Month: December 2006

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Clarke, Susanna: (01.5) The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories

Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories is a collection mostly or entirely [*] set in the same world as her brilliant novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. If you liked the novel, you should certainly read this collection. If you haven’t read the novel and are intimidated by its length, I think that using the collection as a sampler is an excellent idea. The prose style and the topics are the same, and even Jonathan Strange appears in the title story. I won’t promise that you’ll like the novel if you like this collection, because the novel is a lot more ambitious; but I think the odds are very good.

[*] I say “mostly or entirely” because the fictional introduction treats them all as illuminating that same world, but one of the stories is explicitly set in the world of Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s Stardust, which may or may not fully overlap JS&MN‘s world; and back when I read JS&NM, I thought the story “Tom Brightwind, or How the Fairy Bridge was Built at Thoresby” wasn’t consistent with it. (I couldn’t defend that conclusion now without a re-read.)

A few notes on individual stories:

  • Not even for Susanna Clarke can I read a story told in dialect, which rules out “On Lickerish Hill.”
  • “Mr Simonelli or The Fairy Widower” is the longest of the new-to-me stories. It has an enjoyably-unreliable narrator and a fairy household that isn’t as creepy as that of the gentleman with the thistle-down hair, but has somewhat of its flavor.
  • “John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner” is just lovely, a folk-tale like those that appear in JS&MN‘s footnotes.

    The Charcoal Burner went down to Furness Abbey again. “That wicked man came back and ate my toasted cheese!” he told the Almoner.

    The Almoner shook his head sadly at the sinfulness of the world. “Have some more cheese,” he offered. “And perhaps some bread to go with it?”

    “Which saint is it that looks after cheeses?” demanded the Charcoal Burner.

    The Almoner thought for a moment. “That would be Saint Bridget,” he said.

    “And where will I find her ladyship?” asked the Charcoal Burner, eagerly.

    “She has a church at Beckermet,” replied the Almoner, and he pointed the way the Charcoal Burner ought to take.

    So the Charcoal Burner walked to Beckermet and when he got to the church he banged the altar plates together and roared and made a great deal of noise until Saint Bridget looked anxiously out of Heaven and asked if there was any thing she could do for him.

Also, the physical book is a pleasure, with Charles Vess illustrations and a decorated cloth cover with no dust jacket.

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Mori, Kaoru: Emma, vol. 1

I intended to not buy new manga series until I finished the ones I had, but I couldn’t resist volume 1 of Kaoru Mori’s Emma. Not only did Mely’s description make it sound utterly charming, but it gave me the impression that I’d better buy it while it was on the shelf, or I might have trouble finding it thereafter.

This was the perfect palate-cleanser after Planetes, and also very enjoyable in its own right. It’s late-19th century London. William is a merchant whose family wishes to keep moving in aristocratic circles. Emma is a maid for William’s former governess. As Mely says, “they fall in love, which shockingly fails to eradicate class differences.”

This is a very quiet, subtle volume, with lovely characters and art. Not just of Emma and William, either: Emma’s employer has a backstory and a personality; William’s father shows signs of being important; and William’s school friend Hakim, a prince from India, shows up with a large entourage and a number of elephants. Speaking of elephants, I don’t have the vocabulary to describe the art, but I’ve uploaded two pages’ worth of scans (from the original Japanese); choose between small versions of Emma agreeing to walk a little ways with William (read left-to-right) and an elephant on the London streets (roughly 50KB) and large ones (roughly 250KB). As these suggest, the panel layout is very simple and unobtrusive.

Really, that’s not a bad way to describe this first volume: simple and unobtrusive, but in a good way. Despite the lousy quality of the U.S. version’s paper, I recommend it highly. Volume 2 is also out; I’m waiting to need a pick-me-up to read it, or maybe I’ll wait until all seven volumes are out and gulp it down. I’m not sure, but either way, I look forward to more of this series.

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Yukimura, Makoto: Planetes

Planetes is a manga by Makoto Yukimura, complete at five books (four volumes, but the fourth is split into two parts). It’s small-scale science fiction, set in 2074, that follows a ship’s crew as they collect debris in near-Earth orbit. It appears to be much-praised by critics and much-recommended by sf fans. It has meticulous, easy-to-follow art, which is often put to good use depicting space; characters from different nations, races, and genders [*]; and numerous musings on the meaning of, and motivations for, space travel.

I didn’t like it.

I thought the main turning points were so obvious as to be boring and, indeed, annoying. More, they were made obvious by moving the characters like little puppets, which I just don’t have any patience with.

[*] Though race and gender roles seem to be stuck in the early 2000s, or earlier.

There are approximately two character-development arcs within the series. The first focuses on Hachi, who is obsessed with leaving the garbage runs and joining a mission to Jupiter. The second focuses on the ship’s pilot, Fee, who is faced with moral dilemmas at home and at work.

