A tree of immense girth grows from a tufted shoot; a terrace of nine levels rises from a clump of soil; a journey of a thousand miles begins under the first tread.
--Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 64
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Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser (1996), 293 pp (hb).
Apparently I did accumulate at least a little bit of positive karma, because this next book is a winner. I ran across mention of Millhauser a couple weeks ago in rec.arts.sf.written; perusing the library shelves a couple days later, I was impressed by the opening paragraphs of this book and decided to give it a try.
Martin Dressler won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1997, and it's worthy of the award. The prose is flowing and accomplished, a delight to read. Its sense of place is vital and evocative. Millhauser skillfully paints the New York City of a little more than a hundred years ago, a bustling place on the cusp of momentous changes in its landscape.
In simplest terms, this is a book about a young man with a lot on the ball, and his almost preternatural rise to wealth and success. The story opens with Martin as a boy, helping out in his father's small cigar shop. He is tapped to work as a bellboy in a local hotel, and from there rises swiftly through the ranks, from assistant desk clerk to personal secretary to the manager. When he is offered promotion to assistant manager, he declines in order to strike out with a partner and open a lunchroom. More lunchrooms follow, and then he decides to build his own new hotel in an uptown, less-developed location:
...every city dweller harbored a double desire: the desire to be in the thick of things, and the equal and opposite desire to escape from the horrible thick of things to some peaceful rural place with shady paths, murmuring streams, and the hum of bumblebees over vaguely imagined flowers. It was the good fortune of the Dressler to be able to attach to itself both these desires, for while on the one hand it could offer to the prospective long-term resident a park and a river, a veritable vision of pastoral retreat, on the other it could offer the thrilling sense of being in the forefront of the city's relentless northward advance. It simply sat there, waiting for the rest of the city to catch up.
There is more going on here, however. There are indications, subtle but unmistakeable, that this is not just a straightforward narration of an American success story. Because it's subtle, it's never entirely clear what the definitive answer is, but suffice to say that the subtitle "Tale of an American Dreamer" can be interpreted as more than simply a reference to a young man's lofty goals. Is Martin's astonishing rise and success no more than the inflated imaginings of a more mundane Martin mired in a more pedestrian life? Is the story in fact one long dream by Martin, still living with his parents in the apartment over the cigar shop? Is Martin and his life really someone else's dream? I don't know, and I don't care to spend too much time worrying about it, because in the end, the story stands on its own merits.
Before leaving it, let me share one last passage:
As he looked at her lying there in the graying dark, fast asleep on her back with her face turned sharply to one side, as though she were straining away from him, she seemed so heavily crushed by sleep that it was as if she could never raise her frail body against it, but must wait until sleep itself rolled from her body and lay wearily watching as, her hair hanging in damp coils about her face, she rose bruised and aching from the twisted sheets.
Give me writing like that, and I'm there.
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The Eyes of God, John Marco (2001), 789 pp (hb).
A couple of years ago, while trolling among the shelves of the local Barnes & Noble (ah, one of the things I miss about Westwood, the B&N on the corner of Pico & Westwood), I ran across a first novel that seemed to promise a diverting read in the military fantasy line. I wasn't expecting much, but even so I only made it about a third of the way into John Marco's The Jackal of Nar before its undistinguished prose, skittery plotting, and jejune characterization caused me to lose interest in finishing it. It ended up going in my "donate to Goodwill" bag when I moved from L.A.
So not long ago, I was browsing the New Books shelf at the local library, when Marco's newest effort caught my eye. It had the look of a big hefty epic, the type of thing I was more susceptible to in my misspent youth than I am now, and on a whim, I thought I would give him a second chance to entertain me. I even promised myself that I would finish this one, mostly so that even if it was bad, I could feel justified in trashing it in the log. Mistake. This is a bad book, and I knew it well before finishing the first hundred pages. Grimly I pressed on to the bitter end, every chapter providing a fresh opportunity to shake my head or roll my eyes. I've long since broken myself of my teenage conviction that a book once started must be finished, a bit of wisdom that I gladly would have adhered to in the instant case if not for that pesky promise. No more promises like that! ...unless maybe for something like Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past.
