The Bittern

A BookLikes blog about imaginative and fantastical literature, cultural studies, and the history and literature of madness.
Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey The Rushlight List - A novel for each and every country

This was a slow read. Five-hundred pages shouldn't have been too daunting to a regular reader of epic fantasy, but I have to say that after the first few it was clear to me that Oscar and Lucinda was no page-turner. However, I was determined to persevere - not only is this the Rushlight selection for Australia, but I'd also had it recommended by tutors Will Eaves and China Miéville as being thematically relevant to a project I'm working on called The Glass Architect.

Is Oscar and Lucinda a book about Australia? Not really. Is it set in Australia? Well, mostly. The story follows two children - duh, Oscar and Lucinda - through to their meeting in young adulthood. Both have experienced death early in life. Both have developed gambling habits - "one obsessive, the other compulsive." They are damaged, flawed, often dislikeable individuals, drawn together by this one shared passion - or weakness.

Before reading, I had understood Carey's Booker Prize winner to be about a man and a woman transporting a glass church across Australia for a bet. What I didn't realise was that, although this is indeed the part that people remember most - there's a film, which I haven't seen, but I'm guessing it focusses most heavily on this aspect of the story - this plotline doesn't come to the surface until the last hundred pages of the book. There's plenty of foreshadowing and pre-construction, but this doesn't change the fact that most of the book reads as slightly directionless. Even when the two titular protagonists' lives begin to intertwine, we are given little indication of what this portends. Had I approached the book with no prior knowledge, I would have been bemused and probably rather bored by the lengthy descriptive passages with no obvious purpose.

The biggest and most obvious defect of the book was, for me, the author's excessively minute descriptions of his more peripheral characters. I often felt that he was engaging in unnecessary padding, and sometimes even using these passages to avoid the business of progressing the story. But this is precisely why I'm glad I never leave a book unfinished. Much - though not all - of what I had considered irrelevant does eventually present a purpose, and we see by the end how many of those characters besides Oscar and Lucinda - Dennis Hassett, Mr d'Abbs, the unforgettable Mr Jeffris - are in fact integral to the story.

Peter Carey's prose is consistently sublime, and the sheer amount of crafting that has gone into this book is evident. It seems too easy to go for the glass church metaphor, but I'm going there anyway: Oscar and Lucinda is a colossal, fragile work, built on a hundred contingencies, constantly threatening to collapse under the weight of its own improbability. The shocking gravity of its conclusion, which I don't want to spoil here - because, in case you were wondering, you should definitely read this book - is dependent upon the multitude of set pieces that have been painstakingly put in place over the sedate, sometimes sluggish course of 400 pages.

In this sense, Oscar and Lucinda is a wager. The stakes: your time and engagement. Whether the return is ultimately worth it depends upon the reader. You may find yourself questioning whether the story is really going anywhere. You might lose your faith in it entirely. My advice would be to stick with it to the end; leave before the game's over and you'll only wonder what you missed.

The Rushlight List - A novel for each and every country
To Asmara - Thomas Keneally The Rushlight List: Eritrea

The novel presents the fictionalized account of one Mr. Darcy (I tried to find literary significance in the protagonist's name, but it seems to be incidental) a BBC journalist travelling from Khartoum to Asmara to report on the Ethiopian-Eritrean war. Along the way, he accumulates an unlikely group of companions, including Christine Malmédy, a young Frenchwoman in search of her elusive cinematographer father, and Mark Henry, an American aid worker whose motives are unclear.

Anything would have tasted good after Whispers of a Secret God, but I still had quite a few problems with this book. I'm always suspicious of anything that is self-consciously partisan, and Keneally leaves little doubt as to his own views on the conflict. That said, he's not uncritical; a recurring narrative technique has the group's Eritrean guide telling what appear to be tall stories of the Ethiopians' barbarity, only to then be verified by the narrator's own eyes. All of this is based upon Keneally's own experiences of Eritrea, so I'm loath to doubt him. But clever or not, well-informed or not, this is a piece of pro-Eritrean propaganda for a Western audience.

