ironSoap – Complete

author: Charles Dickens
name: Paul
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1859
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2011/10/12
shelves: classic
review:

from Paul's bookshelf: read — October 12, 2011 at 03:12PM

author: Stephen King
name: Paul
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1991
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2011/10/12
shelves: novel, horror
review:

from Paul's bookshelf: read — October 12, 2011 at 03:07PM

author: Frank Herbert
name: Paul
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at: 2011/10/11
date added: 2011/10/12
shelves: science-fiction, novel
review:
Having seen Frank Herbert‘s Dune listed on practically every “Top {Whatever} Best SF Novels” list—well, ever—I figured I’d better finally get around to reading it. The first thing I noticed was that in spite of not having read it or really having a clear idea of the plot and only having half-watched the David Lynch movie way back when I was a pipsqueak, there was an awful lot of the details that had sunk into my subconscious just from the benefit of being a hopeless nerd for the last 34 years. Terms like Bene Gesserit, melange, Paul Atredies, House Harkonnen and Arrakis all rang bells in spite of having no real context for any of them.

Still, even with part of the vocabulary rattling around in my skull, there is a real learning curve to this book. I think, after all this time, I’ve finally come to terms with my relationship to SF: I love the idea of Science Fiction, but a lot of its literature is deeply flawed. Because SF is generally pure imagination, it captures my sense of wonder which is why I go back to it over and over again. But the thing is, the more imaginative the author is, the worse they get at introducing someone into their worlds. At least, that’s how it feels. SF authors like to throw around all these world-building made-up terms and create new languages and cultures and technologies that they get to name and explain and they don’t always bother to set the stage properly for someone coming into the world, instead dropping them in and saying, essentially, “just go with it.” Or, on the other extreme, they spend pages and pages setting everything up without ever explaining why the reader ought to care.

Fantasy authors have a slightly easier time since mostly there is a context to fantasy; perhaps the fantasy tropes are part of its weakness since originality isn’t a defining characteristic but at least they allow a degree of accessibility. You can call the hulking green-skinned, heavy jawed, war-thirsty brutes Bludgryphs or you can call them Wyldingz, or any other psedonym, but I know you mean “Orks.” Even if they have orange skin or fur or some come from noble tribes, I still know what you mean. When some SF writer starts talking about “the wingspan on the steely Feruhgl’ahnj being sixty decajinters wide” I sort of glaze over. Maybe it’s a metal space dragon? Maybe a spaceship? Maybe it’s a really small communicator? Whatever, just get on with it so maybe somewhere in the next twenty pages that one sentence will make half a lick of sense.

And here’s what happens: All this imagination is running around, loose and wild, hoping you’ll pick it up by contextual clues and while the author is smugly shoving their cleverness into your face and daring you to question their wit and craft, I start to fall asleep. Literally, in the case of Dune. It’s not that Herbert wrote a boring book it’s that I floundered so much with his clever but context-deprived jabbering that it wasn’t until 75 pages in that I finally saw some semblance of character and conflict and drama and intrigue. It took me longer to read 30 pages of Dune than it did to read 400 pages in The Hunger Games. Because here’s the secret I don’t like admitting to myself: I prefer YA SF. The short version of it is that YA books get to the point and filter their creativity and cleverness through a character filter so we’re learning about the people while we learn about the places and the things. Maybe Suzanne Collins wouldn’t be doing what she’s doing without Herbert, but I’m glad she’s doing it better than he did.

Fortunately for Herbert, classic SF fans and myself, Dune does eventually start to make sense and even starts to get exciting. A synopsis doesn’t do justice to the intricate plot of the novel, but the focus here is on the planet of Arrakis, a water-deprived desert of a place that just happens to be the sole source of melange—spice—which is vital to the Imperium, necessary for space travel and the cornerstone of the interstellar economy. Arrakis was controlled by House Harkonnen, but an Imperial order has them vacating the planet and welcoming House Atredies as its new stewards. Only the Duke, Leto Atredies, suspects or perhaps knows outright that there is a Harkonnen plot behind the new assignment. His only hope is that his foresight will permit him to turn the tables or, if worst comes to pass, his young but gifted son Paul can succeed where he will have failed.

