Just a short note. Aida Emariam in the Guardian has an interview with Terry Pratchett. He talks about I Shall Wear Midnight and the right to die.
In a way I’m happy that this is the last in the Aching books (whilst I’m also going to miss them) and I’m really looking forward to reading it.
Having a bit of a catch up. I’ve been reading Guy Gavriel Kay‘s Ysabel which I’ve had on my shelf since publication. I’m not sure why I’ve waited so long as I’ve pretty much gulped down previous novels.
It is a departure for Kay in that rather than bringing the reader into a secondary world, the historical world intrudes into the real one. It feels slight at one level and I think marked an attempt to do something very different. It makes me want to get Under Heaven and read it in less than 2 years, though I would suspect that it would be a very different experience.
Having just watched the DVD of Going Postal, I started Terry Pratchett‘s Making Money, the second book featuring Moist von Lipwig. More wry than laugh out loud (well until Mr Fusspot stole the sex toy), there are nice little hooks and thoughtful explorations of the banking industry. I did enjoy the riffing of Newton’s taking over of the Royal Mint and trying to make the coinage valuable again.
As both Gibson’s Zero History and Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight come out next week (and the BBC version of Sherlock Holmes), I’ve got a little re-reading to do. Currently reading Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.
I’ve just finished the Dervish House by Ian McDonald which is set in Istanbul and brings the current series to an end.
After a bomb goes off in Istanbul, near to a house which belonged to a dervish, various lives are interwined in a search not only for the truth of the bombing but also the wider patterns in the city.
Ayse, a dealer who is adept at finding the strangest curio, is talking to Akgun about a manuscript which he highlights as having micrography. Ayse points out that that there is a second layer of micrography, a layer of writing within the writing. That seems to be a key to the book, perhaps even the series which began with River of Gods. Perhaps it equates to a view of science fiction, that there are layers of meaning. Ayse’s search for the Mellified Man, a corpse self-embalmed in honey waiting for the call to rise again, sees her realise that the micro and the macro are entwined in certain ways. For her, it is the mystical chase to find the Seven Letters of God inscribed on the city by a mystucal architect which range from the massive to the micro. As she realises, the architect created them to be “apprehended whole, at once, by the eye of a God immanent everywhere” (p 260) but are not to be read. They exist and the faithful will never rarely see them, only the obsessive might apprehend it.
It being us back to sense of struggling to find a pattern which William Gibson has been exploring in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. As Clute points out in his review, Pattern Recognition marks a move away from First Sf and it sense that there is a future that can be imagined. McDonald continues the trajectory in that, athough the book is set in 2027, it is also now. Or at least a version of now. When Leyla is trying to sell the nanotechnology to the CoGoNano! corporation, the startling lack of a vision of the future is somehow rendered clear. All the corporation wants to do is to sell and market toys and games. Frivolity is more important than change or use.
The same is apparent in the games that the Özer traders play. Realising that the company is weak, four of them concoct a plan to bring it down and expose the corruption at its core. Whilst making a profit for themselves. After the collapse, three of them taking mind-altering nanotechnology, whilst the fourth invests in Leyla and Aso’s nanotechnology. Investing in the future is a rarity as is trying to see a future when the now is uncertain. Perhaps that is when it is most important to try and see one.
Sometimes the pattern makers only see the pattern that they want to see. Adnan, the only remembering trader, sees the flow of “unreal” money moving between corporations; his own micro view guides him. Ayse’s micro gaze, directed by her quest, makes her see part of the city in a radically different way.
Georgios, the professor, begins to see how the smaller fits into the larger after a conversation with an Army general. Thinking about the information given to him, he rethinks his position and ties in information together. As his own view is challenged and is fed new information, he rethinks the conclusion which nearly has distastrous effects for Can, the 9 year old boy obsessed with Robots. Though his old life is in ruins, he begins to recognise the other patterns which led to it and begins to try to salvage his own life.
As the rifts and narratives come together, Istanbul’s geographical position becomes a guiding hand to the story. Divided by water, the city straddles two continents – Europe and Asia. This Janus-like quality underlies the book with its play in history and modernity, mysticism and science and past and future. Each story comes together and plays its part, combining and dividing like DNA, to form the larger stories of the few visionaries trying to build a future which they don’t understand.