My biggest problem, though, was in the way he chose to tell the story. Keneally's gone for a realistic structure which befits the journalistic tone, with little direction and no clear resolution. But, perhaps to give it more of a novelistic feel, he's chosen to intersperse the action with flashbacks - in the form of a diary - to Darcy's failed marriage, and occasional 'Editor's Interjections' from a third party.

Neither of these techniques worked for me. The marriage storyline was drawn out and, unless there was some extended metaphor that I missed (it's probable), largely irrelevant to the Eritrean storyline. The narrator consistently draws parallels between Australia (Keneally's native country, where the flashback sub-plot takes place) and war-torn Eritrea, and I consistently failed to see them. As for the Interjections, these were even more destructive to the pacing. Though blessedly few, each one felt like running up against a brick wall, and sadly the action in Eritrea was not compelling enough to make me want to power through these sections.

Overall, this book was something of a plod. Keneally is a master of portraying inhumanity and brutality, and I would never deny him that. But the fact that the book addresses serious issues in a well-researched and evocative manner doesn't change the fact that, structurally, it's a bit of a mess.

A book for each country: The Rushlight List
Otherworlds - Judith Nicholls I'm not really sure how to rate a collection - by the content itself, or its selection and presentation?

For the first, Otherworlds contains a diverse patchwork of 'poems of the mysterious' - Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas and Walter de la Mare all make welcome appearances, and the real biggies (Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shakespeare et al) are all well-represented. There are also a handful of lesser-known modern poets, which gives a nice variety.

As to the second, I'm not sure about the etiquette of including a number of the editor's own poems in a collection like this. It was a little jarring for me to find Nicholls' poetry alongside classics such as the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the Tyger. I'm not trying to demean her ability, it just didn't sit well with me. Still, as I've said, I appreciated the diversity of the poetry included.

This is a book I'd happily give to my children, if I had any, and I'd recommend it to parents of older children or teenagers as a way of possibly getting them interested.
The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett,  Nigel Planer http://www.goodreads.com/#
Whispers of a Secret God - Robert Dunn,  Jerry Wheeler,  ED.D. The Rushlight List - a novel for each and every country of the world

Perhaps it was the overtone of Christian evangelism. Perhaps it was the conspicuous absence of any kind of proofreading or editing. Or perhaps it was the fact that, for reasons best known to the publisher, the text of the ebook I downloaded was all in eye-frazzling red.

Whatever the reason, I really did not get on with Whispers of a Secret God, my entry for Guinea-Bissau in the Rushlight List.

The blurb (considerably better-written than the book itself) promised not only "intrigue, romance, and fierce battles" but even "brief glimpses into the world beyond, contrasting temporal and spiritual reality". What little intrigue there was became lost under the weight of some truly terrible writing. The romance was dry, the characters utterly flat, and the author lacked the descriptive ability to render "fierce battles" beyond a cursory sentence stating that they've occurred.

That said, it wasn't impossible to get invested in the very simple storyline, even bearing in mind its stately pace. Saaku is a sympathetic protagonist, and it feels as though the book was written with good intentions. But the writer's skill is limited to say the least, and the tribe's "finding God" is therefore entirely unconvincing and childish. And for any Muslim readers, there's plenty in here to take offense over. Being neither Christian nor Muslim, I found myself pretty appalled at times by how flatly and smugly the latter was dismissed.

Sadly, I don't feel that the Rushlight has got off to a very good start with this. Guinea-Bissau was, as one might expect, a rather difficult country to locate a novel for. Beyond a general feel for the savanna and the rainy/dry seasons, which could all apply to many other African countries, this was really not the most evocative book. I'm also strongly disinclined to trust anything it says, as its basic agenda is clear: the Christian God is the true God. The Fula people, whose beliefs are rooted in both tribal and Islamic custom, are ultimately shown to be in folly for having rejected the "secret God" (he has to be kept secret so that the Chief Elder - a Disney-villain reprint complete with gormless sidekicks - won't accuse them of blasphemy, which he really really wants to do) and, as could be predicted from the beginning, convert to Christianity and live happily ever after. Yawn.