My favorite part of the book is the snippets of works by what appears to be Paul’s biographer, one Princess Irulan, <spoiler>later revealed to be his wife-to-be,</spoiler> which appear before each chapter. These foreshadowing blocks of flavor text frame the book as a sort of future history, a narrative account of something that is significant in a broader context looked back on from a future time. It works exceptionally well, even creating a nebulous but fascinating character in the Princess herself, and nearly all the quotes relate in some way to the following chapter.

My least favorite part of the book is the way Herbert struggles to maintain a consistent point of view, switching pell-mell between characters having a dialogue, dropping italicized thoughts in from them or even onlookers, consistently resorting to a more tell than show means of conveying the inner struggles of the principal characters. It never really makes the book hard to follow, but it makes the book kind of a pain to read, consistently pulling the reader out of the flow and making it at times very slow reading.

The good news is that the praise for Dune is deserved because in spite of it being kind of a mess in terms of writing, it’s a triumph of storytelling, world-building, and adventure. By the beginning of Part III, I was absolutely loving the story of Paul Muad’Dib, his mother Jessica and the Fremen natives with their mysterious plan for the desert planet of Arrakis. There is so much thought put into the setting here, Arrakis itself is practically the protagonist and it speaks volumes that unlike some easy to digest places like Hogwarts or Narnia, you don’t want to visit the world of Dune yourself, but it’s so wonderful to be allowed to come along for the ride with the Atredies and share in their fight for the fate of their House and their newly adopted planet and newly adopted people.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — October 12, 2011 at 02:35PM

author: Philip Roth
name: Paul
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1997
rating: 3
read at: 2011/09/25
date added: 2011/09/26
shelves: novel
review:
A brief aside since it’s been a while since I listened to any audiobooks: I listened to the version narrated by Ron Silver on my iPod and I remembered in doing so why I both love and loathe audiobooks. Pro: they are possibly the best thing (when I’m into them) imaginable for dull commutes, especially for someone like me that finds driving terminally boring. Con: Even with an iPod, audiobooks just aren’t as convenient as regular books for almost every other application. Mr. Silver does a great job narrating on this one, though he doesn’t do that much to differentiate individual voices. My overall impression of the audio here was favorable but at one point about midway through I seriously considered just picking up the actual novel and finishing it that way. Okay, on with the book review.

American Pastoral is my first encounter with Philip Roth. Let me get a couple of complaints and pet peeves out of the way, first. For one, I have this thing about writers who write about writers. They do it all the time. I know the axiom, “Write what you know” is out there, but it just seems so incredibly self-referential, so dull and easy to me that I first ask the question: Is it utterly essential that this character be a writer? If the answer is “yes,” then okay. But usually, nearly all the time, the answer is “no” and I get annoyed. The self-insertion, first-person narrator in American Pastoral, Nathan Zuckerman, not only doesn’t have to be a writer, he doesn’t even have to exist. The first part of the book, with its ping-ponging adoration of the protagonist-to-be, Seymour “Swede” Levov and the fabricated historical contextualizing of him from an external viewpoint serves, as best as I can tell, to allow Roth to write about the act of writing. He pontificates at times, rather passionately and eloquently I should add, about what it means to observe as a writer and then what it means to try to orchestrate those observations into something meaningful, something that reflects reality.

Secondly, as hard as Roth tries, he is never really able to give Levov enough roundness to feel genuine. Roth tries valiantly to make him human in spite of being extraordinary, to create someone believable who, by need of the story must be near perfection until he can be shattered by the weight of his shame and guilt over one act outside his control, he doesn’t quite get there. It feels like Swede Levov is a puppet, an article designed to demonstrate something; he’s above humanity until his great sorrow finally creates a human from the superhero, and I don’t think that’s precisely what Roth was hoping for.

What surprises me is that neither of these things, possibly deal-breakers in other books, really bother me all that much about American Pastoral. Roth’s Pulitzer-winner is a very meticulously crafted novel, with a lot of the strings showing almost like Edgar Bergen’s ventriloquism. It’s not perfect, and certainly the illusion is poorly hidden, but it’s good where it matters—in the content. And the content in this book is, for the most part, wonderful.

