Feb 09 2015

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

In the second Discworld novel, The Light Fantastic, Rincewind saves the Disc, not quite by accident but certainly not through great forethought and cunning action, either. The Disc appears to be hurtling toward a great red star in such a way that collision is imminent, and the only way to prevent the Disc’s annihilation is for the eight Great Spells to be cast simultaneously. The problem, such as it is, is that one of the Spells has lodged itself in Rincewind’s brain, and he is (a) far away from the other seven, and (b) not being seen.

As a through-line to hang a novel on, this is a bit thin. There may have been more suspense about the outcome when the book was new, but now there are 38 more Discworld books, so obvsly it doesn’t go crashing into a looming star, casting the remainder of the series into flashback. But the main line isn’t what interests Pratchett anyway, or at least, that’s not what he devotes most of his attention to. He seems most interested in the set pieces, sketches, and ancillary characters that he introduces throughout the book. Sometimes they’re parodies of established fantasy pieces (Cohen the Barbarian, who is now in his late 80s but fierce as ever), while sometimes they are just extended bits of drollery, put there for their own sakes.

Of course, like druids everywhere they believes in the essential unity of all life, the healing power of plants, the natural rhythm of the seasons and the burning alive of anyone who didn’t approach all this in the right frame of mind, but they had also thought long and hard about the very basis of creation and had formulated the following theory:
The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedness.
Thus it was that the sun and moon orbited the Disc because they were persuaded not to fall down, but didn’t actually fly away because of uncertainty. Charm allowed trees to grow and bloody-mindedness kept them up, and so on.

This is all good fun, and the book bounces along happily, skewering cliches left and right. There’s not a lot of heft here (which is fine! how many other books don’t even reach this level of fun?), but for the longer project of the series I’m interested in finding out how many of the minor characters turn up again. Also in the longer context, it’s probably important that the Great Spell is no longer with Rincewind at the end of the book, freeing him up considerably as a character. Twoflower, a tourist who has often driven events in the first two books, decides at the end of the book that his vacation is over and returns to his place of origin. I guess we’ll see about that, too.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/09/the-light-fantastic-by-terry-pratchett/

Feb 07 2015

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

The main reason I enjoyed this book is the impressive way in which Peter Swanson sucked me into Lily Kintner’s psyche. I was originally repulsed by her philosophy of ending lives (and still am, tbh) but as the book progressed, I desperately wanted her to get away with all the marbles. Conversely, her murderous spree went from most to least justified, I felt, over the course of the novel, which only served to highlight how masterful the writing was in getting me to empathize more with her as it went on.

I also find it intriguing that I found the women in the book to be, overall, far more sympathetic than the men, who were all at least some degree of repulsive. Swanson pulls no punches in displaying the tawdry underbelly of the human psyche, in all its cheap, short-sighted selfishness, and I wonder if it says something about me in that I understood exactly where most of the women were coming from (with the exception of Lily’s mother, but that could be because she was viewed solely through the prism of Lily’s fears.)

A solid psychological thriller, with a lot of twists and turns, and an impressive ability to make a monster (or several of them, to be fair) sympathetic.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/07/the-kind-worth-killing-by-peter-swanson/

Feb 06 2015

Truth and Fear by Peter Higgins

People who were annoyed by the cliffhanger ending of Wolfhound Century should definitely wait the six weeks or so until Radiant State is published before reading Truth and Fear. Peter Higgins hasn’t solved the middle-book problem, but it’s clear that he conceived and wrote the three books of the Wolfhound Century tale as a single, coherent story. In the middle of March of this year, it will all be there for readers to enjoy. That is, if the desperate story of a now-renegade policeman caught amidst a revolution and an invasion and maybe a limited nuclear war, with the possibility of a superhuman intelligence imposing permanent totalitarianism, is the sort of thing you enjoy. I know I do.

It’s possible that a merely human Stalinism might be the preferable outcome of the trilogy, given some of the other choices on offer.

Hitherby spoilers.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/06/truth-and-fear-by-peter-higgins/

Feb 05 2015

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) by Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield

This was a hoot.

As the back cover says, “the Reduced Shakespeare Company‘s classic farce” presents, after a fashion, all 37 plays and does something to with the sonnets in just over 90 minutes of stage time. They do the comedies all at once, in a bit
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Feb 03 2015

Premature Evaluation: Mussolini’s Italy by R.J.B. Bosworth

I suppose it would be smart to wait until I got to the part where Italy can properly be said to be Mussolini’s before writing about a book called Mussolini’s Italy, but my progress through this volume has been so slow — “deliberate” would be a kinder word, if less accurate — that I might lose the thread entirely before then.

Bosworth’s book does a lot of what I like histories to do: it locates Mussolini and Fascism within larger currents of Italian and European history; it reaches back to trace continuities, so as to make the differences of the new era clearer; it’s careful with explanations; and it shows the contingency of how events looked at the time. In the particular case of Italian Fascism, it shows clearly how the desire to make things anew rose from the experience of soldiers on the fronts of World War I. While the war didn’t blow up the Italian state, as it did the Russian, German, Austrian and Ottoman Empires, it revealed the old order as inadequate to the demands of the returning soldiers. Bosworth is very good at showing how various threads that became Fascism arose from a largely inchoate desire for something new in national life that would give meaning to the sacrifices of the front.