Their individual versions of sema, leading to the final whirl, allows them to appreciate and to negotiate the other stories. In ignorance of the terrorist purpose (to ignite a religious wave across the world), they perhaps fulfil it. It is a deeper one, more mystical, as it comes from the within than the without.
Watching from the margins, McDonald builds on Gibson’s argument regarding the instability of the future. He riffs of the steganography and transforms it into nanotechnology and micrography. All the while there is the air of a family saga buuilding, that the science could be ignored in the twists of the lives that come together. At points, there are even movements towards the fantastic as djinns can be seen. As First Sf and its uncertain certainties are dead, so perhaps are the ways of writing Sf. I do wonder if this is coming back to the New Wave and the recombination that has been taking place in genre again. As he shows, the boundaries make no real odds. What they show is how uncertain and unfathomable the larger version of the Now is.
Artemis Fowl is happy. Very happy. Unnervingly so. His latest scheme is to reverse global warming and save the world. He’s being heroic. Its unnerving.
He keeps taking and counting in multiples of five as well. Holly Short notices the problem and diagnoses Atlantis Complex. Artemis’s mind has been addled by his magical adventures. However before she and Foaly can begin to help him, they are attacked by a swarm of self-organising bots and their craft destroyed.
Meanwhile Butler is sent to Cancun to rescue his sister, Juliet, and so is not around to protect Artemis. Juliet’s career as a wrestler comes to an abrubt end as they are kidnapped (after nearly being squished by a flashmob crowd).
Both end up in the hands of Turnbull Root who, despite being magicless (unmagicked?), has escaped from maximum security prison and returned to his true love, Lenora. Time has not been kind to his love and he is forced to accept her humanity and aging, unable to continue reversing it.
Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex
Fowl makes his choices and learns to live with them; Turbull’s failure is that he does not take responsibility for himself. Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex is a fun romp with a serious side to it. Under the derring do, there is a deconstruction of the all-conquering (anti-)hero. Thoughtful and fun; a fantastic mix.
Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex, Eoin Colfer (Puffin, London, 2010)
Alison Flood in the Guardian has a piece on the reworking of the language in the Famous Five books which Hodder, their current publisher, are publishing in August. They will still publish the originals but the contemporary range will modernise some of the language.
I can see why Anne McNeill, the publishing director of Hodder childrens books, wants to do this. Some of the language is archaic now and perhaps odd sounding but I wonder if this will add to their popularity or if it is pandering to a perceptions. The article mentions that half a million copies of the books are sold and that she is in the top 10 most borrowed authors in the libraries. So they still hold their popularity.
They are they are a reflection of their time as is the language. (Her attitudes as well but hey ho.) Part of their (limited) charm to me is the fact that they are period fiction, they are completely of their time. I disagree with Andy Briggs, currently is working on his own updating of Tarzan, who is quoted as
It’s an unfortunate necessity … [t]he classic books we were brought up on – the Famous Five, Tarzan, Sherlock Homes – need to be updated. Language just changes, it evolves, and the problem is if we don’t evolve with it, then the new generation of kids is not going to have anything to relate to.
If it is continually updated, then it loses its charm. Books will come in and out of fashion and I’m not sure that this updating will serve to bring readers back to these classics or the authors.
Instead readers are more likely to engage with the new version not the original. This move is unlikely to make the books any more popular or any more “timeless”. As ever, classics and backlists need promotion and ‘re-branding’ but changing or adulterating the text is not the way to go with this. It is not a jolly jape.
The news that the children’s author, KP Bath, had been sentenced for the possession of child pornography has (rightly) sparked a debate on children’s mailing lists. It has reminded me of William Mayne whose writing career was ended by his conviction for indecent assault. It poses the same question that I asked then: “how does the reader respond?” and perhaps it is still too close but needs to be to broached.
One response is to ignore the author and erase him and his work from the record. Whilst it offers an immediate palliative response, I don’t think that it really offers the best response. It is another case of brushing the issue under the carpet. Bath deserves his punishment and there is not excuse for what he did but where does that leave the work itself?
I think that the best response may be to deal with the work as a work. The book clearly exists as an object in its own right and hould be judged on that basis. It is still a naive approach but should the author’s own biography always direct the response. If I’d felt that way I would have never written about William Mayne’s work but not writing about his first novel, A Grass Rope, the later The Battlefield or Earthfasts, one of his most famous novels, would have left my own book poorer and my (still developing) understanding of children’s fantasy.
