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 Gateless Barrier (LW&C II) | The Red Magician |
| The Assassin's Road (LW&C I) | Dream Country (Sandman III) |
| Sharpe's Waterloo | The Doll's House (Sandman II) |
| Something Fresh | Across the Nightingale Floor |
The Gateless Barrier (LW&C II), Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima (1995), 302 pp (gn).
This is the second volume of the Lone Wolf and Cub series. I'm torn between whether I should do each of these as single entries, or do them in clumps of two or three; they read pretty quickly, after all. Since I don't really have instant, unfettered access to the whole series, I suppose I'll just stick with one entry at a time for the time being.
This second volume pretty much follows in the footsteps of the first, as Ogami Itto traipses about undertaking various missions. Ogami continues to be revealed as a pretty honorable fellow, for an assassin, in his own rough-hewn way. It is, of course, a fairly psychotic, bushido influenced flavor of honor. There's the episode, for instance, where he's contracted to take out a "living buddha," a revered provincial religious leader who the political heads of the province need removed because his humane advocacy of the common people's needs is gumming up their ability to deal with the province's tax debts. Ogami sneaks into the temple and finds he can't kill the buddha because the buddha is projecting mu (emptiness) rather than reflecting Ogami's sakki (death lust) back at him. So Ogami sits down and has a nice chat with the buddha, who advises Ogami on what he needs to do to be able to kill him. Ogami duly goes off to a sacred mountain to perfect his own mu, then comes back to fulfill his mission. The buddha's last words are approval for Ogami's spiritual attainments ("Is this not good? He who perfects his path?"). Yeah. I guess from a living buddha's point of view, the whole life-death thing falls somewhat differently on the scale of priorities.
Then there's the episode where Daigoro gets into a scrape with some snot-nosed son of a local government big-wig (Daigoro may only be three, but as the son of a bad-assed samurai, he don't take crap from nobody). The big-wig's men take Daigoro back to their master, who proceeds to outsmart himself: he figures out that Daigoro is the "cub" portion of the famous "lone wolf and cub" duo, and comes to the conclusion that the notorious assassin is running an operation targeted at him personally. In fact, Ogami is laid up in a run-down temple, recuperating from a nasty fever, and could hardly care less about the official. He's perfectly willing to mow down the lackies who show up unexpectedly on his front doorstep following after the escaped Daigoro, though. Benefits of being a bad-assed samurai warrior, I suppose.
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The Red Magician, Lisa Goldstein (1982), 192 pp (tpb).
Lisa Goldstein is another in a growing list of authors of whom I would have either never heard or bypassed entirely had it not been for people whose taste and discernment I respect speaking approvingly of her work. The Red Magician, like Briar Rose, takes the experience of Eastern European Jews during World War II as one of the central underpinnings of its story. That's largely where the similarity ends, however. Whereas Briar Rose uses a split narrative, past and present, to weave the strands of a fairy tale through the story, The Red Magician takes elements of Jewish folkloric and kabbalistic tradition to tell a tale of magic that frames both sides of the horror, before and after.
Kicsi is a young girl on the threshhold of adolescence, living in a small village near the Czech-Hungarian border. One day, a stranger with bright red hair and beard, Vörösh, enters the village. He's had some precognition of the danger that lies in the future, and wants to warn the villagers to leave while it's still possible. When his warning falls on mostly deaf ears, he sets out to use his magic to protect the village. He's opposed and eventually driven away by the village rabbi, who is also a powerful magician and who is stubborn in his belief that he knows best for the village and is best able to protect it. As a result, Kicsi is caught up in the maelstrom, and coming out the other side, has to learn to deal with her survivor guilt and re-awaken to life.
The Red Magician is a fairly quiet, contemplative story. It reads very smoothly; the prose and the narrative move along at an easy, effortless pace. Some stories are good, but require a lot of effort to read; others are bad (or not bad, just lightweight and fluffy) but take no effort to read. This one is good but easy, and I don't mean easy pejoratively here, or even in the sense of provoking no thought or stimulating no feeling. It's an engaging tale about a lively, curious girl in a terrible time. Worth reading.
