Author: katenepveu

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Rowling, J.K.: (01-02) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (audio)

If I’ve done my math right, I should be able to listen to all of the Harry Potter book on audio before the last one is released in July; so I started with the first two, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Listening to these was an interesting and revealing experience. I was glad to be reacquainted with the charm of Rowling’s prose, the humor and the small touches that get lost for me in the big picture. And I got a better sense of the major characters’ personalities than I had before, again because of the slower nature of audiobooks. So those were definite benefits.

Of course, the slower nature also gives more time for flaws to become apparent. With the first book, this is mostly limited to a realization that the mythic nature of the ending doesn’t quite come together; some of it fails to resonate (ROT-13 spoilers (decrypt at a webpage or via a browser bookmarklet): jul dhveery pbhyqa’g gbhpu uneel). The second book, however, I just found more work to listen to. It takes a long time to get started, and tying the books to the school year does odd things to the pacing and tension; the “woe is Harry” sections are a slog; and the structure of the book is neither fish nor fowl (a spoiler-filled post on this is over at my LiveJournal). Also, small plot holes are more apparent, like the contortions required to get a teacher-free confrontation at the end, or (more ROT-13 spoilers) jul yhpvhf oebhtug qbool gb ubtjnegf jvgu uvz va gur svefg cynpr. At any rate, I didn’t enjoy it as much, though I will say that Lockhart is so much more fun when performed (as the movie already showed).

I intend to listen to at least the third book, but I may permit myself to just read the fourth and fifth, as they are monstrously long and seem very likely to suffer in the audio format. (Not sure about the sixth.) I continue to be anxious about the final book: I think there are a number of things being set up by existing books, that I’m not sure if there’s going to be enough room to satisfactorily resolve. These two books, for instance, are built around the fact that things often aren’t as black and white as they first appear: but there are still a lot of received truths in the universe that I’m not sure have been thoroughly debunked. (The one that immediately comes to mind is “all Slytherins are nasty”; somehow this seems implausible to me, and yet all I recall getting so far is “there are bad people in other houses,” which you’ll note does not, actually, negate the prior sentence.) I’ll leave the rest for another time, since they become more explicit in later books.

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Robb, J.D.: (24) Innocent in Death; [meta] 2007-03 commenting notes

Another late winter, another J.D. Robb book, this time Innocent in Death. An entirely harmless school teacher has been poisoned, and while the solution seems to be at his exclusive private school, Eve has a hard time getting a handle on the case. It doesn’t help that she’s gotten tied in knots over an ex-lover of Roarke’s, for the first time.

I do like that Robb continues to explore Eve & Roarke’s marriage, putting stresses on it and exploring how they react. This particular situation also has a nice thematic relationship to the main mystery—which is perhaps a touch over the top, but still good fun. One of the better installments in the series, I’m inclined to say at the moment.

Administrative notes: you can now get new comments on entries of your choice by subscribing to RSS feeds; look for the link below the “post a comment” form. And OpenID commenting works again, so LiveJournalers can just enter the URL for their journal to sign in.

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King, Stephen: The Dark Tower series

The problem with talking about Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is the ending. Personally, I hate it, so much so that I’ve finally acknowledged to myself that I can’t bear to re-read the series (I finished it nearly two years ago, and for several months was planning a re-read so I could write it up properly). This opinion is not universal, however, so I can’t just say “it sucks, stay away”; but I also can’t just broadcast indiscriminate spoilers to help people decide whether they want to read it. (If you want my spoilery takes on things, see these LiveJournal posts (reverse-chronological order).) Nevertheless, I should say something about the series, so I will do my best here.

The series is made up of seven books [*] written over more than thirty years. In very brief, the Dark Tower is the nexus of all universes—and it is failing. Roland of Gilead is the last of his world’s gunslingers; he is on a quest to save the Tower, traveling through a world that has moved on.

[*] There is also a prequel novella called “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” first published in the anthology Legends and reprinted in King’s collection Everything’s Eventual. To the best of my recollection, it is entirely skippable.

Roland and his quest are introduced in The Gunslinger, which was originally a fixup of five stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (King substantially re-wrote the book to bring it into line with later books. I haven’t read the revised version, because I regard it as a (melodrama alert #1!) betrayal of the reader.) Its fairly famous opening sentence, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed,” gives a sense of the book as a whole: strange, spare, dark, compelling but not precisely welcoming—much like its title character, in other words. Though it has elements of Westerns, horror, and epic fantasy, this book feels most like a Western to me—or, to be precise, least like a horror novel or an epic fantasy novel. (I don’t read Westerns.)

