What Are You Reading (In Advance of) Wednesday

[highlyeccentric]

Currently Reading: SRB, 'The Demon's Covenant'; Hawkeye vol 3; Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

Recently Finished:

Silver On The Tree by Susan Cooper

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well, it was nice to finish the series, but this was not the best-structured of the lot. It was beautiful, with delightfully woven myth and literary references, but the great final question of Free Will fell terribly flat, since hardly anyone involved had exercised much free will along the way. I am now assigning Merriman to the Cryptic Manipulative Magical Mentor's Drinking Club (he will drink whiskey with Gandalf, Aslan, Dumbledore, and various others). The three non-magical children got particularly short shrift: their 'tests', especially the boys, were particularly frail, and there was no strong sense of what else they could have done and how they could've done it.

On the other hand: like all the others, this was *absolutely, intricately pretty*, which is worth a lot.


The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a.. peculiar book. The quality of the prose is high: Ishiguro's narrator voices are engaging and I read at a fairly fast pace. I like the general premise, the meditation on mixed-race societies and on healing after war. BUT. It's obvious that Ishiguro isn't a historical/fantasy writer and I got the feeling he didn't _care_ as much about the social questions he raised as he did about the airy-fairy questions of memory and love. I have a strong suspicion I've read the 'Arthur brokers peace between Saxons and Britons, but it's tenuous and eventually his hand is forced and it all gets away from him' logic somewhere before - it's not medieval, but someone's done it. And they, whoever they were, did it *better*. This book needed to be about 1/4 longer in order to better flesh out the social aspects and deal with the fall-out of the death of the dragon.

Also I have absolutely no idea what to make of the ending, with the boatman, and I can't even tell if it's deliberately opaque or not. It might be supposed to leave you wondering if the boatman has tricked them, but if so, it's not signalled clearly whether it's MEANT to be ambiguous and what the other option is.



Among Others by Jo Walton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book's strengths: excellent narrator voice; interesting, sharp insights on the world around her; immensely attractive evocation of the experience of being a teen sci-fi nerd, and what books come to mean in that context. Decent world-buidling re: fairies, magic, etc.

This book's weakness: plot, what plot? Nothing *happens*. There's about 1/3 of a plot missing: the book begins after the boss battle and proceeds to a peculiar final showdown where the protagonist is Now Free of Her Mother, but never explains what the boss battle was or how it had taken place. I expected asynchronous narration, telling the story of the 'main' events in retrospective, which is what I got, only most of them were missing. How did M&M discover the plot? How did they prevent it? WHO KNOWS.

Characterisation: Their mother is a ridiculous villain, her only motivation explained as 'crazy' and 'egotistical'. The only way this makes sense, given the scarcity of information on the actual conflict between mother and daughters, is if the mother is seriously mentally ill (narcissistic? untreated bipolar? IDEK i am not here for diagnosing flat characters) and Mori is, reasonably enough, traumatised by neglectful parenting but also delusional herself. If that was what we were meant to take away then the storytelling is fucking lazy for refusing to engage properly with the protag's experience and her mother's. If that wasn't meant to be the take-away then doubly lazy: why does this woman have no character? TL;DR Sarah Rees Brennan did 10 million times better with the 'malevolent magic-addled mother' plot.

Issues/subplots: there are SO MANY LOOSE ENDS in this. But the most irresponsible is the bit where the protag's father made a move on her, was rebuffed, and then neither he nor the protag EVER DEALT WITH IT AGAIN.



Walton/Mori criticises 'Teen Problem' books but I can't help but feel that if Walton had more respect for the genre she might not have left that great irresponsible gaping hole. Less offensive but still lazy writing, the witch-aunts and the part where Daniel is being abused by said witch-aunts is acknowledged but never dealt with properly.

Conclusion, what conclusion: it was crap. The showdown with her mother was crap. The reunion with the Three Important Men In Her Life was crap. Great gaping questions remain - *what* did Wim tell her father to get him and Samuel down to Wales? How did Daniel evade the witch-sisters? Is no one going to notice that Mori is acting extremely peculiarly? What became of her mother wandering around in the hills anyway?



The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was a re-read, but I haven't got a goodreads review of it for some reason. Short commentary: I LOVE THIS BOOK. IT IS VERY EXCELLENT. Also it is 10 million times better work than Among Others.