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The Assassin's Road (LW&C I), Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima (1995), 294 pp (gn).
This is the first volume in the Lone Wolf and Cub saga, a manga series (I'm not even going to bother snarking about "Japanese comics," save for this bit of mild off-hand paraleipsis) of some popularity in Japan that has fairly recently been introduced in a translated American edition. I probably wouldn't have ever bothered picking it up, if it hadn't been brought to my attention, and spoken approvingly of, by Pam. So it's all her fault. In fact, I've just been back to re-read her review, and she covers almost all of the things I wanted to say about it, so I'm tempted to just include the pointer to her remarks and leave it at that.
Well. Ogami Itto is the Lone Wolf of the title, a free-lance assassin who is pretty much the prototype of the godly swordsman/ass-kicking samurai warrior. Parenthetically, his surname Ogami, although a clan name, is a near homonym for okami, meaning wolf, and Itto ('Yi Dao' in Mandarin) is "one sword"; there's a play on words there, in that, although it doesn't mean it literally (besides the different characters in the surname, do/sword is the wrong measure word for animals), his name can plausibly be taken to read "lone wolf." At any rate, he is widowed, and so travels around with his three year old son Daigoro, pushing him along in a sort of über-pram that has all sorts of concealed weapons built into it (as his opponents often discover, much to their (usually fatal) detriment).
This story is set several decades into the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate (ca. 1655), and one of the interesting things about it is the casual insight it gives into the social and political structure of that period. The first eight episodes in the volume show Itto travelling to various provinces and employing various subterfuges and stratagems (not to mention overwhelming physical prowess) to complete his missions; the final episode, "The Assassin's Road," jumps back to fill in backstory and show how Itto went from a highly placed and hereditary ceremonial position to doing what he's doing. Enjoyable, reads quickly; definitely worth continuing on to the next installment.
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Dream Country (Sandman III), Neil Gaiman (1991), 137 pp (gn).
This Sandman compilation is shorter than its predecessor The Doll's House, consisting of four short, essentially self-contained stories that don't have any really obvious links to a larger story arc. That's okay, though, since all four are good, and at least one, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," is excellent.
I've occasionally made jokes, by no means original, about being deserted by my muse; the opening story "Calliope" takes that conceit and treats it literally. The Greek muse Calliope has been bound to the service of a budding novelist with writer's block, who will do anything to get his creative juices flowing again. I don't think it cuts too deeply, but it's an interesting little story.
I have mixed feelings about "A Dream of a Thousand Cats." I have no particular fondness for cats, and so I tend to get annoyed by those who fetishize them, rattling on about how their cat is really in charge, or the cats are secretly running the world. That degree of fetish isn't present in this story, but there is a strain of anthropomorphism here that butts up against the limits of my interest. On the other hand, the story itself is kind of interesting, dealing as it does with the idea of dreaming different realities into existence. On balance, it's a net positive, and a good story.
I haven't yet commented on the actual "graphic" part of the equation in these "graphic novels," mostly because the artwork in The Doll's House and the first two stories of Dream Country has struck me as decent, serviceable, but not really comment worthy. That changes with the art in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Drawn by Charles Vess, it's frankly stunning, and really stands out. This is the story that won a World Fantasy Award for short fiction in 1991 (it's usual practice to observe at this point that the rules were changed after that so that "comics" couldn't win; I haven't been able to document that, so I'll just repeat the hearsay), and it's a worthy winner. "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is the story of the first ever performance of the eponymous play by Will Shakespear's company of players. The twist is that the play was commissioned by the Lord of Dreams himself, and the audience is the real faery court, led by the real Oberon and Titania. This is a very fine story, with arresting visuals and excellent dialogue.
The final story "Façade" would probably have more impact if I were familiar with the backstory of the main character, Element Girl, who has apparently wandered in to this story from another series. As it is, this is mostly notable to me because of the appearance of Death at the end. There really is no better way to describe Death in this incarnation than as a "perky goth." Never mind that it's a conceit that's been done to...death...since, it's still a delightfully ironic little bit of characterization. The introduction (yes, I read it last this time) describes her as "the foxiest little incarnation of Death you ever saw," which, although entirely true, mostly made me boggle over the dated colloquialism--I heard the term "foxy" about a billion times growing up in the 80's, and almost never since. Death is really the best part of this story, and gets some great lines, including the last one ("Be seeing you.").