The next two books, The Drawing of the Three and The Waste Lands, describe the formation of a new ka-tet, or group bound together by destiny. As such, these three books form a natural unit—despite the fact that The Waste Lands ends on an appalling cliffhanger. The books get longer and more like King’s usual style, opening up from their tight focus on Roland as he, himself, opens up.

(These three books are also a unit because I read them together, more or less—I don’t remember when I started, but it wasn’t very long before I bought the third new when I was fourteen. As a result, I first fell in love with the series during my “indiscriminate” phase—while I’ve re-read them since, and they’ve held up for me, I can’t claim to be objective.)

The fourth book, Wizard and Glass, was published five years later. The bulk of it is a flashback to Roland’s original ka-tet, his first love, and the roots of his quest. There’s much good about this story, but it has always felt over-long to me; and the present-day framing material is unfortunately slight. Structurally speaking, it is a pause between the first and last three books, clearing away the old now that the new has been established.

The last three books were released at intervals of six months in 2003 and 2004, after King’s serious accident in 1999. I mention the accident here because I found myself wondering whether some of the issues I had were attributable to King’s having rushed to finish. This is mostly in reference to the last book, which I will come to in turn.

The fifth book, The Wolves of the Calla, is faster and tighter than the fourth, though it still spends a fair bit of time on backstory, this time of a newly-introduced character. There’s nothing wrong with this thread, but it didn’t particularly grab me. Perhaps it was just the character, or perhaps there isn’t room in my heart given how thoroughly it’s filled by the ka-tet as established in The Waste Lands. The other threads are a variation on Seven Samurai and a return to our world (or something very close to it) as significant in the larger picture—because, after all, what’s the point of having a multiverse if you can’t play with it?

Song of Susannah, the sixth book, is noticeably shorter than its predecessor in both length and time: I believe it covers just a single day. It also ends on a cliffhanger, and the level of metafictionality rises rather a lot. I don’t have a problem with how the metafiction works in the series, but if you are allergic to the concept, you should very definitely give the series a miss. (Ditto if you hate authors tying all their books together into one big universe.) By the end of the book, I was filled with fierce love for the ka-tet and was pretty well dreading the next one: I’d run headlong into unmarked spoilers for the last book, you see, as part of a conversation in a general forum, and I just couldn’t see how that would work.

(I believe Song of Susannah is the book with an allusion to the fall of the World Trade Center, which I found in jarringly bad taste and kind of a cheat, to boot.)

And now to try and figure out what to say about the last volume, The Dark Tower. I think my issues with the book fall into two categories: everything before the Coda at the very end, and the Coda itself.

The Dark Tower series is almost defiantly cross-genre: the underlying quest is high fantasy, while the characters and plots are from Westerns, horror, and fantasy (in roughly that order of frequency, I would guess). This works surprisingly well until the last volume. The genres of problems and their solutions are mismatched; there are unnecessary single-genre bits; and the overall effect is lumpy, puzzling, and frequently anti-climactic. It’s still affecting and effective in points, but much more towards the beginning, as I recall.

And then there’s the Coda. It’s the very last thing in the book, and it opens with the author telling the reader that, no, really, you probably don’t want to read this. And indeed, I wish I hadn’t, but I’d been spoiled—though the warning is itself annoying, as the general effect (melodrama alert #2!) was of the Coda tearing out my heart and stomping on it, while telling me smugly that it was all my fault. But melodrama aside, I think there are genuine logistical problems with the Coda, that the book makes no attempt to resolve or even acknowledge. So the Coda ran afoul of two of my major reading characteristics: fervent partisanship on behalf of beloved characters, and a perpetual desire for plot elements to make sense. Conversely, at least some people who like the Coda seem to do so for its thematic and symbolic elements. That’s about all the guidance I can give as to whether someone might like it; I realize it’s not much, but even as it is I worry that I’ve come too close to spoiling things.

