Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu's Book Log

I'm glad I borrowed Never After, by Rebecca Lickiss, from the library.

Instead of actually buying it.

This book annoyed me quite considerably. A full explanation requires spoilers, which I'll be posting to sf.written; a link will be in the comments, as usual. Here's the setup: a prince goes looking for a princess, because his parents have decreed he can only marry an actual princess—mostly because they don't like his cousin, Vevila, and are afraid he might marry her otherwise. The prince finds a castle behind brambles, complete with sleeping inhabitants and not one, not two, but three—princes. One "s" only. He also finds a sleeping woman who he's convinced is a princess and would marry if she weren't, you know, so asleep. So he goes to get his cousin Vevila, on the theory that she's much smarter than she is and could figure it out. He runs into Vevila on the road; she's run away from court, rather than be married off to her suitors, etc. Along the way they also pick up some wizards.

Back at the castle, they discover that the caster of the spell is still around: she's the prince's fairy godmother, protecting him from evil (or, Eeeevil) by keeping him away from the world. (She also divided him when he was a child, to protect him from assassins.) The witch has no intention of actually letting anyone break the spell, because that would mean her beloved godchild would be back in the world again. So she subjects Vevila to a princess test (spin straw into gold) before she'll even let Vevila try to kiss the princes. Also, along the way, she curses one of the wizards so that he can only talk in Shakespeare quotes (which the wizards all know, even though they state he's from a different world. Which is never explained.). As the story goes on, alleged princesses and princess tests proliferate, Rumpelstiltskin shows up, there's a pumpkin carriage and a ball, and eventually everyone is subjected to a Happy Ending.

First of all, this has been done before, and better, by at least two different authors: Patricia Wrede, in her Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and Terry Pratchett, in Witches Abroad. (I do hope the author hasn't read Witches Abroad, or if she did, that she meant the "cat turned into servant for Cinderella's ball, acts like a, well, tomcat in human form" episode as a tribute to Greebo . . . ) Three, counting John Barnes's One for the Morning Glory, I suppose. So any charm that originality might lend is lost on me.

Second, there are too many characters, and too few of them have any depth. Third, they all have horrible names; even for a parody-fairy tale, this is going too far. Althelstan. Vevila. Mazigian. Urticacea. Berengaria. Jaquenetta. You get the idea.

Fourth, fifth, and nth, the ending. Oh, the ending.

Okay. We've got a story that's structured around fairy tale elements, specifically princess tests. The story uses these elements to deconstruct the idea of "royalty," and to point out that a person's status as a princess is socially constructed. Great, fine, no problem. Now, having gone to all the trouble of undermining one of the key conventions of fairy tales, why would the story turn around and subject its characters to the most unthinking and conventional kind of Happy Ending there is? It's absolutely baffling, extremely unsatisfying, and a complete compromise of the characters.

And then the story takes the idea that royalty is purely socially constructed, and tries to extend it to claim that personality traits are also purely socially constructed. Which I find offensive. If the question is whether someone is, say, generous and charitable, then it actually matters if that person gives stuff away.

It's possible that this extension was meant to be limited to magic, but that's not how it reads to me. And I reject the idea, particularly when presented as the moral insight of the story.

If you want fairy tale elements twisted around in light fantasy, read the other books I mentioned above. Avoid this one.

The law library at work has a "paperback exchange," where you can take out pleasure reads for free, or donate books. (In practice, it includes hardcovers and a few audio books.) For some reason, the selection tends heavily toward mysteries, and today the new ones had several in a series about an antique dealer.

The Judas Pair, by Jonathan Gash, is the first of the Lovejoy series, and as I'd guessed, does indeed have cool how-things-work vibes about the antique business. However, the first-person narrator is a complete jerk, and while the ending is initially cool in an adrenaline-inducing way, it doesn't really make sense on sober reflection. This one's going back to the paperback exchange. (I might get the rest and just read the antique stuff. I have no actual interest in buying antiques or collecting things, it's just the kind of thing I find soothing to read about.)