I don’t believe that it is something that should be forgotten but there are some times when you need to concentrate on the work rather than the author.
I suspect Bath now knows that he is unpublishable now. Mayne was, and his backlist completely disappeared from the shelves. Perhaps the fact that they are writing for children is the key to this in that it might imply a darker or desired closer relationship to the object of a sexual fantasy. The Writewords site posed this and got a variety of responses, including somebody refusing to read Clarke after the unproven allegations. The biographical approach is one such approach but there are others and I’m sure that eventually somebody will use a psychological approach to examine these author’s relationships with children.
If the book is good enough to discuss in an essay or piece, then it should be.If it good enough to be read (whether bought or borrowed from friends or library), then again it should be. Brushing it under the carpet strikes me as a new Puritanism which denies the reader having to make up their own mind.
Lee Siegel has been stirring the minor storm in a tea cup which raised its head above the parapet again in genre recently: is fiction dead? (It was enough for the Observer to get excited about.) In an article entitled ‘Where Have All the Mailers Gone?‘ in the New York Observer he opines that fiction is dead (long live fiction?) and that non-fiction is the only type of writing telling the story of the world, concluding:
For about a million reasons, fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the nonfiction writers.
At this point I strongly disagree, Mr Siegel.The greatest story tellers of our time are not necessariy non-fiction; rather have you considered that your favoured non-genre fiction writers are not reacting to the world in the same way as Mailer or Singer? That they may not be really getting under the skin of the age in the same way, that they cannot experience the existential crisis in the same way?
William Gibson’s most recent novels, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, respond brilliantly the sense of ennui, and more frankly, “fuck, the world didn’t end in 2000″. Neal Stephenson’s dense books which create the Baroque Cycle explore the architecture of the last ten years (and I suspect are already dated in their outlook). For sheer exuberance and experimentation, China Miéville’s, Neil Gaiman’s or Jeff Vandermeer’s novels all offer insights and views into the contemporary world. The latter three are fantasticaly knowledgeable in various genres and create eminently readable books which can also be perfectly self-referential and self-reflexive. He writes:
It is only when an artistic genre becomes small and static enough to scrutinize that a compensating abundance of commentary on that genre springs into existence
He seems quite willing to ignore the swathes of commentary on ‘popular’ fiction whilst merrily reducing his own favoured few into a small enough group to determine as unworthy or unreadable.
The New Yorker ’20 under 40′ list, to which he refers, is a small list and should be argued against. I read about it in the Observer last week and took some notes an authors who sounded interesting but it strikes as being only part ofthe mix like the Granta New Writers list. It might be a starting point if there is an author who counds interesting but is in no way an arbiter of a reader’s habits (or at least the sensible reader who dips in and out).
In the Huffington Post, Jason Pinter’s ‘Death of the Literati‘ responded:
The Literati have been dividing literary culture for years, decrying popular fiction, dismissing authors, genres and authors exploring new media. And by doing so they have journeyed far, far away from the realm of relevancy.
He continues that the Literati are dying and I’m not sure on this point. I think that the Western Canon, the tradition derived from Modernism, is running to the end of its course. Harold Bloom, Lee Siegel and to an extent Robert McCrum’s positions are becoming isolated from the cut and thrust of fiction and seem to forget that Modernism was born from cultural crisis. Eliot realised that literature at the time could not comprehend a post First World War world or express it. In his fractured newness, he was heavily reliant on the past. The same was true for John Masefield and JRR Tolkien who used a different tradition but in a more reader friendly version. Perhaps we have reached a similar cultural impasse and something new is going to come along.
I come to that having re-read Harold Bloom’s now notorious/famous piece on Stephen King’s receiving of the ‘distinguished contribution’ award where he derides him as “a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind” (Source: Boston Globe) and wailing that the award was tarnished somehow. Yet he ignores the simple fact that Roth, Bellow and Mailer responded to one world, King to quite another. For the latter, the response was more to the youth cultures of the 1950s and 1960s, but the former had the war to initially contend and deal with. Different starting points lead to different conclusions.
