinese agent
Michael Moorcock, The Chinese Agent (1970; Mayflower, 1979)
I must've read this one about 30 years ago, probably in a library copy, because I didn't own a copy until I found one in a 2nd-hand shop a few months back. An enjoyable two or three hours, given that MM probably devoted all of a couple weeks to writing it. There are some passages of pretty evocative description – devoted mostly to the more sordid districts of London, to the old Notting Hill and Portobello Road – and gratifying few of the terrifically sloppy passages one finds in so much of his work of the 60s and 70s.
This is non-fantasy, non-SF Moorcock – a clear precursor of the "serious" city books of later years, Mother London (1988) and King of the City (2000). Gosh he loves London, and that affection suffuses the passages of urban description. Plotwise it's nominally a spy thriller – well, actually a spy farce, the sort of thing that got filmed so delightfully in all those Peter Sellers movies of the day. The protagonist is Jerry Cornell, who is a kind of down-at-the-heels, bourgeois version of Jerry Cornelius; he's working, improbably, for the British secret service. The novel has him revisiting the bosom of his disgusting Cockney family (rather more outrageously gross than the other Jerry C's), falling into bed with a shy receptionist and a Mata Hari-like femme fatale, and blundering his way thru a highly improbable comedy of mistaken identities, stolen secret documents, and time-bombs.
A bit of literary popcorn, in the final analysis – but it never aspires to be anything higher than light entertainment, and that's sometimes refreshing from a writer who can get all too "heavy" when he furrows his brow and becomes serious.
[1]
I must've read this one about 30 years ago, probably in a library copy, because I didn't own a copy until I found one in a 2nd-hand shop a few months back. An enjoyable two or three hours, given that MM probably devoted all of a couple weeks to writing it. There are some passages of pretty evocative description – devoted mostly to the more sordid districts of London, to the old Notting Hill and Portobello Road – and gratifying few of the terrifically sloppy passages one finds in so much of his work of the 60s and 70s.
This is non-fantasy, non-SF Moorcock – a clear precursor of the "serious" city books of later years, Mother London (1988) and King of the City (2000). Gosh he loves London, and that affection suffuses the passages of urban description. Plotwise it's nominally a spy thriller – well, actually a spy farce, the sort of thing that got filmed so delightfully in all those Peter Sellers movies of the day. The protagonist is Jerry Cornell, who is a kind of down-at-the-heels, bourgeois version of Jerry Cornelius; he's working, improbably, for the British secret service. The novel has him revisiting the bosom of his disgusting Cockney family (rather more outrageously gross than the other Jerry C's), falling into bed with a shy receptionist and a Mata Hari-like femme fatale, and blundering his way thru a highly improbable comedy of mistaken identities, stolen secret documents, and time-bombs.
A bit of literary popcorn, in the final analysis – but it never aspires to be anything higher than light entertainment, and that's sometimes refreshing from a writer who can get all too "heavy" when he furrows his brow and becomes serious.
[1]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)