Roth—via Zuckerman—details the life of Swede Levov, high school athlete superstar, successful businessman, husband of a former Miss New Jersey, father of an adored daughter. He’s the guy who has it all, and unlike some characters that might get put into this idyllic life in the hands of other authors, The Swede loves it. There is a herculean act—wrought in part by the Nathan Zuckerman beginning—put forth to make sure that there is no dissatisfaction, no malcontent or malaise in the mind of Seymour Levov until the act which undoes everything and punctures the meticulous world of the Levovs. He adores his life, he loves that he has it all and there is a professed self-awareness about how The Swede operates, acknowledging and respecting his blessed station, trying for a humility in the shadow of this great cascade of fortune. Of course a book about a guy with no problems would be miserably boring so Roth makes The Swede’s daughter, Merry, a stuttering and angry child who fixates on the Vietnam war to an unhealthy degree. Eventually she turns to an act of terrorism on the small New Jersey hometown that The Swede loves so ferociously. In this act of—rage? defiance? desperation? accident?—Merry Levov, The Swede’s daughter, blows up both the town’s general store and also, symbolically, Seymour’s life.

American Pastoral leaps around in time, skipping from Swede’s musings on Merry’s motivations, her childhood, her rebellion, the act itself, the aftermath, the affect it has on his wife Dawn, dancing its way from the 50s through the tumultuous 60s and 70s and partially the 80s, all drifting back from the retrospective lens of the 90s where the whole thing is encapsulated by a know-the-ending-first framework from Zuckerman’s initial meeting with the elderly Swede. Roth dissects the slice of life from an all-American Jewish family perspective, weaving notable historical events throughout and contextualizing them within that screwed-up family that, by all accounts, started off normal and should have just kept on being normal. There is a palpable sense through the whole novel that Roth is trying to cut to the truths and lies and misperceptions and insightfulness that all lie behind the simple phrase uttered by the aged: “Back in my day…”

Roth writes with a surgeon’s patience, remorselessly but steadily sawing through disillusionment and agony, capturing at his finest moments the poignant torture of parenthood; the fearful, ineffectual dread of the elderly at seeing the world leave them behind; the natural state of paranoia in a populace that fears even necessary change. He understands that when people look back with nostalgia at the past, they often overlook things that were wrong then, they almost never see what’s right about the present. At times American Pastoral seems to argue that the worst thing we could ever hope for would be for everything to be exactly how we think it should be.

And yet, for all of the triumph of writing in this book, it has a glaring flaw which is the final scene. This last, laborious moment starts fairly late in the novel and describes a dinner party, held some five years after Merry’s terrorist act, by happenstance on the exact same day The Swede first re-connects with his fugitive daughter. I can only think of one other book that had this same sense about it, as I closed in on the end and realized how much physical content the book contained and understood the state of the story at that point and realized, “There’s no way there is enough time left for this to come to a satisfying conclusion.” The previous book was the woefully rushed SF novel by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash. With that book, which in spite of its incomplete finale I still count as one of my favorites, new and awesome things were still getting introduced practically to the last page. With American Pastoral though, it isn’t that too much new information is added late, it’s that there are so many questions unanswered and resolutions that must be filled in to get from the old-man Swede we encountered with Nathan Zuckerman at the beginning to this mid-life, broken Swede and simply there is not enough time to get there.

And true enough, this final sequence is stunted, baffling and circular, managing all at once to undo some of what was good about American Pastoral up until the dinner party began. The specifics of the disappointment I found in this final scene aren’t necessarily open to discussion in a review, since spoilers would abound. This is book-group discussion material. But I do want to make one broad point about this finishing act that doesn’t give much away in terms of the plot. Up until this point there is a sense that the book is in part about the way in which no matter how much you think you have it all and no matter how hard you work to combat all the variables, to control the environment and influence the outcome, sometimes the agents of chaos and the laws of probability cannot be countered. You could even make an argument that Swede Levov’s un-relatable inhumanity prior to the devastation at the hands of his daughter which injects him with a sudden sense of legitimacy and person-hood is intentional to show that suffering and loss and destruction are essential to making us who we are.

And then, at the very end, Roth seems to suddenly switch tracks and postulates that possibly Merry existed and acted because The Swede was who he was. He unexpectedly seems to re-cast the whole dynamic as if it were some kind of cosmic balance, like an equal and opposite reaction necessary to counter the force that is or was Seymour Levov. But in casting it this way, in making the case that perhaps Merry had to be Merry because The Swede was The Swede, it makes it feel suddenly pat, bookended and complete; karmic, almost. And for a novel that until that point seemed to revel in the entropy of time and the unpredictability that comes when cultures and generations and events collide in this land of (supposed) possibility, that seemed to me to undermine so much of the power the book had held through nine-tenths of its length. I suddenly didn’t know what American Pastoral or Roth himself was really trying to say, it made me wonder if Roth even knew. And in short, it weakened the book for me.