The Science of Discworld, by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen works quite well as a bedtime/filler book. Chad's book log entry describes the basic setup very well, so I'll just mention a couple of things that I particularly liked.

One was a discussion of an experiment that used a genetic algorithm approach on electronic circuits, to explore evolution. After four-thousand odd generations, the resulting circuit could tell two tones apart, but in an incredibly complicated and non-intuitive manner; for instance, five of the logic cells in the circuit didn't appear to do anything (they weren't connected electrically to any of the others)—but if you took them out, it wouldn't work any more. I thought this was a really illuminating example of how evolution doesn't necessarily rely on narrativium (the power of story, which in the Discworld is one of the driving forces of the universe) and, therefore, doesn't have to produce anything we'd recognize as a designed solution.

The other is a silly bit, as the wizards contemplate an ice age on Roundworld:

"I think it looks more like a Hogswatchnight ornament," said the Senior Wrangler later, as the wizards took a pre-dinner drink and stared into the omniscope at the glittering white world. "Quite pretty, really."

"Bang go the blobs," said Ponder Stibbons.

"Phut," said the Dean cheerfully. "More sherry, Archchancellor?"

"Perhaps some instability in the sun . . . " Ponder mused.

"Made by unskilled labour," said Archchancellor Ridcully. "Bound to happen sooner or later. And then it's nothing but frozen death, the tea-time of the gods and an eternity of cold."

"Sniffleheim," said the Dean, who'd got to the sherry ahead of everyone else.

(Good night, everybody . . . )

On Monday, I was feeling out of sorts and wanted a comfort book. I had been reminded of Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's I Dare while poking around Meisha Merlin's (annoying) web site trying to decide whether to buy their most recent book, The Tomorrow Log (which I did, discounted from Amazon; it's up next). Also, I was curious to see if I still had the problems I did on the first read. So I gave it a really quick re-read on Monday.

Well, all the gripes I had last time still bother me (except the copyediting, which I was reading too fast to notice). In particular, I think it would have been better if the story in this and Plan B had been condensed into one book and proportioned more chronologically. But I just really like the people, so it served its purpose perfectly well. It was probably a mistake to re-read it close to the new one, which is not in the same series, but oh well.

Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde's sequel to The Eyre Affair, is a very silly book. Really very silly.

I was not that impressed with The Eyre Affair, frankly; it had some inspired bits, but I was never that involved in the story. For whatever reason, I enjoyed Lost in a Good Book far more. Maybe Thursday is a more interesting narrator to me when she starts out happy; maybe my expectations were more finely-tuned; maybe it's just that I'm not recovering from taking the bar. Also, I was warned that it was not a fully self-contained story, so the ending didn't bother me.

(I read the end yesterday, eating lunch outside on a beautiful sunny 80-degree day. Under those conditions, it would be hard to upset me anyway.)

Quite a lot of it doesn't hold up to close scrutiny, but there are so many lovely little touches that I don't really care. For instance, at a meeting of Jurisfiction, which polices literature from the inside, on the agenda is:

"Item three: Interloper in the Sherlock Holmes series by the name of Mycroft—turns up quite unexpectedly in The Greek Interpreter and claims to be his brother. Anyone know anything about this?"

I shrank lower, hoping that no one would have enough knowledge of my world to know we were related. Sly old Fox! So he had rebuilt the Prose Portal. I covered my mouth to hide a smile.

"No?" went on the Bellman. "Well, Sherlock seems to think he is his brother, and so far there is no harm done . . . "

Nice to know I'm not the only one who thinks Mycroft Holmes shows up out of nowhere.

And then there's:

"Thursday, that's not possible!"

"Anything is possible right now. We're in the middle of an isolated high-coincidental localized entropic field decreasement."

"We're in a what?"

"We're in a pseudoscientific technobabble."

"Ah! One of those."

As I said, it is a silly book. I look forward to the next one considerably more than I looked forward to this one.