more recent reading
Dec. 17th, 2009 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitHere are a couple more books I've recently read. My reviews don't contain major plot spoilers; they're probably less spoilery than a typical newspaper or magazine review.
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Napoleon, by Gideon Defoe
My main thought about this book is: how the hell did it get published? I don't mean that in a bad way--I enjoyed it a lot. But it's pretty much Pirates of the Caribbean AU crackfic with the serial numbers barely filed off. There's a charming, luxuriantly-bearded Pirate Captain (few of the characters have names) whose main goal in life is to win the Pirate of the Year award, but alas, there is no swimsuit event and instead he keeps being asked about splicing the mainsail. There are a bunch of other pirates, all to varying degrees ironic, including the pirate with a scarf (the P.C.'s loyal follower), the pirates who loved kittens and sunsets, and Jennifer the former Victorian Lady (now a pirate). And there's Napoleon, who, no longer in a position to conquer Europe, decides to conquer the chair of the St. Helena Residents' Association instead--but for this he must strive with the Pirate Captain, who (having lost Pirate of the Year again) has retired to St. Helena to become a beekeeper. There are loopy plot twists, informative but completely irrelevant footnotes, amusingly unnautical terminology, and a lot of jokes that are funny but not exactly on a par with Terry Pratchett. All rather silly, and very short (177 small pages with large type), and yet not only is it published (U.S. edition) in hardcover by Pantheon, it's the fourth in a series.
Good enough fun, but probably something to get from the library rather than buy, unless you're really into this kind of humor.
Shriek: An Afterword, by Jeff Vandermeer
This is Vandermeer's follow-up to the amazing City of Saints and Madmen collection, which I re-read and posted about a couple of weeks ago. Like CoSaM, Shriek is set in Ambergris, a decaying and yet vibrant city that's haunted by violence, much of which may be the fault of the "gray caps," the city's not-quite-human former inhabitants who were massacred and driven literally underground by Ambergris's early colonists. The novel follows a couple of minor characters from the first book: the art historian and gallery owner Janice Shriek and her brother Duncan, a historian. It purports to be a memoir by Janice Shriek after the disappearance of Duncan, a long-time investigator of the gray caps; Duncan, however, is back now and the book includes his annotations, meaning that many of Janice's claims are contested within the text.
It's exactly the kind of book I ought to love, as I loved CoSaM. But, while I liked it, I don't love it. To start with, I find both Janice and Ducan Shriek uninteresting. There were many other characters from CoSaM I'd rather have spent more time with (I treasured the intermittent appearances of Martin Lake in Shriek). But Janice and Duncan are self-absorbed, tediously obsessive, and while I think that's part of Vandermeer's point, it doesn't really make for an engaging read. The first section of Shriek is just dull, in large part because it neglects the truly fascinating things about Ambergris in favor of Janice and Ducan's childhoods and personal lives. It felt like reading a mainstream realistic novel, and there's a reason I don't often do that. The second part, in which things actually happen, picks up a lot. However, throughout the book I felt like Vandermeer over-relied on Duncan Shriek's doomed love affair with Mary Sabon to engage readers' sympathy, but never gave us much to engage with. Admittedly I'm not the ideal audience for heterosexual love stories, but I also couldn't find much to care about in a love affair between two rather selfish people, especially when most of the narrative is from the perspective of a disapproving third party (Janice).
A novel-length work needs more plot than Shriek has. There's also a problem of form. Shriek, apart from its two narrators, is fully conventional in structure, and that creates difficulties. Part of the wonder of CoSaM was its cacophony of (often unreliable and generally mutually contradictory) voices, its intersubverting narratives all claiming the status of documentary truth, the sheer joyous inventiveness of a book that includes short stories, a history of Ambergris, a pseudo-scientific treatise (complete with a long and brilliant bibliography) within which nestles a story of murder and madness, and a psychiatrist's letters about a delusional patient. The end result was mystery. There's not much mystery in Shriek; instead, Vandermeer resorts to blatant authorial manipulation (such as teasing the reader with information that's then withheld for another hundred pages) in order to create suspense. I found myself resentful at times, and the ultimate payoff wasn't worth it. If a novel withholds revelation, one expects revelation at the end, and there isn't much revelation in Shriek.
Shriek takes too much of the wonder out of Ambergris. As I said earlier, I think that may be the point. That kind of interrogation of "escapism" is a popular game among certain of the more avant-garde sff authors, such as (in particular) Jeffrey Ford. But it's not something I'm especially fond of. Fortunately, Vandermeer doesn't take it to the lengths Jeffrey Ford does--I never got the feeling he was contemptuous of either the fantasy genre or his readers. But I think the best fantasy can question fantasy tropes and assumptions without stranding the reader on the bleak shores of realistic fiction, without disapproving of fantasy; China Miéville does it beautifully in The Scar. But the fantasy of Ambergris was already so thoroughly deconstructed in CoSaM that I'm not sure what the further deconstruction and demystification of Shriek is meant to accomplish.