I liked American Pastoral, I liked the way it made me think and I’m sure it will lead me try more of Philip Roth’s work, but I don’t know that I found it to be a masterpiece, largely because of this stifled, abrupt conclusion. I would give the book a mild recommendation, and I think its best platform would be for discussion groups with the luxury of multiple viewpoints to dissect and debate what Roth is saying—intentionally or not—about people and what living in this country does for, and to, them.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — September 26, 2011 at 02:26PM

author: Lynda Van Devanter
name: Paul
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2011/09/08
date added: 2011/09/08
shelves: history, non-fiction, memoir
review:
My wife has been pestering me to pick up Lynda Van Devanter‘s memoir of serving as a nurse in the Vietnam War for years. The thing is, I don’t really like memoirs all that much. Too often they spend a third or more of the book going over the kinds of “start at the beginning” backstories which don’t really add as much to the framing of the meat as the authors think. This is especially true of stories where either childhoods were especially harsh and difficult (nearly always highlighted in tales of survival as the place the narrator learned how to never give up) or were more or less idyllic (usually setting up a grand disappointment or disenfranchisement later). It’s rarely as simple as these narrative devices let on and they just sort of bore me, especially since I usually only care about the hook of a memoir, something the author can describe that I’ve not heard about before. I’ve heard plenty of stories of happy and sad childhoods. Spare me.

Home Before Morning isn’t exempt from this memoir-itis, relying on the idyllic childhood context to contrast the horrors of war and show how the oppressive futility of trying to piece dying soldiers back together shattered her once peaceful little existence. Whatever else you may say about the meat of the book and the skillfulness of its crafting, the basic premise is hardly novel. That doesn’t make it bad, I suppose, it just makes it familiar. I guess it’s difficult to look at a book about a naive Catholic nursing student volunteering for a tour of duty from my lofty 21st century ivory tower, decorated as it is with all the dissecting literature, film and coursework of the past forty years and not say, “Well, jeez. What did you expect, lady?”

Still, Van Devanter managed to make a slow but effective incision in my post-irony viewpoint and drag me back to a time when patriotism wasn’t just a jest adopted by people to serve a political purpose, when ideals weren’t viewed with cynicism and suspicion wrought from too many disappointing years under questionable leadership. Home Before Morning shows, in a way, the birth of all that, chronicling at its best moments the death not of an individual’s innocence, but of a nation’s.

Some of Home Before Morning doesn’t completely work. The last third of the book is devoted to Van Devanter’s return to the States, chronicling her disenchantment with what she (and other vets) termed “The World.” The World was unhappy with the war and for the most part shamefully took it out on the soldiers who, as Van Devanter points out, largely were as opposed to it as those who hadn’t gone into the service. Some of this section is powerful, riveting and insightful but parts of it drag a bit as she describes Post Traumatic Stress Disorder faithfully but without near as much passion and impact as her tales from the one year in the 71st Evac. The choices of what to skim past (her marriage) and what to bog down in detail (her stint as a dialysis nurse) and mostly what to try to weave as a narrative thread aren’t always the best. A key example for this is the recurring theme of the question that continues to plague her throughout the war and the aftermath: Why? For as often as Van Devanter asks the question, she never makes any serious attempt to answer it, even when some thoughtful introspection about it would be deeply appropriate like in the epilogue where she describes her return to Vietnam in 1982.

A couple of places where Home Before Morning really shines is in its depiction of the horrors of war through the lens not of the hyper-masculine killing machines in the infantry units (I’m thinking of works like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket), but through the eyes of the sort of ironically necessary medical personnel who have to be on hand to try and undo the work of the warring soldiers on both sides. For some reason the idea that the trauma of war would seep into the lives of medics never really occurred to me, as if treating wounded soldiers was no more traumatic for hospital staff than the doctors and nurses working in a Stateside facility in a particularly violent neighborhood. I’m grateful to the book for giving me a different perspective, one that extends to all emergency medical personnel.