A couple of years ago, Jason Sanford wrote a piece in the New York Review of Science Fiction called ‘Dipping Their Toes in the Genre Pool: The U.S. Literary Establishment’s Need-Hate Relationship with Speculative Fiction’ about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I’m not going to go back into the argument regarding the book but Matthew Cheney was incensed and argued on his blog that the artificial distinction between the genre and ‘literature’ is just that artificial (and Jeffrey Ford’s comment reminds us that it is a tired distinction.) It demonstrates though that the same yearning for some kind if exclusivity or wonderfully fabulous hot-tub experience where we all get along together (it’ll never happen and would be highly boring if it did).
What Mr Siegel should really be asking is who is responding to the age? Which writers are trying to make sense of the post-millennial , post-financial crash world? The impetus for so-called Canon has gone and been changed. It probably doesn’t even exist any more outside of being an occasionally useful sign post. Things change, things stay the same. Perhaps we need to remember Frank Kermode’s opening statement in his essay, The Life and Death of the Novel, :
The special fate of the novel, considered as a genre, is to be always dying; and the main reason for this is that the most intelligent novelists and readers are always conscious of the gap, consisting of absurdity, that grows between the world as it seems to be and the world proposed in novels.
I acknowledge that we need critics like Siegel and Pinter arguing over books but some times the circularity and repetition of arguments needs to be remembered. As Carolyn Kellog has it, Fiction is Dead. Again?, where she points out that it is rare reader who will not enjoy both fiction and non-fiction. I think we might be be in a lull at the moment and that writing will appear, but for the moment can we just enjoy the one’s we have?
It has been a while since I followed Charles Stross‘s Laundry Novels but I recently read The Fuller Memorandum which has made me want to re-read the Jennifer Morgue and Atrocity Archives.
It is a slightly less madcap romp through the Laundry with the inevitable end of the world – but which world is ending? Bob finds himself investigating and digging through the Laundry’s past to figure out what the Fuller Memorandum is and how it might affect the Laundry, Meanwhile, Mo is sent on rough assignment to Amsterdam and the following fall out plays on their marriage. Bob finds that the end of the world is being called in London and he has a wonderfully dark skit on the cult initiates and their unthinking beliefs.
The novel reads as a nice sorbet after the noir of Vandermeer’s Finch or panorama of Tim Power’s Declare. Stross has fun with the horror and spy potentials of horror and spy fiction.
I’ve just finished Ken Macleod‘s The Restoration Game (Orbit, £18.99) and I’m still slightly agog.
Lucy Stone is asked by an unknown agency to go back to Krassnia, a small Russian republic in the Caucasus. Her mother, Anna, created the Krassniad, a collection of linked together folk tales, and is also a CIA agent. She’s not sure who her father is – either he is local oligarch or a traveller. She is forced to become re-acquainted with the region’s politics whilst working on a game set in the locale. As war threatens to break out between Russia and Georgia, plans are accelerated to get her into the secret Zone which contains the region’s closely guarded secret.
The book moves away from the spy thriller genre that he has been writing within recently, one presumes as a response to the ‘war on terror’, though doesn’t entirely abandon it and comes back into a more science fictional mode. In one sense I was reminded of Tim Powers’ recently republished Declare with its notion of the secret of the world hidden away. Whilst Powers’s book references the Cold War, Macleod is far more in The Matrix mould of things but with he understands both the science and the philosophical underpinnings.
In part I wonder if this novel is riffing off Kim Stanley Robinson‘s excellent novel The Years of Rice and Salt or William Gibson‘s Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. As part of the game of simulacra, Macleod echoes the idea that historical events would take place in the same way, in the main, but the timings would be different. At the same time the novel’s history intersects real history with the South Ossettia troubles. The world itself remains unknowable though. There is a continuing sense (and it might be as I was re-reading Clute‘s review of Pattern Recognition last night (collected in Scores)) that Macleod is re-mining familiar ideas such as false worlds but refreshing them and possibly linking them to something else like post-modernism. The Restoration Game re-uses the ideas of simulacra and resists the temptation to remove responsibility for the world from its inhabitants. Instead it continues the rediscovery and remaking of the familiar, as ‘New Wave of Space Opera’ (though I cannot help feeling that that movement was artificially constructed) did last decade.
Definitely a book to come back to and enjoy again.
The Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy has issued a call for papers for their conference on Mervyn Peake next year. It certianly a conference that I’ll be trying to attend, even if I don’t contribute a paper.