(The series shifts back to Hachi at the end, which feels almost superfluous. I certainly found it an anti-climax.)

Hachi’s arc, which really starts in the second volume, is the worst offender in the “too obvious” area. He goes further and further into an extreme personal philosophy, and is opposed by a new crew member, Tanabe, who is just as tedious in the other direction. Actual dialogue between Tanabe and Hachi, upon finding the body of an astronaut:

“Instead of rushing into the cosmos and exposing himself to lethal amounts of radiation, he should have thought about [his family]. He should have stayed on Earth!! He made a loveless choice . . . and that is always the wrong choice.”

” . . . Love? Who gives a crap about love? Go back to Earth, throw on some John Lennon and hug some trees. Your ‘love’ doesn’t belong out here. It’s a weakness. That guy had a passion for the stars and there’s nothing wrong with that. [ . . . ] We live alone and we die alone. And that suits me just fine!”

(Ellipses in original, except for the one in brackets.)

I presume you can see where this eventually goes from about a mile away, without binoculars. (Even David Welsh, a reviewer who likes the series more than I do, admits that Tanabe is a major problem with the series.)

Fee’s arc, later on, is set up just as obviously. The minor plot point, which is used as inspiration for her actions in the major, is neighbors complaining about her family’s many dogs barking. All night. In a city apartment building. Fee takes a neighbor’s suggestion and uses collars that spray nasty stuff into the dogs’ faces when they bark, telling her son that “Sometimes you have to be cruel. That’s real life. You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Naturally, she changes her mind and removes the collars, and then uses the memory of her son’s reaction to decide something at work . . . because if she’d used any of the many cruelty-free ways to address her dogs’ barking, well, there goes the handy parallelism, doesn’t it?

(Also, this annoys me because, hello, her neighbors have a point! And I speak as a dog owner.)

Seriously, it’s almost enough to make me re-read Saiyuki for an essay I originally thought about doing, on independence/dependence and attachment/detachment, just to see how these kind of themes can be done well. (I gave up the idea when I realized that I would have to discuss literally every plot arc within the series.)

Moving away from my complaints, there are a couple of other things that I should just note about the series. First, though it’s science fiction, it has a mystic or fantastic streak. Hachi has a couple of conversations that could be his imagination, could be hallucinations, or could be actual manifestations; it’s hard to tell. I’ve seen one of these sequences called a “vision quest,” which is as good a label as any. Second, there is at least one odd little episode that never goes anywhere, which could either be good or bad depending on one’s tastes.

I wanted to like this, I really did, but its virtues couldn’t outweigh how cranky it made me.

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Crusie, Jennifer, Lori Foster, and Carly Phillips: Santa Baby

I bought the romance anthology Santa Baby because Jennifer Crusie has a novella in it. Knowing that the other two stories would look really flat in comparison to Crusie’s, I tried reading Lori Foster and Carly Phillips’ contributions first.

I couldn’t make it through even chapter one of Foster’s story, “Christmas Bonus”: I found its prose stilted, its characters insufficiently engaging (especially since the heavy breathing started right away), and its plot annoying—and worse, it could have been an interesting inversion of gender stereotypes if it had gone the other direction (I flipped to the end to check). I did finish Phillips’ story, “Naughty Under the Mistletoe,” but it was more out of habit than anything, and I won’t remember a thing about it in a week. Its prose was a bit awkward, but more importantly, it failed to overcome the problem inherent in short stories within the romance genre: unless your characters knew each other already, it’s really hard to convincingly portray their falling in love in such a short space.

Fortunately, Crusie’s story, “Hot Toy,” was as fun as I expected. I mean, how can I resist a story that starts with a character searching desparately for a Christmas toy called a “Major MacGuffin”? The explanation given for the MacGuffin is, of course, not in the least sensible, but who cares, because this is pure distilled Crusie goodness: funny, fast, and energetic, with family and a consistent and satisfying emotional theme.

(Not reading the back cover of the book made this story a different, and I think mildly better, experience, as I was in the same state of ignorance about something as the point-of-view character. Of course, now that I’ve said that, anyone with the book is automatically going to look at the back cover, so never mind.)

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Duane, Diane: (104) A Wizard Abroad (audio)

I’ve never booklogged Diane Duane’s A Wizard Abroad, so I might as well say something briefly about it after listening to the audiobook.

This is the fourth book in the series, in which Nita goes to Ireland. It’s something of an interlude between the first three books and the continuing developments that start in the next, and has always felt somewhat to me like an excuse to write about Ireland, where the author moved a few years before this book was published. It’s not a bad book (at least not to this non-Irish person whose culture and history aren’t being appropriated left and right), but it is a letdown after High Wizardry.

As for the audiobook, Christina Moore, as always, does a very nice job narrating. In particular, she manages the Irish accents well—or, at least, as they’re described in the text, which specifies numerous regional differences.