One thing I wish Home Before Morning had was a follow-up; the book’s narrative stops in 1982 and I had to go online to find that she eventually re-married, had a daughter and passed away in 2002 and spent a lot of the years between the publication of the book and her death serving as a spokesperson for women veterans and that this book was in part the inspiration for the television series China Beach. Obviously that’s not the kind of thing that would appear in this book, but I was interested enough in the tale, and in Van Devanter herself, to want more when it was over. I guess that says something in itself.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — September 08, 2011 at 08:52AM

author: H.G. Wells
name: Paul
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1888
rating: 3
read at: 2011/09/03
date added: 2011/09/04
shelves: classic, novel, science-fiction
review:
Despite a near universal loathing for the ridiculous concessions writers force upon audiences of time travel tales, I love them. I’m not even sure why since I so often find myself annoyed when the logic—even the story’s internal logic—stumbles, but something keeps me trying them over and over. H. G. Wells‘s The Time Machine, written over 100 years ago, is probably as deft a treatment of the subject as I’ve yet encountered.

In large part this is accomplished by avoiding the messy paradoxical elements of visiting the past (other than returning through time to the origin point, all time travel occurs to the future in this novel), and focusing instead on a nineteenth century scientist/scholar visiting a far-flung future in which the evolution of humanity has branched into a parable of class division and a political dissection of, essentially, socialism.

Politics aside, this book does what most good speculative fiction does which is frame a particular thought process into a fantastical story which is both entertaining and thought-provoking at once. I read the entire 128 page book in a few hours which speaks to its readability and found myself enchanted by the descriptions of the Morlocks and the Eloi, the struggle for the narrator (referred to only as “The Time Traveler”) to escape his uncertain fate and the reactions by the crowd of dinner guests who form the audience hearing of the Traveler’s tale. The bulk of the book is devoted to a quoted first-hand account by the Traveler of his eight-day adventure with the Eloi and Murlocks, but the framing of the story as a spoken-word tale amongst society gentlemen works well to create a particular sense of setting and atmosphere, such that it feels a lot like a valiant campfire tale.

In particular I found the end of the book to be remarkably unkempt—satisfying while being fairly open-ended instead of trying, as too many time travel tales do, to draw to a conclusion a narrative that almost by definition defies beginning and end. It seems almost comical to me that one of the earliest and most drawn-upon sources for time travel fiction turns out to be one of the best but I suppose there really shouldn’t be much surprise there. Of course, this is all only true if you focus solely on the nuance of plot and the intrigue inherent in the story itself. The main flaw in the book is that Wells scarcely bothers to create much in the way of character (perhaps this is obvious of a writer who doesn’t even bother to name the protagonist); the most well-rounded character of all is an Eloi female named Weena who herself is remarkable only for her devotion to the Traveler. Additionally there is a fairly unnecessary sequence late in the book where the Traveler proceeds beyond the year 802,701 AD and watches as the sun dies, a sequence that defies some commonly understood modern scientific notions and doesn’t really add much to the overall tale.

Still, I enjoyed The Time Machine and found it to be, especially for a beleaguered time travel devotee, a pleasant reminder of why this particular subgenre holds fascination in the first place, coming straight from one of the original inspirations.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — September 04, 2011 at 04:56PM

author: Robert B. Parker
name: Paul
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1973
rating: 2
read at: 2011/09/02
date added: 2011/09/03
shelves: mystery, novel
review:
For the first half of The Godwulf Manuscript, I had a hard time understanding why I was reading the book. I had been recommended the series as being solid detective stories featuring a wise-cracking protagonist and a good example of how to craft snappy dialogue. But for the first 100 pages or so I just couldn’t get a handle on Spenser as a character. His “wit” seemed to be a casual sneer in the direction of everyone he encountered—most of whom he could have gotten to be much more cooperative if he’d not been such a tool right off the bat—and it wasn’t even all that witty to me anyway.

But then, curiously, Spenser started to grow on me. By about halfway through the book I was appreciating his sense of humor more, and his disregard for the kinds of social convention like assigned parking and not beating puffed-up bullies senseless endeared me a little. Robert B. Parker never does a great job at describing Spenser physically so in part I think my inability to connect with him early on was that I couldn’t get much of a mental picture going, but eventually this straightens out.