I should be able to just let it go at that, but part of this whole reading critically thing is to, well, critique. So. What makes it bad? Let me count the ways. Let's start with plotting. Plotting in the The Eyes of God is best described as (to borrow a phrase) "arbitrary and capricious." The narrative course veers wildly and with little to no internal logic, not once, but several times. Defenders of the book might laud this as "daring," "fresh," and "unexpected." It's not. It's amateur and deeply uninteresting.
The book is divided into three roughly equal sections. In the first, young King Akeela, recently ascended to the throne, makes peace with a neighboring country, which in turn gifts him with a royal princess for a wife. She immediately commences an illicit liason with the king's best warrior and right-hand man, Lukien, aka The Bronze Knight. She also happens to be fatally ill with a stomach cancer. Up pops a scholar to mention a pair of fabled amulets, the eponymous "Eyes of God," located in a far-off land and capable of curing all illness. Off go Lukien and the scholar to fetch the amulets. The quest is quickly and ludicrously achieved. Oh! but the amulets have a curse attached. Oh! and the king has learned of Lukien's perfidous conduct with his bride. Lukien is exiled, the bride sequestered deep in the palace (part of the curse; the amulets work, but no one can look upon the wearer, or their efficacy fades. Yes, this means all the queen's servants are summarily blinded).
I could recap the last two sections, but I don't have the heart. The setting of the tale contains not a single thing to make it memorable. The nations, the cities, the de rigueur impregnable strongholds--all are generic, and even when described in any detail, convey no sense of life or wonder. The prose is pedestrian and straightforward, with frequent lapses into breathless and overwrought:
[Akeela] had daydreamed throughout his entire journey home, whistling while he rode...and staring up at the stars at night, looking for Cassandra's face. But he had never really found her in the heavens, because she was more beautiful than that, and no constellation could rival her. He was already lovestruck and he knew it, and despite Lukien's warnings, he planned to give his love to Cassandra completely.
At least some of these shortcomings might have been bearable, had the characterization not been so consistently risible. None of them are people; they're all cardboard cut-outs. The inner emotional lives of these cut-outs are fickle and random, and not believably so. It's never really possible to predict how any of them will react to a given stimulus: will they be angry? pensive? happy? forgiving? Who knows--it seems to turn almost entirely on what the plot needs at that particular moment. One of the main characters takes a dirt nap roughly half way through the book, and my reaction was a resounding yawn and a check to see how many pages were left.
In an attempt to be fair, I will concede that my taste for big epic fantasy has lessened a bit over the years, and my bar for quality in same has been raised over what it might once have been in days of yore. So there is perhaps some bias at play. Still, I genuinely believe it's not solely a question of taste--this is at best a very, very average example of big epic fantasy. Those fond of R.A Salvatore's œuvre might possibly find The Eyes of God to be to their taste. While in a mind-candy sort of mood, I read Salvatore's Icewind Dale Trilogy a couple of years ago, and while that's not quite as poor as The Eyes of God, it shares certain similarities in style and characterization. If one has a taste for such, then by all means, chacun à son goût. Otherwise, give it a miss.
Okay, I've done my penance in Bad Book Land. Did I build up enough good karma to receive something better next turn of the wheel?
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"Sandkings", George R.R. Martin (1979), 62 pp (e-b).
I don't usually read a lot of short stories, novels being my poison of choice. On the other hand, I've become something of a fan of Martin over the last several years due to his big, sprawling Song of Ice and Fire series. I don't recall hearing of him prior to that, but I've since become aware that he has a number of earlier works, both novels and shorter material, that are apparently thought of quite highly. Unfortunately, they seem to be out of print and darn hard to get ahold of. One of his short pieces that's often spoken of is "Sandkings," which won the 1980 Hugo Award for best novelette. I'm not yet totally converted to the idea of reading fiction on a computer screen, but when I happened to be browsing the fictionwise website and saw "Sandkings" there, I couldn't resist grabbing it.