I genuinely thought I would never see this series finished, even before King’s accident; and I’ve been reading it for so long, and have such an emotional reaction to it, it’s hard for me to assess the series overall. There’s certainly much that’s good in it: outstanding characters; careful use of its central themes of addiction and division; successfully pulling off a very tricky type of metafictionality; and a kind of fundamental conviction or passion behind it all that makes a lot of objectively-corny things work (though YMMV as always). The cross-genre stuff is really interesting as well, at least until it breaks down in the last volume. But as I’ve suggested above, the pacing is often problematic, and I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone who found all of the resolutions in the last volume satisfactory (not counting the Coda). Given all that, and what I suspect are highly personal reactions to the Coda, I can’t really recommend it or not recommend it. It’s a great big ambitious piece of work, possibly King’s life work, and I expect it to be the subject of debate and analysis for years to come.

(Need I say it? No unprotected spoilers in comments, please. If you must, either ROT-13 them or put them between <span style=”color: #000; background-color: #000;”> and </span>.)

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Smith, Alexander McCall: (02) Tears of the Giraffe (audio)

Tears of the Giraffe, by Alexander McCall Smith, is the sequel to The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. As with the first book, I listened to an audio recording narrated by Lisette Lecat.

This book is somewhat more focused that the last, with two major threads and two minor. In Mma Ramotswe’s professional life, she investigates the ten-year-old disappearance of a young American man, at the plea of his mother. (Lecat’s American accent is imperfect, but does not hurt my ears too much.) To keep that investigation from being over too soon, there’s also an adultery investigation, conducted by Mma Ramotswe’s new assistant, that raises unexpected ethical questions. In Mma Ramotswe’s personal life, she and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni adjust to their new status as an affianced couple and find that their new lives take an unexpected turn (to them; it’s entirely predictable to the reader). Relatedly, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s maid also has some adjusting to do, in a subplot that felt to me like it had barged in from some other book.

Lecat does a beautiful job of narrating, as before, and the very leisurely pace of the story was restful for part of the time I was listening—but only part. As with the first book, I didn’t find the mystery portion satisfying (too easy, both as a puzzle and in its outcome), and I have no reason to think that any subsequent books will be different. I should probably just check them out of the library and skim them to see what happens to the recurring characters (rather than trying out our library’s downloadable audiobooks for the third one). However, if you like the books already, do try the audiobooks.

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Wilder, Laura Ingalls: Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie

It’s funny what I remember about books from my childhood. I’m sure I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, including Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie, dozens of times when I was a kid: I have a very strong memory of reading them at my paternal grandparents’, a set of paperbacks like the ones currently in stores except with pale yellow borders. But when I re-read these first two earlier in the year for the first time in probably twenty years, I was amazed at what I rediscovered.

First, I had the hazy recollection that they were set much, much earlier, all the way back in colonial days. (Hey, as a kid I didn’t have a really good grasp on U.S. history, okay?) The Industrial Revolution is a far greater divide than mere chronology would suggest—the author died within my mother’s lifetime! (I don’t think I realized they were autobiographical, either.)

Second, I had completely forgotten a major part of the second book, when the local Indians react to the family’s setting up a homestead on the prairie. This dominates the second half of the book, but when I saw Oyceter remark on it, my immediate reaction was flat-out incredulity. I can’t think how I managed to forget this, but there it is: I remember things like building a house and making maple syrup, but not actual plots. (To be fair, there is quite a lot of detail about making things, from houses to hats to food, which I still enjoy very much.)

Third, I’d forgotten that Laura was a tomboy. The books are mostly told in third person from Laura-as-child’s point of view, and they make no attempt to disguise that Laura wasn’t interested in proper ladylike behavior (or that she sometimes behaved badly). I probably don’t remember this because I didn’t feel very constrained by, or even aware of, gender roles as a child; but now I think it’s pretty cool. (And, conversely, find Laura’s prim sister Mary very boring, as I think Laura did at the time.)

As mentioned above, the books rarely shift point of view: in the first book, there are a few first-person stories set off in the text as “The Story of [something]”, and there are some comments from the present-day author of the type, “No one knew, in those days, that fever ‘n’ ague was malaria, and that some mosquitoes give it to people when they bite them.” From my adult perspective, this is sometimes frustrating. I would have liked to know, for instance, what Laura thought about American Indians when she grew up; I could tell that the adults around her had different views, but not what she thought as she was writing. And sometimes I would have liked a psychological explanation for events, not just a factual reporting. It’s a little thing, but what was Laura’s mother thinking, to tell blonde Mary and brunette Laura that they should ask their cousin which is best, golden or brown hair?