A more pointed critique for The Godwulf Manuscript is that, as a mystery, it’s only so-so. There’s an economy of characters problem throughout in that very few individuals (left alive) could possibly be the guilty party meaning the reveal is less whodunnit but whydunnit. That’s okay, I suppose, except very early on the mystery stops having anything to do with the titular manuscript and becomes about <spoiler>drugs and a series of murders</spoiler>. In fact, I was never terribly clear on what the manuscript had to do with anything at all, other than to conveniently get Spenser involved in something that otherwise would have been a routine police matter. Maybe that’s all it was, but by the end it felt a bit like Fridge Logic.

The real question, I suppose, is whether this book made me want to continue reading Mr. Parker’s novels, because by most accounts I’ve seen, the series gets better as it goes along. I guess the highest praise for The Godwulf Manuscript I can muster is that it was interesting enough to put the series on come-back-to status: I haven’t entirely written off Parker as a novelist and Spenser as a character so I can see going back and trying book two at some future point. But, this certainly didn’t have me racing out to see desperately what happens next.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — September 03, 2011 at 07:38AM

author: Raymond Carver
name: Paul
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2011/08/30
date added: 2011/08/30
shelves: short-stories
review:
The short stories in Raymond Carver‘s collection of brief, desperate shorts read like things that should be taped to the backs of old photographs. Muted colors and slept-in clothing bought from Woolworth’s were conjured as I read, reminding me of a world filtered through the red-brown of a whiskey bottle. People speak of “Carver’s America” as if it were a place he made up, but I suspect it was as much a real location as the country I grew up in only without all the disco pop and day-glo colors and quirky cultural fads like Rubik’s cubes and video arcades. The thing is, Carver understands that it doesn’t matter when a person is, they still don’t know how to handle the life they’re handed.

Carver’s stories start somewhere and end somewhere else. Often the end isn’t the ending, it’s just the place where the story stops. There are often questions, those questions aren’t answered. The writing style is bare, almost curt. But unlike fellow minimalist Hemingway, it isn’t abrupt or stilted, Carver’s writing has a rhythmic, almost percussive quality. Reading Carver is like listening to jazz, where so often the essence of a song is not in what notes are played as in what notes aren’t. As often as not, what Carver doesn’t reveal or discuss matters more than what he does. The peculiar cadence to the words and—especially—the dialogue gives the sense that the characters are eternally pre-occupied. Often a conversation will happen between two people not with each other or even at each other but just in each other’s presence, trading non-sequiturs because their self-absorbtion is complete enough that the other’s reply is inconsequential.

Some of the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love are vicious, aggressive. Others are sad and solemn, maybe even a little sweet. You feel as you meander through the pages as if you were walking through a neighborhood, stopping to look through the invisible walls along the way, catching a conversation, a fight, a beginning, an end. Certain tales resonate stronger than others: Gazebo, a conversation between a remorseful husband and a resigned wife; The Bath, a slice of a parent’s nightmare; Tell The Women We’re Going, a haunting tale of two old friends who don’t really know each other at all; Popular Mechanics, possibly the best/worst story ever told in two pages; the title story which fogs the windows with heartaching insight. This is a readable book, but a difficult one. It makes you want to drink, or quit drinking forever. It goes quickly but it’s hard to finish. I kind of loved it.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — August 30, 2011 at 10:23PM

author: George R.R. Martin
name: Paul
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2011/08/26
date added: 2011/08/26
shelves: fantasy, novel
review:
George R. R. Martin gets some heat for his writing prowess, or perhaps, lack thereof. I think this is overstated not because Martin is terribly dynamic with his wordcraft (which he isn’t) or because his narrative voice is particularly noteworthy (which it isn’t), but because where Martin may occasionally struggle to embroider a tale, he excels at crafting one. His skill lies not with the embellishment or wordsmithing but with forging a macro-level tale that explores all the various motivations and mechanisms that lie behind the butterfly effects of both emotional response and the best-laid plans.

By this point (book two) in A Song Of Ice And Fire, most readers will probably have their favorite characters picked out. Fans of swordplay and valiant high fantasy-laced action will probably gravitate toward Jon Snow’s exploits along the Wall. Travelogues will likely appreciate Daenerys Targaryen’s wandering toward an unknown destiny. Those with a soft spot for the underdogs will lean perhaps toward poor broken Bran Stark or puppet of fate Theon Greyjoy. Personally though, I find the scrappy Arya Stark and the wily dwarf Tyrion Lannister to be the most enchanting characters in A Clash of Kings.

