Month: January 2009

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McWhorter, John: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

I enjoyed The Power of Babel so much that when I saw that John McWhorter had a new pop-linguistics book, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, I put it at the top of my Christmas list. This is much less dense than Babel, but seems to be carefully argued as best I can tell, and is still an enjoyable read.

McWhorter argues that the traditional story of English’s evolution is much less interesting and complex than the real thing, which in his telling has two under-recognized components. First, because English co-existed with Celtic languages for centuries, weird things happened to English’s grammar like having to use “do” in questions and negative sentences. Second, because the Vikings showed up and learned English as a second language, they knocked a lot of the embellishments off of English, leaving it the least complex of the Germanic languages. (And even Proto-Germanic, McWhorter argues, is less complex than other languages descended from Proto-Indo-European. He hypothesizes that this may have been because Phoenicians learned it as a second language, but notes that so far this is just a hypothesis.)

After these two under-recognized components of English’s history, McWhorter draws broader lessons about language. English’s bastard grammar shows that, from a linguistics point of view, there’s no such thing as “errors”; arbitrary rules are just that, arbitrary. And from the reduced complexity of English after the Vikings got through with it, McWhorter argues that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language strongly channels thought) has to be wrong, because we aren’t less able to deal with complexity today than Anglo-Saxon villagers were.

None of this will be hugely surprising to those who’ve listened to his lecture series on historical linguistics, but the additional detail and the handy print nature of the book nevertheless make it worth reading. Just don’t expect anything as detailed as Babel, and you’ll be all set.

February 21, 2009: belatedly crossposted to [info]50books_poc, as discussed here.

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Westlake, Donald E.: (02) Bank Shot

Bank Shot is second in the Donald E. Westlake Memorial Dortmunder re-read. This is the one in which they steal a bank. Not rob a bank, steal a bank.

(It’s in a trailer while the usual building is under construction.)

This was the first one I read: Chad and I were in the cavernous warehouse branch of Second Story Books in the D.C. area, back in 1998, and he came up to me with a copy and said, “You have to read this.” “I do?” “You do.”

And I did. And the rest was history.

Obviously, this worked well as a starting point for me, but on this re-read, I found myself again cataloguing the ways it is and isn’t like the series as it became firmly established. It’s the first book with May, Dortmunder’s faithful companion, for instance, and the first time there’s a (semi-)absurd overheard conversation at the O.J. Bar and Grill—but those having the conversation aren’t identified as the regulars yet. There’s no Max yet, and for possibly the only time we see a financier outside the gang, and May and Murch’s Mom have a more active role than usual.

Only two other things of note: there’s a character named Herman X who appears to be a semi-parody of a very specific type of Black radical. Since I don’t have the context, I can’t say whether I thought the portrayal was reasonable, but it made me twitch a little pre-emptively. (Herman is a person as all Westlake’s characters are people; it’s the political components that I wonder about. Also, they probably make the book more dated than others.) And second, I really like the way the tension and absurdity of this escalates. It’s not as over-the-top as The Hot Rock, but it’s still a lot of fun.

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Walton, Jo: (202-203) Ha’Penny; Half a Crown

Ha’Penny and Half a Crown are the concluding books in Jo Walton’s Small Change (or Still Life with Fascists) series, which began with Farthing.

Farthing was not written with sequels in mind, but I can’t remember if Ha’Penny was planned as a single sequel or the middle book in a trilogy. Regardless, reading it now after the publication of the complete trilogy, I couldn’t help but find it an example of middle-book syndrome; that is, I expected ultimate resolutions to wait until the last book. For me, this was exacerbated by its being set only a couple of weeks after Farthing. Inspector Carmichael, who investigated the country house mystery of Farthing, is now confronted with the explosion of a bomb at the home of a London actress. In the other narrative thread, Viola Lark finds herself trapped in a plot to kill Hitler and the British Prime Minister.

Though I had the aforementioned middle-book problem in reading this, I recognize that it contains as much of an arc as possible. I was also impressed by the way my sympathies repeatedly shifted as things kept getting more complicated. And on an aesthetic level, I appreciated the unreliability of Viola’s narration; it can’t be easy to do first-person narration of someone who thinks she’s much saner than she actually is.

Half a Crown is set in 1960 and again juxtaposes Carmichael’s third-person narration with the retrospective first-person narration of a woman, this time his teenaged ward Elvira. She is by far the least aware of the series’ narrators at the start, and part of the book is how she progresses from thinking that a fascist rally—complete with tied-together Jews to throw things at—is “jolly fun.”

Elvira is just one example of what seems to me is the central concern of the book, people’s individual breaking points: what they will or will not betray and how far they can be pushed or will go themselves. And because politics is composed of people, this drives the plot through to the series’ end.

As the concluding volume in a trilogy, it’s hard for my opinion of Half a Crown not to depend heavily on my opinion of that conclusion. And I have very mixed feelings about the ending, which strikes me as a peculiar mix of deep cynicism and optimistic deus ex machina. Which in one sense is not entirely fair, as the d.e.m. bits have, in retrospect, been set up as much as possible given the limitations of narrative structure; and yet I can’t seem to shake the feeling of abruptness that I got on the first reading.