I would say that "Sandkings" is really as much a horror story as it is a science fiction story. The protagonist, Simon Kress, is a thoroughly unlikable fellow who lives on some planet apparently named Baldur. When he returns from a lengthy business trip to find a number of his exotic pets deceased due to neglect, he goes into town to find some replacements. At a mysterious little shop he's never visited before, the proprietor sets him up with a unique set of pets, the sandkings. These look like an insect colony, but have a hive-mind that is apparently a bit different than the standard insect (yes, I'm sure the entomologists in the crowd will immediately point out that there ain't no such thing as a "standard" insect. Sorry.). The competing colonies (Simon has four installed in his defunct aquarium) build a fortress and fight wars against one another. They also come to "worship" their owner as a god. Alas, Simon is a malevolent rather than benevolent god, and he knows neither as much as he thinks he does, nor as much as he needs to, about sandkings. Suffice to say, bad things happen.
"Sandkings" is a creepy little story, and I mean that in a good way. It's a story about someone who thinks he holds all the cards and blithely digs his own hole as a result. I would say that anyone who has occasional nightmares about nasty wee critters skittering around in the walls might want to steer clear of it, but other than that, it's pretty decent entertainment.
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The Fox Woman, Kij Johnson (2000), 380 pp (hb).
I can still recall one of my old Chinese professors waxing eloquent on the topic of fox-fairies and their propensity for seducing lonely scholars away to a bad end. The motif of the fox-fairy--a fox that becomes human through magical means--is an old one in Chinese tales of the fantastic, appearing in tales more than 1,500 years old and becoming particularly pervasive (and sophisticated) in Pu Songling's Qing dynasty story collection Liaozhai zhiyi. I hadn't realized the motif was also an element in Japanese folklore, leading me to wonder if it slipped over as part of Japan's first great cultural borrowing from China during (roughly) the Tang dynasty, or if it evolved independently and in parallel.
Kij Johnson's The Fox Woman can fairly be described several different ways. It is, of course, a modern re-telling of a fox-fairy tale. It is a story of a love triangle between two women and a man. And it is a psychological study of three individuals who slowly awaken both to a greater awareness of themselves and to what it means to be human and happy. It takes as its setting the world of the Shining Prince--that Heian Japan of the nobility so vividly described by Murasaki Shikibu's Genji Monogatari and Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book. There are three narrative voices, rendered as excerpts from each of the three main characters' diary/pillow book/notebook, which are interwoven throughout the course of the story.
Kaya no Yoshifuji is a courtier who has failed to gain a position from the annual New Year's appointments, and rather than remain in the capital and maneuver for next year--the customary gambit for those in his predicament--he decides to retire to his land in a rural province. He is a man in the grip of a restless ennui, dissatisfied with himself and his life, and unsure why:
Life was like that once for me. When I was Tadamoro's age [his son], everything I saw (or heard, or tasted, or thought) was new. Even though I had seen springtime come before, each one was special, the first time I had seen this spring, these new leaves, this family of squirrels. Even the horrible things--my first taste of sake, the abscessed tooth I had when I was fourteen--were intensely experienced. The future promised a string of equally interesting sights and tastes and thoughts.
I still felt this way when I married Shikujo. The time we spent together was like discovering new sutras every day, each written in silver characters on indigo paper, beautiful and precious, but even more so because of their contents, the words that added meaning to our lives.
When did this change? I only know that it did. At some point I realized that life was not as sweet as it had been. Nothing tasted as good as it did the first time--or as it might taste again, in the undetermined future. No: I am trapped in now, a now that is not as good as "then" or "soon." Worse, experience has taught me that when I get to tomorrow, it will turn into yet another drab now. How can I fight such a despair?
His wife Shikujo is beautiful and, by the arcane and demanding standards of the Heian court, "perfect." She never acts in a way not in accord with propriety. She never gives vent to inappropriate emotion, which means she never allows herself to show anger or distress. Take her response to her husband's decision to leave the capital:
He did not insist that I (or our son) attend him, though of course it was the proper thing to do. But on that spring night when he told me of this, I said nothing. Our son asleep on the mats between us, I watched the first cherries blooming, their blossoms glowing cold and pale as snow in the moonlight.
"Are you upset?" he asked me.
A good wife is never upset, never unsettled, and I was, in truth, both. And a good husband never corners his wife in this fashion, forcing her to decide between what is correct and what is true. "Of course not," I said.
His unhappiness affects us all.