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Sharpe's Waterloo, Bernard Cornwell (1990), 371 pp (tpb).
This is the big one, the final clash that finally broke Napoleon's ability to make war. It's always seemed little less than astonishing to me, not having read extensively--even cursorily, for that matter--in the history and background of the specific events, that Napoleon and the forces of his self-proclaimed empire could be trammelled about so straitly by the early months of 1814 that he would surrender, abdicate, and go into voluntary exile, and yet not much more than a year later, return in triumph, take up the reigns of empire, and march to war with a very good chance of winning. Yet so it was; France almost won the field at Waterloo.
This is Waterloo through the eyes of Richard Sharpe, recalled from his new companion Lucille's farm in Normandy and serving as a British officer on the staff of the feckless, militarily incompetent Prince of Orange. At his side, of course, is ex-sergeant Harper, on hiatus from his new occupation as publican/stolen horse fence in his native Ireland, and under a strict injunction from his wife not to do anything that might get him killed. Cornwell tacks on a subplot involving Sharpe's faithless wife, now mistress to a cavalry officer, and some conflict between Sharpe and said officer, but frankly I found it uninteresting and unnecessary. Sharpe has slowly lost his ability to involve me as a character, and by this book, I was reading for the history and the sake of completion, as much as anything. Fortunately (for my sake), most of the book is taken up with a description of the campaign itself, from the time that the Duke of Wellington, while attending a ball in Brussels, gets news that the French army has crossed the border at an unexpected point, through the battle for the crossroads of Quatre Bras, to the immense, one day conflagration a few miles south of the village of Waterloo that ended near sunset with the complete defeat of the French forces.
This book marks the end of what might be called the original, core Richard Sharpe series (following the success of the T.V. series starring Sean Bean--I've seen a couple of episodes recently, and was mildly entertained but not particularly impressed--Cornwell has gone back and, in his own words "virtually began a whole new Sharpe series," filling in as-yet undocumented portions of his hero's adventures). I think I've already hinted at the fact that this series just lost steam in my eyes as it progressed. It's tempting to bring up Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, which covers the same time period as the Sharpe series from the point of view of the British navy, but the Sharpe books really won't bear the comparison. In almost every way that matters--subtlety of character, depth of insight, virtuosity of prose, complexity of plotting--O'Brian's books are much the superior. To give them their due, though, Cornwell's Sharpe books are reasonably entertaining historical military page-turners.
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The Doll's House (Sandman II), Neil Gaiman (1990), 229 pp (gn).
Scant days after averring that I could never seem to get my hands on copies of Neil Gaiman's much caressed Sandman series of graphic novels (I'll refrain from any sneers about "comic books" if everyone else will, too, 'kay? 'Kay.), I ran across a near-pristine copy of The Doll's House at the local library (every library in which I've looked in the last year or so, maybe four or five altogether, has had their graphic novels shelved in the Teen/Young Adult section. Okay, I'm a young adult...yeah...we'll go with that). Since I've been assured, most recently in this lengthy series retrospective by Kate, that it isn't necessary, perhaps not even recommended, to start with the first compilation, Preludes and Nocturnes, I was willing to start with this one.
The Doll's House begins with an introduction by Clive Barker that's predictably hip and pretentious and unnecessary, and then a prose forward by Gaiman that sets the stage: Morpheus, Lord of Dreams and one of the Endless, has been imprisoned and has recently escaped, to find his realm somewhat in disarray. What follows is eight sections, corresponding to issues that were originally released separately when they were first published (note: the copy I have doesn't reprint "The Sound of Her Wings" from Preludes and Nocturnes, unless I really really missed something).