(I also wondered about Laura’s mother’s history. There’s a reference that she was “very fashionable” before she married, and she still likes dressing up; she must’ve been really in love to move out of town to a place where she would go weeks without seeing anyone other than her spouse and children. I am not, however, curious enough to read the prequels written by other authors.)

On the whole, I couldn’t recommend these to adults, because they’re written at a pretty low level. However, so far they hold up quite well to re-reading, and would be fine for kids or to read to kids. I just hope the rest of them continue to hold up.

(This post was written thanks to a LiveJournal poll indicating it was the most desired, rather to my surprise. Thanks, LiveJournalers, for giving me motivation to write.)

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Kay, Guy Gavriel: Ysabel

Guy Gavriel Kay’s new book, Ysabel, is a return to his first work, The Fionavar Tapestry, in at least two ways. It is the first of his books since then to have a contemporary setting, though this book is set entirely in our world; and two characters from The Fionavar Tapestry reappear (rather to my surprise). I read it as a return in a third way, to one of the story patterns prominent in Fionavar, but that’s debatable.

Ned Marriner is fifteen and in present-day Provence, because his photographer father is shooting a book there and his mother is in the Sudan with Doctors Without Borders. In a chapel, he meets two people in rapid succession: an American girl named Kate, and a man with a knife who tells them first, “He isn’t here,” and second, that they should leave because while he has killed children before, he has “no strong desire to do so now.” Because he is a character in a book, and for other reasons, Ned doesn’t let go of the mystery posed by the man; and he, Kate, and the photography crew are drawn into the latest iteration of a very old story.

While I admire Kay for attempting something new, the book doesn’t work for me. The most fundamental reason is the voice, which didn’t click and thus kept me a layer away from the story. Some of my problems are with the little details Kay throws in to show that Ned is a present-day teenager: to take the opening chapter as an example, iPods don’t have an off button, and while Pearl Jam is still angry and might still be cool, I suspect that “grunge” is no longer a label in current use. But more fundamentally, I find that Kay’s distinctive style, heavy on omniscient foreshadowing and portent, jars when combined with a contemporary teenager’s viewpoint. (Also, comma splices seem to be much more obstrusive in this book than in The Sarantine Mosaic, the last Kay books I read.)

As a separate problem, I was not engaged by the old story that the present-day characters become enmeshed with. It has logistical issues, if you will, the why and how of things, which are not explained, and I couldn’t construct any satisfactory explanation myself out of the information given. This lack led, at least in part, to other problems: a perception of gender essentialism, which needless to say I disliked; a lack of conviction that the story was as fundamental as the characters claimed; and a dissatisfaction with the story’s resolution, which seems either anticlimactic, pessimistic, or subversive of the grand high nature of the story itself—which I suppose might be interesting, if I thought it were done on purpose. Instead, it just seems a muddle.

I’d been thinking I might re-read The Fionavar Tapestry if I didn’t like this book, because something else reminded me of it. Now that Ysabel has turned out to be connected, that might be another incentive. Of course Fionavar is a muddle too, but in the kitchen-sink direction, and for all its flaws I retain an affection for it. It may well be that like Fionavar, Ysabel would work for some people who either disagree with my assessment of its flaws or aren’t bothered by such things. But it’s not a book for me.

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Robins, Madeleine E.: Point of Honour and Petty Treason

Madeline E. Robins’ Point of Honour opens with the statement that “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Fallen Woman of good family must, soon or late, descend to whoredom,” and spends the rest of its pages proving it wrong. It is Austen noir, with all that such a juxtaposition implies, and is both admirable and entirely enjoyable (as is its sequel, Petty Treason).

The protagonist, Sarah Tolerance, declines to conform to truths universally acknowledged, and so forges a career as an “agent of inquiry” instead of working in her aunt’s brothel. (The setting is tweaked just very slightly from our history to make this career not impossible, though still looked at askance.) What seems a simple matter, the retrieval of an Italian fan, turns much nastier (as would be expected in a noir) and brings into Miss Tolerance’s life an attractive, high-ranking, and wealthy man (as would be expected in a Regency). Where the book goes from there, and how it negotiates these genres—is something I will leave the reader to discover. I will say, however, that I deeply admire the ending.