Kitsune (literally, the Japanese word for "fox") is a young fox whose family's den is initially beneath the foundation of Kaya no Yoshifuji's country estate. She has an inexplicable curiosity about humans, and when Yoshifuji and his retinue take up residence, she is drawn to him, watching him from cover at nights while he paints or writes poetry on his veranda. As her longing for him grows, she is led to seek out the magic that will allow her to become human.
Johnson writes very well, adopting a style that evokes the lyricism and nature aesthetic of Heian period writers. Indeed, in sections of Shikujo's pillow book, Johnson is clearly consciously aping the descriptive format of Shonagon's own famous Pillow Book. On the whole, Johnson handles the style with real facility, and her prose is a pleasure to read. The plot lags a bit near the middle to late-middle, and perhaps doesn't quite live up to its initial bright promise. The evolution of the central characters is for the most part affective and convincingly portrayed. Yoshifuji is, for me, the least sympathetic of the three, while his wife Shikujo is, by the end, the most sympathetic. There's a lovely little passage marking one of the turning points in her growth, where she is talking with her mentor, an imperial princess who is aunt of the reigning emperor:
She glanced at me again. "Are you suprised at my attitude toward the poems? I leave for the nunnery as soon as I can get permission from my nephew; I think I can afford to be honest with myself about things now."
"My lady, what are you telling me? Don't you care for these things?--for poems and propriety and courtesy?"
"Of course I do, girl. They're important, just not as important as living well."
"But they are living well!"
"No." She coughed for a moment, then: "They're living beautifully. There is a difference."
I'm always struck, when reading a work by a modern author that purports to depict another time, place, and culture, by the question of authenticity. I don't believe such a work can ever be the equivalent of something actually written in that time and place. Authenticity, then, becomes a consideration that involves, at the least, accuracy of detail and tone. I'm no expert on Heian Japan, but it seems to me that The Fox Woman captures detail and tone fairly well. It betrays its modern sensibilities in places, but not so much as to upset the flow or feel of the story. More importantly, the story itself is interesting and well-told. On balance, The Fox Woman is a triumphant, quality piece of work.
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Tides of War, Steven Pressfield (2000), 416 pp (hb).
Tides of War is Steven Pressfield's second historical novel, covering events of ancient Greece. His first, Gates of Fire, told a story that led up to and culminated in the stand of Leonidas and 300 Spartan Peers against the advancing Persian army of Xerxes at the pass of Thermopylae (aka the "hot gates," or "gates of fire"), a stand that gave the rest of the Greek city-states time to unite and mobilize against the threat. I was quite impressed with Gates of Fire, and it was that positive impression that led me to pick up Tides of War. Having read them both, I think Gates is ultimately a more interesting and enjoyable story than Tides, but that hardly means that Tides is unworthy; it's just telling a different story in a somewhat different fashion. Plus, it's hard to top the sheer heroism of the first tale, well-captured by the speech Leonidas delivers near the end of Gates:
"They will come, scholars perhaps, or travelers from beyond the sea, prompted by curiosity regarding the past or appetite for knowledge of the ancients. They will peer out across our plain and probe among the stone and rubble of our nation. What will they learn of us? Their shovels will unearth neither brilliant palaces nor temples; their picks will prise forth no everlasting architecture or art. What will remain of the Spartans? Not monuments of marble or bronze, but this, what we do here today."
Out beyond the Narrows the enemy trumpets sounded. Clearly now could be seen the vanguard of the Persians and the chariots and armored convoys of their King.
"Now eat a good breakfast, men. For we'll all be sharing dinner in hell."
Of the many regrettable lacunae in my education, a rather notable one has to be that I've never read Thucydides (or Xenophon, or Plutarch...the list quickly becomes tediously lengthy); my knowledge of Golden Age Athens and its immediate aftermath is limited to a couple of dimly remembered chapters from a college history survey course and the discussion of hoplites and the phalanx innovation contained in John Keegan's A History of Warfare. This, I think, is a dual-edged sword when it comes to reading this novel: on the one hand, I come to the subject largely fresh, and I'm in Pressfield's hands for the construction of the world, but on the other, I have little or no external context on which to rely should the author skimp on details with which he feels, perhaps, one should be already conversant. Pressfield largely meets the challenge here, although there were a number of points where I wanted more information. This is not to detract from his effort, however, since this generally happens whenever I read any historical novel worth its salt. It should be seen as a good thing, since it sends me skittering off to do at least a little background reading on whatever period a given novel purports to cover. Perhaps not the most efficient way to plug those lacunae, but one of the more interesting.