My affection for the two characters comes in part from the best of Martin’s writing: His ability to foreshadow remarkable feats based on no other information than the fact that he chooses to dedicate pages to a specific character and his knack for weaving tension and outright excitement from political maneuverings. There is something remarkable about Arya because in spite of her not having much to do throughout book one (A Game of Thrones), and even with several check-ins early in A Clash of Kings, the sense that she is destined for something marvelous is tactile in her chapters. Meanwhile, though Martin includes plenty of military scenes and fights throughout, none are as frantic as the sizzling sequences where a politician-gamer like Tyrion plays at a different kind of swords, the swords of power. These fight scenes—including a particularly memorable one fairly early in the book where the Imp slowly reveals a treacherous decision to a placid captain of the royal guard—waged with tongues instead of blades are as thrilling and deadly as any of Martin’s battle accounts.

Martin still relies far too heavily on certain pet phrases, introducing here “half a hundred” to the others he revisits from A Game of Thrones and too many interesting events in this volume happen off-page, only referenced by other characters as they hear of them (Robb, for instance, has scarcely any time devoted to him despite his war efforts having ripple effects on the POV characters). The bigger issue in A Clash of Kings is that the story begins to careen out of control in terms of scope and characters. Where A Game Of Thrones was sprawling and complex, for the most part it was navigable. Kings, on the other hand, drives forward into a morass of new and minor characters, introducing two additional principal POVs in Theon Greyjoy and Davos Seaworth, both distinct from the scattered points of action previously established. Where the first volume was admirably able to present spatial and human relationships in such a way that maps and character appendices weren’t strictly necessary, Kings begins to read like epic Russian literature in which certain locations or individuals suddenly pop up as vital to the plot where previously they may have been assumed to be of little importance.

Martin challenges readers to keep up with him which I both admire and kind of resent. In a big way I don’t know that the story would be as successful as it is if it were easier to keep up with, if it were smaller as it were. The fact that it is big and ugly and convoluted and no one (least of all the reader) can be entirely sure of what is really going on everywhere at once make the saga dance with a life that rings authentic. Real war and politics and strife is messy and hard to fathom, so why shouldn’t this be as well? Still, it would be nice not to feel like I needed a detailed Wiki to make sense of the dozens of minor lords, hedge knights, lesser houses and geographic relationships just to understand the significance of certain military maneuvers.

I mentioned in my Game of Thrones review that it had restored my faith in the fantasy epic and while A Clash of Kings is a worthy successor, I started to see glimpses of issues I had with other series creep in: Prophecy and meaningful dreaming plays a much more significant role here than in book one, plus magic (deliciously rare in Thrones) plays a bigger part and is hinted at being elevated still. Additionally there are a number of much slower segments in this novel compared to the first. It never truly bogs down to the point where the book becomes tedious, but it does take a bit too long for each of the three major plot threads (Dany, Jon and the war around King’s Landing) to set themselves up for their climactic scenes.

However, when A Clash of Kings is done carefully aligning the dominoes the toppling climax is dynamic and utterly gripping. The final quarter of the book is as intense and readable as any potboiler, in some cases made more so by the grand scale of the thing so meticulously orchestrated to that point. Additionally, I can’t help but praise and admire Martin for his willingness to resist the temptation of many authors (especially fantasy authors) to create overly-convenient macguffins or descend into deus ex machina. It makes the conflict more visceral and the danger more vivid when there isn’t a hope of some magical protector sweeping in at the last minute. In a welcome nod to realism, characters in A Song of Ice and Fire live and die by their resourcefulness and fortune alone.

I do wish this installment was of the same overall quality and relative brisk pacing as its predecessor, but I do grant middle entries in trilogies (though I know this series has expanded beyond the original three volume set) some leeway since they mostly serve to facilitate a drive toward a grand finale. Still, Martin is crafting a powerful tale and the strongest praise I can grant this book is that it has me earnestly looking forward to volume three.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — August 26, 2011 at 09:30AM

author: Suzanne Collins
name: Paul
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at: 2011/08/09
date added: 2011/08/10
shelves: novel, science-fiction, young-adult
review:
For the first few hours after I finished Mockingjay, the final chapter in the Hunger Games trilogy, I thought I just hated the ending. But as I reflect more on it, I think the entire book was disappointing, even leading up to the final 50 or so pages.