The novel was rewarding in one respect, though: to compensate me for the financial and emotional damage of Redgate, Amazon gave me a £5 gift voucher (more than I'd actually spent). Even so, I can't help but feel I should have been paid more than £1.01 to read this book.
The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes (The Sandman, #1) - Neil Gaiman, Malcolm Jones III, Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg I feel like four stars is a little generous, three too harsh - so more of a 3.5.

As usual with Gaiman's writing, I feel like his visionary ideas are punctuated by heavy-handed blustering to cover over the bits he's not so sure about. While I enjoyed reading this, and will look forward to picking up the next instalment, it seemed rather directionless. Even the three-part fetch quest seemed more like an excuse for the titular protagonist to trot around meeting a typically Gaimanesque cast of contempo-myth eccentrics. I can't always stomach the slightly kitsch, self-conscious use of cliche in the dialogue, and the Sandman himself is... well, difficult to empathise with. I find myself rooting for him, but I'm not really sure why.

I still feel that as a writer, Neil Gaiman is overrated, valuing style over substance. But this first collection of the Sandman series is very stylish indeed, and nothing if not entertaining.


http://thebittern.blogspot.com - thoughts on fantasy writing.
An Articulate Anger: Dambudzo Marechera, 1952-87 - Kirsten Holst Petersen Very interesting. Very much looking forward to reading Marechera's fiction.
The Green Child - Herbert Read This book should have baffled me, I suppose. It's hard to say. The bizarre overall structure gives the lie to Read's clarity of expression; you could open it on any page, read a couple of paragraphs, and conclude that it was a rather dull novel by a similarly dull, well-meaning man. And yet, read it in full, and you're left with a distinctly trippy aftertaste, which draws into douebt the author's true intentions. You know you've been taken to a strange place inside your own head, but you don't recall the journey; the fabric of reality has been stretched, but it has happened without your knowing.

It's difficult to catch Read in the act of distorting space-time. An obvious example would be the transition between the human world and that of the Green Child, which takes place at the close of the first section and the opening of the last. This is made particularly disorientating by the splicing in of a lengthy middle chapter, detailing at great length Olivero's rise to power as President of the fictional Republic of Roncador. This section would be unremarkable to anyone even vaguely well-versed in the history of nineteenth century uprisings - or rather, remarkable in that, for a novel, it presents so little of any novelty. While the first and last sections play fast and loose with the laws of physics, President Olivero's story is ruthlessly procedural.

The first section is without doubt the strongest, and will leave the reader hoping for a pastoral fantasy, with perhaps a bit of the old cross-species romance; hopes that remain unfulfilled. In the final chapter, the narrative ultimately becomes one of philosophical reflection on the nature of life and acceptance of death. These themes do not, at first glance, run through the entire story, and the reader walks away unsatisfied in every sense.

The real question I was left with was this: should I be drawn into the bottomless pit that seems to have consumed those few who have tried seriously to pick The Green Child apart? The shadow of genius looms over this novel to such a degree that I can't help but feel suspicious. It's easy to be an apologist for something that sets itself up to be deliberately obscure, but I'm not even certain that that is what was intended. Perhaps The Green Child was really just the result of poor planning - the fusion of several ideas that should each have been the subject of stories in their own right. This was, after all, Read's only novel; perhaps the weirdness, the incongruities that make this book so unique, are symptoms of his own inexperience.

This book, among other recent reads, has made me realise that I dislike the 'story within a story' in the vast majority of cases. Once you've built up your reader's interest in one plotline, it's something of a slap in the face to expect them to engage instantly with another, one that they are well aware will be intermittent and ultimately inconsequential.

What are the book's implications for fantasy writing? Well, as far as influence goes, it's as dead as the Darling Downs Hopping Mouse. I still can't see how the story of the Green Children of Woolpit is "the norm to which all types of fantasy should conform", nor even what that myth has to do with his own novel. Still, I found that it rivalled Brian Aldiss's 'Hothouse' as a masterclass in portraying the alien uncomfortably close to ourselves.

Read The Green Child if you're looking for a short, insightful, and thoroughly unique human fable. Not suitable for epic fantasy, action, romance, realism, or history. This book seems determined to please just about nobody, and it was this, above all else, that made me warm to it.