In the sequel, Petty Treason, the publicity that Miss Tolerance gained from the prior case results in her hire to investigate a murder, that of a Chevalier who turns out to be a thoroughly nasty piece of work. His wife comes under suspicion, which is one of the meanings of the title: petty or petit treason was the English common-law offense of a husband’s murder by a wife, which according to the thought of the time paralleled high treason’s betrayal of a sovereign by a subject. As with the first book’s examination of prostitution, however, this book finds many different meanings of treason, often ones unacknowledged by society of the time. Fear not, however, Miss Tolerance is not a twenty-first-century feminist dressed in Regency clothes. Indeed, one of the functions of the omniscient narration is to highlight Miss Tolerance’s different ways of thinking, by contrasting it with the narration’s opinion. (For those who dislike omniscient, it’s rarely obvious: most of the time the narration is indistinguishable from tight third. Also, I have to say that a novel has done a really good job of worldbuilding when “Fuck” is genuinely shocking.)

If it were just the great premise, and the way it’s followed through on—both careful and fun, with verbal and literal fencing—that would be sufficient. But the characters are also vivid and rounded. I particularly like that Miss Tolerance has existing relationships as the books open, ones that evolve along with her during the course of the books. Unfortunately it appears there will not be a third book, so these relationships will not be further developed. (Both books are still available in paperback from Amazon, despite my taking an appalling amount of time to get around to writing them up.)

Finally, fans of Kate Ross’s Julian Kestrel series may well like these books, though I think they better handle the contrast between, and the convergence of, the glittering and seamy sides of Regency England. Fans of fantasy of manners should definitely check these out, unless the lack of fantasy and of a sparkling tone is an impossible barrier. I think very highly of these books, and (paradoxically) it’s been that high opinion that kept me from timely booklogging them. I hope that this belated report will nevertheless help the books find some more appreciative readers.

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O’Brian, Patrick: (12) The Letter of Marque (audio)

Patrick O’Brian’s The Letter of Marque feels in some respects like a reset of the series, despite being the twelfth in the Aubrey-Maturin series. Principally this is an effect of the naval activity, which comes in tight, intense pieces of subterfuge and bravado both, which remind me of the Sophie‘s daring actions. However, the stakes are as high as they’ve ever been after the crucial events of the last book, and that additional edge also echoes younger days.

I don’t think there has been such a span of highs and lows in a single volume since maybe The Fortune of War, or even H.M.S. Surprise. Or perhaps not at all, since so much of the effect of this volume comes from the accumulated weight of characterization and history [*]. Deeply satisfying and well-crafted as always.

[*] I believe that this book was the first published in the U.S., which must have been very strange indeed.

Finally, another O’Brian resource: “A Guide for the Perplexed”, which translates all the non-English words and phrases in the series. (The Butcher’s Bill, an index I mentioned last booklog post, has already proven its worth by confirming that the confusion over Dixon is all on O’Brian’s part, not mine.)

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Doyle, Debra, and James D. Macdonald: Land of Mist and Snow

Land of Mist and Snow, by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald, is a stand-alone fantasy set an alternate U.S. Civil War. Despite the title [*], the book is mostly concerned with the sea: the Union has discovered a way to power a ship without steam or sail, which is obviously of great benefit despite its unusual requirements (no iron, virgin brass, a virgin woman . . . ). But as a character notes, “the presence of one esoteric ship implies the presence of another esoteric ship,” and soon the chase is on.

[*] Yes, okay, Google tells me that it’s a poetic allusion, but I didn’t know that ahead of time and was therefore puzzled.

Told in epistolary form, this is a fast-paced and enjoyable novel. I suspect it of having structural and symbolic depths that I am unable to recognize, both because that tends to be my experience when reading Doyle and Macdonald’s books (e.g., The Apocalypse Door), and because Teresa Nielsen Hayden refers to it as having allegorical personifications in the middle of a really, really long Making Light thread. However, it’s perfectly possible to enjoy the novel without consciously understanding any layers other than those on the surface.

In conclusion, I must briefly disagree with a short review in this month’s Locus, which complained that a particular person was a cardboard villain—not over whether the person was cardboard, which is a matter of taste, but over the implication that the person was the antagonist, which is not structurally supportable (she says, humbly).

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