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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| The Queen's Necklace | The Redemption of Althalus | Coraline |
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The Queen's Necklace, Teresa Edgerton (2001), 579 pp (tpb).
This is a sort of swashbuckling tale in a fantasy setting. It's set in a land where a goblin empire ruled for thousands of years, oppressing the human race as slaves until the humans rose up and overthrew the empire. Now, a thousand years later, a shadowy conspiracy of remnants of the deposed goblin ruling class--biologically quite different from humans, but outwardly indistinguishable--plots to sweep back into power. The protagonists of the novel, Wilrowan Krogan-Blackheart, captain of the queen's guard, and his wife, member of a secret sorcerous society central to the earlier overthrow of the goblins, must ferret out the plot and rush to thwart it before all is lost.
This is the type of story that seems like it should be right up my alley, so it's just a little bit surprising that I didn't enjoy it more than I did. I found it only mildy entertaining. Part of it, I think, is that it has about three different narrative tracks, normally not a problem, but in this case they seemed to jump back and forth in ways that I felt tended to sap each of them of momentum and make the whole less interesting. Part of it is that something about the world-building that I can't quite put my finger on bothered me. And part of it is that I felt on the verge of liking one or more of the characters several times, without every quite getting there. As a result, well, mildly entertaining rather than the solid hit it might have been.
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The Redemption of Althalus, David & Leigh Eddings (2000), 726 pp (hb).
I know what you're thinking. At least, if you're thinking something along the lines of "what is he doing giving the time of day to that hack Eddings?", then I know what you're thinking. And the answer, if not complicated, then at least has something to do with the intersection of my sheepish admission that I enjoyed both of his "shiny blue rock" series (aka The Belgariad and The Mallorean) back in the day (even if the second was a near carbon copy of the first), a certain nostalgic longing for the simple pleasures of my youth, and a passing fancy for a bit of lowest-common-denominator epic fantasy. I did enjoy those series back in high school, which looking back is about the latest age that I possibly could have enjoyed them, although I no doubt would have been mildly offended at the time at any suggestion that I was reading trash. Reading this book, though, is more than sufficient to suggest that I really don't want to do a re-read of those series to see how they hold up. I'm pretty sure they don't. Hold up, that is.
Out of a misguided sense of obligation to my youthful fondness, I'd really like to bend over backwards to give Althalus a fair shake, but.... ah, screw it. This book is a piece of crap. It's not worth bothering to finish, much less to pick it up in the first place. More fool I, for doing both. I could go into detail, but why bother? So, in general: the world-building is generic and undistinguished, the characters are bland and uninteresting, the plot is tedious beyond belief, the dialogue indulges all the authors' characteristic quirks--that I found at least moderately amusing way back when--and raises them to the level of teeth-gritting irritation. The nominal main character, the eponymous Althalus, is a smug twit when he's not otherwise a cypher. Sweet jumpin' Jehosephat on an jury-rigged jitney, but this book is boring, boring, boring. Avoid unless you have an inexplicable craving for generic fantasy pablum that you can't find a way to satisfy any other way.
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Coraline, Neil Gaiman (2002), 162 pp (hb).
This is ostensibly a children's book, but it's pretty good to adult eyes also, and at 162 pages, it reads really quickly, too. Coraline is a young girl whose family--she, her mother, and her father--have recently moved into a new flat. Next door live the Misses Spink and Forcible, and in the upstairs flat lives the crazy old man who claims to train rats to perform. There's a locked door in the living room of Coraline's flat that opens onto a bricked-up doorway, but one day Coraline opens it to find that it leads to a hallway. Down the hallway, she finds a mirror-universe, with a "new" mother and father who are seemingly the same as the old models, save that they have buttons sewn where their eyes should be. They assure her that they love her lots and really want her to stay with them. Things start to go downhill from there.
Gaiman does a pretty good job creating creepy atmosphere and a real sense of peril for his young heroine, and he tells an interesting tale. It's an inventive setting, with a nasty villain, unexpected allies, and a satisfying resolution. Good for kids, yes, but not at all bad for adults, either.
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The Black Moth, Georgette Heyer (1929), 403 pp (tpb).