Tides of War covers the Peloponnesian War, that epic struggle between the Athenian empire and Sparta and her allies which ultimately spelled the end of Athenian power and primacy. It is also a novel about Alcibiades, the Athenian general and statesman who was a major player--perhaps the major player, if the novel is to be believed--in the events of the War. The story is told through the device of a double narrator, first, the character Polemides, assassin of Alcibiades (no spoiler, this is mentioned in the first chapter), who while sitting on death row relates his memories of the war to the second narrator, the Athenian noble Jason, a disciple of Socrates (who himself makes several cameo appearances and is, in fact, sitting on the same death row as Polemides). Not surprisingly, it is Polemides' story as much or more as it is Alcibiades', and it is far easier to get a fix on Polemides' character than Alcibiades', although there are some vivid and often humorous adumbrations of the latter, such as this one:
Much has been made of Alcibiades' lawlessness in his private life, by which his traducers meant that he would fuck an eel if it would hold still long enough. You have met Eunice, Jason. She is no eel, but he took her to his bed one night, or she went of her own....This was her way of striking at me, when blows would not suffice, for lack of attendance upon her and her children, of which laxity I was surely culpable.
...Calling him to account, on a moment alone beside the hulk works, his response was of such grave rue that my anger failed at once, replaced, as you may believe or not, by sorrow on his account. For his incapacity to govern his appetites was the single failing that made him feel mortal.
"She told me she was no longer your woman, that you had cast her into the street. Her pretext for entry to me was want of money." He met my eye. "I knew it was a fraud and went ahead anyway, such a dog am I." Then, dropping his hands: "Here, flatten me where we stand, Pommo, and I'll make no matter of it."
What was I supposed to do, strike our fleet commander, there before the strip yards?
"You don't even remember her name, do you?"
"My dear, I don't remember any of their names."
Pressfield's prose is one of his real strengths; he is able to write short, direct sentences as needed, but even then there's always an underlying complexity, and his vocabulary, sometimes simple (though more usually quite rich), is never simplistic. He also does an excellent job describing the exhaustion, confusion, and occasional outright terror of melee warfare, a strength that has carried over from Gates of Fire. Here's a snippet of commentary taken from the disasterous Athenian campaign to conquer Syracuse and the island of Sicily:
The enemy was massed in uncountable numbers. Our ranks closed; the armies crashed together. A melee ensued that could be given the name of battle by its scale only. No one could swing a sword, such was the press of bodies. The nine-foot spear was useless. One dropped it where he stood, fighting instead with the shield as weapon, struggling simply to take your man's feet out or stick him Spartan-style with the short thrust and draw. Any part of the body that bore armor became a weapon. One fought with his knees, driving them into his man's testicles, with elbows fired at the throat and temple, and heels against those fallen on the earth. In the melee a man seized the rim of the enemy's shield and pulled it down with all his weight. You clawed at a man's eyes, spit in his face if you could summon spit, and bit at him with your teeth.
The plot meanders quite a bit, understandable given that it's covering twenty-seven years worth of war, but also making it sometimes difficult to stay closely focused on what's happening. The background politics are also sometimes quite confusing, a point of some concern since it is political machinations that drive most of the major events of the narrative. One of the deepest impressions that the novel leaves has to do with the downsides of Athenian democracy, that very institution so often reflexively venerated in the mythology of America's civil religion: the unruliness of the mob, its susceptibility to demogoguery and manipulation, its inability to act wisely and decisively at crucial junctures. Indeed, after reading this book, some of Stephen's rants (in O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series) about the evils of democracy make a little bit more sense.
Tides of War is sometimes a challenging book, but it's certainly also a very fine one. It takes one of the great periods and series of events in world history and succeeds in giving it a human face. With excellent prose and well-done characterization, it breathes life into the bare facts in a way that textbooks can't. It would never do to forget that it is, of course, fiction, but like other fine historical novels, it tells a fascinating and important story.
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