Vandermeer's new novel Finch, which I haven't read yet, is also set in Ambergris. I look forward to reading it, because I think there's a lot more to do with Ambergris than Shriek manages.
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Napoleon, by Gideon Defoe
My main thought about this book is: how the hell did it get published? I don't mean that in a bad way--I enjoyed it a lot. But it's pretty much Pirates of the Caribbean AU crackfic with the serial numbers barely filed off. There's a charming, luxuriantly-bearded Pirate Captain (few of the characters have names) whose main goal in life is to win the Pirate of the Year award, but alas, there is no swimsuit event and instead he keeps being asked about splicing the mainsail. There are a bunch of other pirates, all to varying degrees ironic, including the pirate with a scarf (the P.C.'s loyal follower), the pirates who loved kittens and sunsets, and Jennifer the former Victorian Lady (now a pirate). And there's Napoleon, who, no longer in a position to conquer Europe, decides to conquer the chair of the St. Helena Residents' Association instead--but for this he must strive with the Pirate Captain, who (having lost Pirate of the Year again) has retired to St. Helena to become a beekeeper. There are loopy plot twists, informative but completely irrelevant footnotes, amusingly unnautical terminology, and a lot of jokes that are funny but not exactly on a par with Terry Pratchett. All rather silly, and very short (177 small pages with large type), and yet not only is it published (U.S. edition) in hardcover by Pantheon, it's the fourth in a series.
Good enough fun, but probably something to get from the library rather than buy, unless you're really into this kind of humor.
Shriek: An Afterword, by Jeff Vandermeer
This is Vandermeer's follow-up to the amazing City of Saints and Madmen collection, which I re-read and posted about a couple of weeks ago. Like CoSaM, Shriek is set in Ambergris, a decaying and yet vibrant city that's haunted by violence, much of which may be the fault of the "gray caps," the city's not-quite-human former inhabitants who were massacred and driven literally underground by Ambergris's early colonists. The novel follows a couple of minor characters from the first book: the art historian and gallery owner Janice Shriek and her brother Duncan, a historian. It purports to be a memoir by Janice Shriek after the disappearance of Duncan, a long-time investigator of the gray caps; Duncan, however, is back now and the book includes his annotations, meaning that many of Janice's claims are contested within the text.
It's exactly the kind of book I ought to love, as I loved CoSaM. But, while I liked it, I don't love it. To start with, I find both Janice and Ducan Shriek uninteresting. There were many other characters from CoSaM I'd rather have spent more time with (I treasured the intermittent appearances of Martin Lake in Shriek). But Janice and Duncan are self-absorbed, tediously obsessive, and while I think that's part of Vandermeer's point, it doesn't really make for an engaging read. The first section of Shriek is just dull, in large part because it neglects the truly fascinating things about Ambergris in favor of Janice and Ducan's childhoods and personal lives. It felt like reading a mainstream realistic novel, and there's a reason I don't often do that. The second part, in which things actually happen, picks up a lot. However, throughout the book I felt like Vandermeer over-relied on Duncan Shriek's doomed love affair with Mary Sabon to engage readers' sympathy, but never gave us much to engage with. Admittedly I'm not the ideal audience for heterosexual love stories, but I also couldn't find much to care about in a love affair between two rather selfish people, especially when most of the narrative is from the perspective of a disapproving third party (Janice).
A novel-length work needs more plot than Shriek has. There's also a problem of form. Shriek, apart from its two narrators, is fully conventional in structure, and that creates difficulties. Part of the wonder of CoSaM was its cacophony of (often unreliable and generally mutually contradictory) voices, its intersubverting narratives all claiming the status of documentary truth, the sheer joyous inventiveness of a book that includes short stories, a history of Ambergris, a pseudo-scientific treatise (complete with a long and brilliant bibliography) within which nestles a story of murder and madness, and a psychiatrist's letters about a delusional patient. The end result was mystery. There's not much mystery in Shriek; instead, Vandermeer resorts to blatant authorial manipulation (such as teasing the reader with information that's then withheld for another hundred pages) in order to create suspense. I found myself resentful at times, and the ultimate payoff wasn't worth it. If a novel withholds revelation, one expects revelation at the end, and there isn't much revelation in Shriek.
Shriek takes too much of the wonder out of Ambergris. As I said earlier, I think that may be the point. That kind of interrogation of "escapism" is a popular game among certain of the more avant-garde sff authors, such as (in particular) Jeffrey Ford. But it's not something I'm especially fond of. Fortunately, Vandermeer doesn't take it to the lengths Jeffrey Ford does--I never got the feeling he was contemptuous of either the fantasy genre or his readers. But I think the best fantasy can question fantasy tropes and assumptions without stranding the reader on the bleak shores of realistic fiction, without disapproving of fantasy; China Miéville does it beautifully in The Scar. But the fantasy of Ambergris was already so thoroughly deconstructed in CoSaM that I'm not sure what the further deconstruction and demystification of Shriek is meant to accomplish.
Vandermeer's new novel Finch, which I haven't read yet, is also set in Ambergris. I look forward to reading it, because I think there's a lot more to do with Ambergris than Shriek manages.