Miss Heyer's first novel, and, cliched as it sounds to say it, it shows. Not that The Black Moth is devoid of merit, but dialogue is a bit more clumsy in places, the plotting seems somewhat more ragged, and the characters a bit less polished. It's set in an earlier period than the Regency, too. Jack Carstares, heir to the Earl of Wyncham, steps in to save his younger brother from a charge of cheating at cards by taking the blame upon himself. Jack is disgraced and leaves the country, only to come back a few years later in the guise of a highwayman. Of course, he doesn't really steal anything important from really worthy people. He's a rogue, but an honest rogue. The plot gets fairly byzantine before too long. To simplify, he falls for a beautiful young lady--the closest approach the story makes to real depth is the scene where she tries to declare her feelings while respecting convention, and he reluctantly turns her away while doing the same--the young lady is ensnared in the nasty Duke of Andover's plots (Andover also fancies her), and Jack must simultaneously clear his name and foil the Duke. Rough around the edges though it may be, it's also a pretty entertaining story.
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Arabella, Georgette Heyer (1949), 402 pp (tpb).
A diverting little adventure, without a great deal of heft, but no matter. A Regency Romance, wherein the titular Arabella, eldest daughter of a country vicar, goes off to town for the season to conquer hearts and win her fortune--which is to say, given the peculiar dynamics of the time and place, win her fortune by conquering hearts. Arabella's upright father has gifted her with a good moral core and a happy upbringing, but not a lot of money with which to launch her into the great hunting grounds of "society." She gets an invite from her mother's old, wealthy, scatterbrained-but-good-hearted friend to come stay for the season in London and be sponsored by said friend. Traveling on the way to the city, she chances to take refuge one evening with (unbeknownst to her) one of the richest eligible bachelors around, Mr. Beaumaris. Overhearing a conversation in which Mr. Beaumaris mentions to a friend how bored he is by scheming fortune hunting misses, she pretends to be incredibly rich. Before she can set two feet in town, word has gotten around, and Arabella is being treated as the newest mysterious heiress to hit town. Hijinx, Regency Romance style, ensue. Fun, fluffy, and reads quickly.
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The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001), 566 pp (tpb).
I understand this made a bit of a splash in mainstream bookwatching circles (a nicely vague descriptor, I agree), which I don't tend to follow much as a general rule, although in this case I picked up enough to sort of recollect this book being selected for Oprah's book of the month club and then being summarily de-selected after the author said snotty things about said club. Anyway, I grabbed it because I was in one of my relatively infrequent moods where a yen for "weighty" or "relevant" literature intersects with a hankering for a modern, non-genre (a freighted term, I own, but we'll let it lie) novel. Such moods never last long, as one will note upon perceiving that the next two booklog entries will be Regency Romances by Heyer....
I trust I'm a fair enough reviewer to recognize The Corrections's merits, but I'll just say at the outset that I couldn't love it, or even like it much. Franzen has demonstrated some real technical skill, not only with his writing, which is pretty accomplished, but also with the way he weaves some fairly complicated narrative strands together into a more-or-less coherent whole. And he does pretty well with his characterization, making the complex members of the family he describes into fully three-dimensional portraits. The trouble, for me at least, is that the story he tells is, well, I can't think of a better way to put it than that it's too depressingly realistic in many ways. Ditto for the characters...yeah, so they're complicated, they have "issues" (lots of them), they're flawed and human and all...and I find that I really don't like any of them.
Well. This is the story of the Lambert family, parents Albert and Enid, and their three adult children Gary, Chip, and Denise. Each of the three children is trying to escape their mid-Western upbringing in their own way, and each has a section of the narrative mostly devoted to what they're up to. Albert is going slowly off the deep end from Parkinson's disease, Enid is trying to hold it all together after fifty years of marriage, and each of the kids is a bundle of their own particular hang-ups and neuroses. There are a few moments of humor, in particular in Chip's section, where Franzen gets into an almost Neal Stephenson sort of manic near-satire groove in places, but mostly it's pretty grim stuff. Or at least I found it so. And I don't know if he was shooting for an uplifting ending, but by the time I got there, I was feeling pretty depressed by it all. No doubt The Corrections works well for a lot of people, but it just left me pretty cold.
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