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Snicket, Lemony: (08.5) The Unauthorized Autobiography

While Lemony Snicket’s The Unauthorized Autobiography was published between books 8 and 9 of A Series of Unfortunate Events, I only read it over this weekend, thanks to a reminder in comments.

The book is as metafictional as promised by the title. I am particularly fond of the index:

  • code of V.F.D. See codes
  • codes. See noble causes
  • noble causes. See necessary evils
  • necessary evils. See moral uncertainty
  • moral uncertainty. See villainy
  • villainy. See conspiracies
  • conspiracies. See overall feeling of doom
  • overall feeling of doom. See doom, overall feeling of
  • doom, overall feeling of, ix-211

As for its relationship to the series, it seems to me to fill in some backstory that is interesting but doesn’t necessarily affect my understanding of events to date. However, I’m only through book 11 of 13, so that assessment may change—I’m told that something in book 12 is only explicable with information in this volume. (Remember: only cake-sniffers spoil people!) And I wonder if the author had a better idea along the way, as certain things in The Slippery Slope don’t seem consistent with a strong suggestion in this book.

Anyway, if you like this series, it’s certainly worth grabbing from the library.

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Snicket, Lemony: (11) The Grim Grotto (audio)

The eleventh book in A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Grim Grotto, takes place almost entirely underwater and makes a concerted effort to muddy the waters of the series, a phrase which here means “tries to suggest that people are neither essentially noble nor essentially villainous.” I’m not sure how effective this is. On one hand, the series has made a point of showing the foolishness of blind adherence to simple mottos [*]; on the other, the characters have so consistenly fallen into clear categories — good, evil, or indifferent — that book 11 of 13 seems a little late in the game to be injecting nuance. (Okay, yes, there was that brief bit in book 10, but it was really brief.) I’m not objecting to nuance; I’m just wondering whether it can be managed at this late date.

(Also, I think the details somewhat undercut the effort. ROT13: juvyr svban pbzrf npebff nf guerr-qvzrafvbany, ure fvoyvat qbrfa’g, rfcrpvnyyl ng gur raq.)

[*] For instance:

Having a personal philosophy is like having a pet marmoset, because it may be very attractive when you acquire it, but there may be situations when it will not come in handy at all. “He or she who hesitates is lost” sounded like a reasonable philosophy at first glance, but the Baudelaires could think of situations in which hesitating might be the best thing to do. . . . But despite all these incidents in which hesitation had been very helpful, the children did not wish to adopt “He or she who does not hesitate is lost” as their personal philosophy, because a giant octopus might come along at any moment, particular when the Baudelaires were on board a submarine, and the siblings would be very foolish to hesitate if the octopus were coming after them. Perhaps, the Baudelaires thought, the wisest personal philosophy concerning hesitation would be “Sometimes he or she should hesitate and sometimes he or she should not hesitate,” but this seemed far too long and vague to be much use on a plaque.

Other than that, I am amused to note that I am clearly more awake than I was for the last book, because I figured out the solutions to all of the plot dilemmas well, well in advance. It is a known disadvantage of the format for me, but I like Tim Curry’s reading well enough to put up with it, and I’m mildly annoyed at having to wait to start book 12 (I would have had to stop about halfway through for holiday travels, which is sub-optimal).

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Snicket, Lemony: (10) The Slippery Slope (audio)

I think I may do a single run at finishing A Series of Unfortunate Events, now that the last book’s out and I’m in the mood for some frivolity. At any rate, I just finished listening to the tenth book, The Slippery Slope, as read by Tim Curry, and went straight into the next one.

The theme of The Slippery Slope is aptly described in its opening paragraph:

A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called “The Road Less Traveled,” describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn’t hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is now dead.

The Baudelaire orphans find themselves on various roads less traveled in the Mortmain Mountains, where they meet a number of unexpected characters, some new (and occasionally surprising, at least to me) and some old; face serious (though obvious) moral dilemmas; experience at least two landmark events in their lives; and learn a bit about the mysteries surrouding them. We the readers learn more [*], which is perhaps unfair, but that’s what happens to the Baudelaire siblings.

I forget how many days prior books have taken, but this one took only three by my count, and it introduces a hard deadline just five days away. The relationship of that deadline to the overall series’ progression remains to be determined. I haven’t heard howls of indignation from anyone who has finished the series, though, so I’m guessing that however we get there, the destination won’t suck. (Remember: only cake-sniffers spoil people for things they haven’t read yet!)

[*] Specifically, it seems (ROT13’ed for spoilers): gurve sngure vf hadhrfgvbanoyl qrnq; gurve zbgure znl or yrzbal favpxrg’f fvfgre, naq vs fb, fur’f nyvir; naq gel nf gurl jvyy, gurl jba’g svaq gur fhtne objy.

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