October 1922, the month the Fascists seized power with their March on Rome, is closer to World War I than it’s common to see in histories that concentrate on western Europe. Only a month earlier, Turkish forces under Atatürk regained control of Smyrna, effectively ending the war in the former Ottoman Empire and deciding it in favor of Turkish nationalist forces. October 1922 was also the month when the Bolsheviks captured Vladivostok, ending the Russian Civil War in the far east and cementing Communist control of the Tsar’s former empire. The Soviet-Polish War was only a year in the past. In Germany, there had been armed uprisings in 1920 and 1921. So while I’ve often read of the Fascist seizure of power as a harbinger of the politics of the 1930s, it might be just as illuminating to see it as another 19th century regime swept away by the First World War.

I’m a little past a third of the way through, and Bosworth is just starting to describe actual Fascist rule. I’ll see if he’s as thorough with the execution as he has been with the setup. But probably not speedily.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/03/premature-evaluation-mussolinis-italy-by-r-j-b-bosworth/

Feb 02 2015

Buddha’s Little Finger by Viktor Pelevin

Third time wasn’t the charm. I’ve tried twice before to read Buddha’s Little Finger, and it just didn’t catch with me. This time around was no different.

Usually I describe reading Viktor Pelevin with a short monologue accompanied by hand gestures. “It’s like somebody opened up your brain” — both hands held together to form something like a sphere, and then rotating the one representing the top over to the side as if there were a hinge between them — “and did this” — holding the lower hand in a bowl shape still, then making a mixing and scrambling motion with the forefinger of the other hand — “and then closed it back” — doing the hinge gesture in reverse, so as to end with a sphere again. I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t what everyone wants a book to do. Even I don’t want a steady stream of it. But from time to time, it’s kinda awesome.

My favorite of Pelevin’s books is A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories. These stories bring fantastic and surreal elements into early post-Communist Russia in a way that still leaves me amazed. He captures not just the grimness of Russian life at that period, but the inherent weirdness, and then uses that as a springboard to go to unexpected places. The title story is about exactly what it says. Then there’s “The Prince of Gosplan,” which is something like a day in the life of a mid-level bureaucrat crossed with an Infocom text-adventure game, with no in-story preference about which element is real. And half a dozen more genre-bending mind-stretching tales.

The Life of Insects and The Yellow Arrow both scratched a similar itch. But Buddha’s Little Finger? I don’t know. I bounced off of its surface and was never drawn to its depths. Maybe next time.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/02/buddhas-little-finger-by-viktor-pelevin/

Jan 28 2015

Vlast and Cool and Dangerously Sympathetic

I’m about a quarter of the way through Truth and Fear (concurrent with more Discworld, The Iliad – to see whether it captures me the way The Odyssey did, and in a modern translation since I bounced right off of Chapman’s, and probably some other things that rise to the surface of the to-be-read piles), and I wanted to just sketch out a few things that I had in mind about the relationships between our consensus history and the imagined Russia of Peter Higgins’ novels.

I’m also starting to think that the series is About climate change, though I’m not sure how thoroughly the author is aware of it.

Hitherby spoilers, and randomness.
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Jan 25 2015

The Giant Book Of Stories by Various

It seems a bit odd, tbh, to lump together the many contributors to this compendium of short stories under the one word “various” but Galley Press never named an editor, and there were enough anonymous contributors that I don’t feel all that bad doing it.

Anyway, this book was one of several I brought home with me after my last visit to Malaysia and oh, the nostalgia! I remember reading this the first time (of several) between the ages of 8 and 11, and how it inspired so much of my composition writing in grade school. It’s a compendium of Girls’ Own type stories, with brave and clever heroines getting out of all sorts of sticky situations, with beautiful pen illustrations throughout. It’s a total throwback of a book, so veddy British, and I love every page of it. It’s not any great intellectual exercise, as almost all the problems are solved within ten pages or less, but it is a lovely, almost aspirational, proto-feminist breeze of a book (plus, there’s a heroine named Doreen in one of the shorts, as well as an author of the same name, and that is something rare and to be cherished.)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/25/the-giant-book-of-stories-by-various/

Jan 23 2015

The Whisper of the River by Ferrol Sams

The Whisper of the River follows Porter Osborne, Jr. to college in the city of Macon, Georgia, in the late 1930s. It also follows Run with the Horsemen, the first book of Ferrol Sams’ semi-autobiographical trilogy.

Young Osborne, improbably known as Sambo, grew up as the only son of a planter in rural Georgia in the years just before and then during the Great Depression. The first book related Porter’s childhood with warmth and affection, but did not hide the feudal relations that governed the agricultural South of the time, nor the violence underlying those relations and the effects that violence, both repressed and expressed, had on the people of the farm and the region. Porter is smart and precocious, and by age 16 has exhausted what his high school has to offer.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/23/the-whisper-of-the-river-by-ferrol-sams/

Jan 22 2015

Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend by Erika T. Wurth

Margaritte is a 16-year old girl of mixed heritage – Apache, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and white. She lives in the underprivileged town of Idaho Springs, Colorado, and deals with an alcoholic father and an ineffectual mother in addition to the pressures of trying to avoid becoming a statistic. The author speaks with an authentic voice that penetrates, that reveals the depth of the difficulties that Margaritte faces as she works for a future that is a future and not just a repeat of being trapped in the cycle of poverty that plagues Native Americans. Margaritte is a very accessible character. The writing is raw and doesn’t hold any punches, so you understand exactly what Margaritte’s life is like and how difficult her chosen goals are. I recommend this book for young adults and adults both. It’s good, and thought-provoking.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/22/crazy-horses-girlfriend-by-erika-t-wurth/