In 2009 I picked up K's copy of this, and she wouldn't let me take it away so I went promptly down to Kinokunia to demand my own copy because I could not continue to exist without it. In 2015 I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to find I had not brought my hard copies to Europe with me, so I bought the whole series in e-book and then devoured the first one in a single evening.

Comments

[ursula]

For me, the stuff with Mori's dad really works. I always feel weird saying that on the internet, because I don't want it to be interpreted as a coded accusation of my own dad, with whom for the record I have a very good & entirely non-Freudian relationship. But I was once a young teenager who had learned about sex mostly from science fiction and had some missing boundaries, and Mori's combination of overintellectualization and denial rang very true to me.

[highlyeccentric]

Oh, I found her *reaction* perfectly plausible, but that's just one component of story element. What the hell was HE thinking? How does that tie in to his relationship with his sisters? There are ways, even in close POV narration, to indicate that there's more going on than the protag is aware of - Hilary Mantel, for instance, makes it pretty clear Jane Seymour's relationship with Henry is non-consensual and threatening to her, without ever letting that fact come to the surface of Cromwell's mind.

[rymenhild]

I got the sense that a lot of the problems with Among Others - and I agree with your assessment almost completely - have to do with the book as fictionalized memoir. I don't know how much is invented and how much is memoir, but I have the suspicion (without any knowledge to support it, except vague memories of posts I read when the book first came out) that some of the more troubling family dynamics may be drawn from life.

Among Others as memoir

[rymenhild]

"I had an unusual set of things happen to me at the end of my childhood and the beginning of my adolescence, and I hadn’t ever written about them because I hadn’t ever seen a way in to talking about that." Jo Walton, at http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/01/20/the-big-idea-jo-walton/

"Think of this as a memoir. Think of it as one of those memoirs that’s later discredited to everyone’s horror because the writer lied and is revealed to be a different colour, gender, class and creed from the way they’d made everybody think. I have the opposite problem. I have to keep fighting to stop making myself sound more normal." -the prologue to Among Others, quoted at http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/06/book-review-among-others-by-jo-walton/

Re: Among Others as memoir

[highlyeccentric]

I read the prologue as Mori's POV voice, but perhaps you're right about Walton. That probably *explains* the total lack of interest in the mother - but an editor should've caught that. You can indeed refuse to engage with your own mother for your mental health, but it's sloppy work to do the same with your fictional villain.

Re: Among Others as memoir

[rymenhild]

Reading over those posts, I actually think that Walton wasn't trying to write a coherent fantasy novel, she was trying to write a memoir that happened to have fairies in, and her editor (I'm pretty sure he's Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Tor) supported her in this. Walton's Big Idea post I linked above is pretty explicit on the mother being based on Walton's mentally ill mother, and the sister who died being based on a sister who died, and so forth.

The problem is that the book doesn't then function as a coherent fantasy novel, because the parts of the story Walton would have to make up in order to make the narrative coherent weren't in Walton's life.

Re: Among Others as memoir

[highlyeccentric]

I'm not sure the wholesale disengagement with the crazy mother makes a good memoir, either. Understandable, but not *good*. Were it a straight memoir, it might have worked, by actually portraying the protag's life, but as it is, it asks you to accept that because the 16 y old protag says her mother is crazy - and she seems to be non-neurotypical - that she's a malevolent force. If I found a straight memoir that did that without trying to separate 'mentally ill' from 'also a bad parent', i'd give that a poor review too. I mean, sure, plenty of mentally ill mothers *do* make for traumatic childhoods, but if you're writing a book about that, you need to actually engage with the situation rather than writing her off as crazy and evil.

[liv]

I'm kind of fascinated by how much you hated Among others. I mean, I feel a little odd about it because I know the author slightly (she's married to a close friend of mine). But I agree that the narrative voice is great and the plot is kind of... absent. I hadn't picked up the connection between despising Teen Problem books and the way this book doesn't actually address any of Mori's problems, but I think that's a good insight.

I found the near-incest scene with her father pretty horrifying, and like you really disliked the way it's never resolved at all. I felt similarly about Mori's relationship with Wim, in fact, there's something deeply dubious about that, because it's awfully convenient for the narrative that he was completely innocent of non-consensually getting his ex pregnant and he really didn't seem to respect Mori at all, which again just isn't addressed.

I was more favourably inclined than you towards the way the key confrontations between M and her mother happen sort of off-stage. I thought that was an interesting narrative technique. But I'm not sure about the absence of any real characterization of the mother beyond "evil".