I won’t spoil the end, but here’s the problem I have with it: Up through the finale of Catching Fire (as stunted as it was), even though we see all the events through Katniss’s eyes, her own negative self-image is not what is reflected back from the supporting cast. Throughout the first two installments even when she loathes herself and struggles with her own actions, we see what others see in her, the good they find, the inspiration she ignites. There is a great scene in Catching Fire where Peeta teases Katniss because she can’t see the purity in herself that others do (and occasionally find resentful). In that moment we understand what Peeta is talking about, even when she can’t. Katniss is a survivor and she does what she has to to protect her family, her loved ones, even herself. But she’s motivated by more than just cold self-preservation, she also wants to do the right thing and her actions—even murderous ones—are never beyond the reader’s ability to sympathize.

Where Mockingjay breaks down is that it transforms Katniss from desperate survivor, justifiable murderess, into a stone sociopath. The key is that at some early point in the third book, I stopped rooting for her. She spends an excessive amount of time in the book convalescing which destroys the frantic pacing that made The Hunger Games and Catching Fire so ridiculously readable, and while Suzanne Collins makes an effort to repeat a situation similar to the arena for a third time, it fails. I was able to forgive the Quarter Quell for being a contrivance because it had internal consistency and a suitable lead-in but with Mockingjay the motivations are all wrong and the stakes are too far removed, creating a forced atmosphere. The rest of the story involves the war against the Capitol, but it’s not a war novel—it maybe should have been.

Broadly speaking you can see that sense of Collins reaching desperately to write herself out of a corner throughout the novel. Characters change drastically because they need to in order to maintain a rough similarity to the structures established in books one and two (the love triangle, the conflicted protagonist, the life-or-death stakes) but that need exists only in the author’s head. And even with all that effort, it’s still wildly divergent from the previous entries. The result is a book that tries to split the difference between maintaining what the reader has come to expect from the series and needing to be broader in scope to best serve the story. The tepid middle ground results in a muddled, unfocused plot leading to the unsatisfying conclusion.

It’s bad enough that the ending results in a main character that is nearly impossible to care about, what’s worse is the fact that it feels like an alternate ending from the special features on a DVD: The “dark” take that is interesting in a curious sense but didn’t play well with test audiences. You’re intrigued by what it could say about the characters, but it doesn’t fit well with what we’ve learned about them so far, leaving you relieved that they stuck with the better, lighter conclusion. Except here, this is the only ending we’ve got. And there are so many things wrong with it (again, no specific spoilers, just generalizations): Katniss’s breaking point could have been handled in a dozen different ways but Collins goes for the jugular and as a result undoes everything that matters not just to Katniss, but the reader as well. She never explains Katniss’ actions sufficiently, never contextualizes them so we can get a sense of whether she was justified or maybe will be in the future, never even attempts to make sense of it. And perhaps worst of all, the resolution of the love triangle that has been such a pivotal part of the story until the final pages and epilogue is whipped by in a blur as if it were an afterthought, a non-issue. It’s so incredibly flippant that it made me irritated that I had even cared which suitor she would choose to begin with.

Obviously I have affection for the books, the characters and the series as a whole. If not, I wouldn’t care the way I do about how it ended. But it reminded me of two other trilogies: One is The Matrix movies, where my low opinion of how the story drew to a close affected my overall perception of the earlier movies that I liked so much. The other is Scott Westerfeld‘s Uglies trilogy (since expanded), which did the opposite by letting the books change the world without trying to return to the hook from book one, allowing the story to happen naturally. I don’t have a problem with Collins choosing to go a darker route with her finale than Westerfeld did (though his isn’t exactly a comedy either), but there’s dark and then there’s dismal. Even worse, it feels rushed and incomplete while being dismal.

What I feel is the most frustrating part is that I don’t even feel that a similar outline of this book, expanded differently, would have been as disappointing: Even if the same key events took place with minor revisions it could have been done in a satisfying way. Instead this feels too much like an early draft, one an editor needed to draw big red lines through and say, “Less moping, less grim-for-grim’s-sake, more intrigue, more vitality.” I still recommend the series, and I’m probably more generous with this entry than I should be on the strength of the first two, but I can’t help but warn others that this isn’t the conclusion I wanted from a series that I loved for 700 pages and then resented for about the last 200.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — August 10, 2011 at 09:54AM