Unfortunately I can’t be more specific without spoiling the whole thing, which I’m not willing to do. It’s one of my personal truisms of narrative art that questions are easy and answers are hard; that is, a work that sets up fascinating mysteries or difficult problems is almost certainly going to do better at that part than at revealing the answer or fixing the problem. (Dan Simmons, I’m looking at you.) In other words, Farthing may remain the book in the trilogy that people like best, or at least find most satisfying. But if you appreciated Farthing, I think it’s worth reading the rest of the series.

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Banks, Iain M.: (05) Inversions

Inversions is Iain M. Banks’ stealth Culture novel. It’s told from the point of view of two people who don’t know the Culture exists, but from their reports, the Culture’s role is quite clear to the familiar reader. (The unfamiliar reader who nevertheless is reading through an SF lens will understand it just fine, though a few of the details might be hazy.)

After I finished this, I realized that I’d spent so much time decoding the stealth Culture references that I wasn’t actually sure what I thought it it as a book. And, you know, I’m still not sure. For some reason it’s hard for me to get past “this is what was going on from the point of view of someone who knows about the Culture” to any other assessment of the book.

I can say that the book’s two strands do connect up in a satisfying way, in both their obvious and stealth-Culture natures. I didn’t feel there was anything obviously excessive or indulgent, as is the case in some other Culture books. I have a quibble or two with some of the characterization, but that may be a matter of the limitations of the point-of-view characters. But, on the whole, I don’t seem to have much of an emotional reaction to it beyond appreciation for its craft.

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Cooper, Susan: (05) Silver on the Tree

What an extremely peculiar book Susan Cooper’s Silver on the Tree is.

It has some very wonderful and haunting episodes, both scary and moving. And yet many of those are embedded in a long section with a peculiarly metafictional bent that I can’t get a handle on, that doesn’t quite seem to fit, but that my thoughts always slide off of as though it were a dream.

Then, on one hand, it rests the penultimate development on mortal choice and judgment. On the other hand, it rests the ultimate development on plot tokens taken to the logical but idiotic conclusion.

And that doesn’t even mention the very ending, which sends many people I know into frothing rages. (Or the unanswered questions of why the Drews, or why the huge privileging of Great Britain in the fight against the Dark, or why the very odd treatment of women in the book . . . )

Color me baffled.

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Westlake, Donald E.: (01) The Hot Rock (re-read)

We interrupt this re-read of the Dark Is Rising series for the beginning of the Donald E. Westlake Memorial Dortmunder re-read, starting with the first book, The Hot Rock.

I described the plot of this one previously, so I’ll just note here how I was struck by the ways that it’s not like later Dortmunder novels: though they don’t shoot people, the characters carry and use guns (I don’t think the later novels even mention guns, which may be a consequence of tougher gun laws in New York City), and generally seem much more prone to solve problems through physical intimidation. (This may have something to do with the plot’s roots as a rejected Parker story.) Also, Stan Murch gets some social skills along the way.

Still an excellent book, but perhaps very slightly down the list of places to start because of these differences. (I started with Bank Shot, myself, and will see what I think of that when I get to it.)

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Cooper, Susan: (03-04) Greenwitch; The Grey King

Okay, so it won’t be 2011 before I finish re-reading Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising series, as I’ve just completed the third and fourth books, Greenwitch and The Grey King.

Greenwitch is much better than I’d remembered, tighter and more emotionally satisfying than The Dark Is Rising. It has good characterization of the Drews, Will, and even the representative of the Dark—not to mention the Greenwitch, who is creepily alien yet a figure to be sympathized with. And I appreciate the way it acknowledges that plot tokens aren’t everything, and indeed that such an attitude can be counter-productive.

It’s just too bad the new prophetic doggerel is so much worse than the first.

Speaking of plot tokens, The Grey King interests me because though it’s structured as a quest for a plot token, the quest is about the least important and interesting thing in the book. The energy and force of the book, for me, comes from the characterization, and particularly the horrible sick inevitability of the actions of one character who is influenced by the Dark. Very much not a comfortable book to read, for that reason, but powerful.

This book also has a conversation about the problem I had with The Dark Is Rising, between John Rowlands and Will:

“But I was only saying, be careful not to forget that there are people in this valley who can be hurt, even in the pursuit of good ends.”

 . . .

[Will] sighed. “I understand what you are saying,” he said sadly. “But you misjudge us, because you are a man yourself. For us, there is only the destiny. Like a job to be done. We are here simply to save the world from the Dark. . . . The charity and the mercy and the humanitarianism are for you, they are the only things by which men are able to exist together in peace. But in this hard case that we the Light are in, confronting the Dark, we can make no use of them. We are fighting a war. We are fighting for life or death—not for our life, remember, since we cannot die. For yours.”

I am not convinced that Will is right—he of all people ought to know that the lack of charity can be a weapon for the Dark, and this seems to me perilously close to the ends justifying the means—or that the text wants us to think Will is right. I’m going to have to withhold judgment until the last book, I think, but at least it’s a live issue in the text.

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