Read full review at http://thebittern.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/green-child.html
Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness - John Nathan This is quite something. These stories really draw you in, if you approach them with an open mind. 'The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away' is confusing, but once you've mastered the perspective shifts and un-flagged dialogue, it's a fascinating read. Personally, I did find these techniques detrimental to the reading experience, and was relieved that 'Prize Stock' (my favourite of this collection) used the more conventional paragraph breaks and speech marks. It's definitely the most accessible of the four.

'Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness' was interesting and disturbing, but I found it a little disappointing, largely because it recycled themes from the first novella (or vice-versa; I don't know which was written first), and perhaps because otherwise it has the potential to be the most poignant of the four. And 'Agwhee the Sky Monster' was deeply unsettling and whimsical at the same time; the ending will certainly linger in my mind.

For me, the value of these stories is in Oe's portrayal of extremes. Madness moves from being something deeply alien (green goggles, 'Happy Days', giant babies) to something distressingly understandable. It's an infinite challenge to make sense out of mental illness, and it never makes for the most accessible read. But I'd say a large part of the challenge to the reader is opening your mind to upsetting truths.

There is clearly more to Oe's stories than just mental disorder. They explore Japan more specifically, the ramifications of war, racism, and the relationship between parents and children. These are serious themes and it is in no way a lighthearted book, but this translation by John Nathan is painfully emotionally articulate - you certainly won't be bored.
Lord Foul's Bane  - Stephen R. Donaldson Oh. My.

Pay no attention to those who'll tell you Donaldson is 'the alternative to Tolkien' or that the two should 'stand shoulder to shoulder'. I'm not even talking about quality. The two are incomparable simply because Donaldson is a leech - this book reads as if someone has chewed up the Lord of the Rings and spat it back out. If you read much fantasy, you'll be well aware of the tendency to denigrate writers who seek simply to rewrite Tolkien. I've been pretty selective in my reading of fantasy, and, until now, have mostly managed to read stuff which avoids this to some extent, or at least does it in a fresh and enjoyable way.

But this book, so often touted as the great alternative, baffles me. The only original thing here is the unpleasant leper protagonist, and I couldn't agree more with the reviewer who described this as 'a failed literary experiment' - failed because Donaldson seems to lack the insight or technical skill to make his anti-hero believable. The world itself is wooden and dead, and no amount of overblown similes (open the book on a random page and count the 'as if's and 'like's - you will be amazed) can bring it to life. The characters are equally two-dimensional; dull, bound by honour, ready to fight for their Land, yadda.

But what makes this book so unbearable isn't the masturbatory Tolkien-fanfic vibe it exudes, or the unforgivable prose style (clearly Donaldson knows HOW to write, but he utterly, utterly kills it with similes and appalling cliche). It's that it's just so damn BORING. Seriously. I pride myself on never giving up on a book, but halfway through Lord Foul's Bane I was very close to reneging on this policy. Very, very little happens over the course of almost 400 pages. The whole book is like a tribute to writer's block - they travel. A lot. There's a lot of empty and unpoetic description of scenery that's of no ongoing importance, interspersed with Covenant's endless and tedious agonising over whether he should believe in this other reality. That could have been so wonderful, insightful and interesting, but Donaldson butchers it utterly.

I could probably dredge up a couple of things I like about this book (on reflection, rather than while actually reading it). Leprosy is an endlessly interesting topic, and Donaldson's brief description of Covenant's trials is a misleadingly promising start to the book. The author's metaphor-heavy style appealed to me at first, but I quickly soured towards it; he throws them around with no regard for relevance or moderation, and seems to think that this passes for good writing. I really can't say ANYTHING good about 'the Land' that forms the vast bulk of the narrative; it's tedious, soulless and utterly derivative.

Anything else? No, that'll do. I'd just like to finish by saying, if you are considering reading this book, DO NOT BOTHER. It's bad, and not in an interesting way. I don't feel as though I've gained anything from reading it. If you love Tolkien, this pale knockoff will anger you. If you hate him, you'll find all the same things to hate here. If my review can save just one person from the waste of time and money that is the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, then maybe it'll have been worth reading after all.

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