The first couple of issues are little bit confusing to follow in terms of how they're contributing to an overall story progression, but it's not hard to be patient since they're fairly interesting in their own right. I really liked the issue "Men of Good Fortune," which is plopped in the middle as sort of an intermission and isn't really connected to the rest of the story arc in this volume. It tells the story of Hob Gadling, a stout English yeoman boasting to his friends in a tavern in the fourteenth century that while death may be good enough for other folks, he thinks it's a stupid idea, so he's not going to die. By chance, Dream and his sister Death are at the tavern--rubbing shoulders with their constituency, as it were--and Death decides to make Hob's boast a reality. Dream then makes an appointment with Hob to meet at the same tavern every hundred years to catch up on events. And so they do, every hundred years.
The other really noteworthy issue here is, of course, "The Collectors," which is set at a serial killers' convention. I have to admit, it's fairly gutsy to write about a serial killers' convention, but not only does Gaiman mine the situation for some seriously mordant humor, but it tells an interesting story, as Rose Walker, one of the central characters of the overall story arc, wanders into the convention looking for her long-missing brother, and Morpheus, looking for Rose, follows her.
On the whole, I'd say that The Doll's House isn't brilliant, but it is good and interesting, and I will certainly have my eye out for the next compilation in the series, Dream Country (as well as looking to go back and catch up on Preludes and Nocturnes).
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Something Fresh, P.G. Wodehouse (1915), 208 pp (tpb).
Something Fresh is Wodehouse's first offering in his chronicles of Blandings Castle, perhaps his best known series after his Jeeves & Wooster material. To take his foreword at face value, this was originally a one-off, and he didn't start out with the idea that it would become a recurring setting, with a recurring cast of amiable idiots (being Wodehouse, I must suppose that the amiable idiots are pretty much de rigueur). This is a very early effort on Wodehouse's part--pretty close to one of his first publications of fiction, I believe--and I think it shows. The plotting isn't as tight, the characterization not quite as nimble, the prose not quite as effortlessly brilliant, as some of his later material. Still, there's good stuff here, and it's an entertaining enough story.
Something Fresh spends its first third or so meandering about getting characters established and situations prepared, before it finally moves the action to Blandings Castle. Here we see another version of the plot device that Wodehouse was clearly very fond of, since it recurs in both Code of the Woosters and Joy in the Morning, that being the clandestine attempt to steal back a piece of property that has somehow or other left its putative owner's possession. In this case, it's a valuable Egyptian scarab (a Cheops of the Fourth Dynasty, no less) in the collection of Mr. Peters, a rich American, that is absent-mindedly lifted by the Earl of Emsworth, owner of Blandings Castle. Since Mr. Peters's daughter is engaged to marry the Earl's son, uncommon delicacy is required to recover the prized scarab. Solution? Mr. Peters and his daughter both independently engage a young adventurer to follow them to Blandings and undertake hush-hush dark-of-night repossession activities. The two young adventurers, Mr. Marson and Ms. Valentine, are easily the most sympathetic characters, and the real heart of the story. They soon discover their common mission, and decide to combine forces, although not without a bit of tough negotion at first:
'It won't do, Mr Marson. You remind me of an old cat I once had. Whenever he killed a mouse, he would bring it into the drawing-room and lay it affectionately at my feet. I would reject the corpse with horror and turn him out, but back he would come with his loathsome gift. I simply couldn't make him understand that he was not doing me a kindness. He thought highly of his mouse, and it was beyond him to realize that I did not want it. You are just the same with your chivalry. It's very kind of you to keep offering me your dead mouse, but, honestly, I have no use for it. I won't take favours just because I happen to be female. If we are going to form this partnership, I insist on doing my fair share of the work, and running my fair share of the risks--the "practically non-existant" risks.'
Blandings Castle is an interestingly alien world; it's particularly fascinating, to my eyes at least, when Wodehouse discusses the intricate social hierarchy of the vast servant population at the Castle. It's not quite the same level or tone of commentary as say, Remains of the Day, but it has its moments. Here's a bit of description of Blandings's head butler that amused me:
Butlers as a class seem to grow less and less like anything human in proportion to the magnificence of their surroundings. There is a type of butler, employed in the comparatively modest homes of small country gentlemen, who is practically a man and a brother, who hob-nobs with the local tradesmen, sings a good comic song at the village inn, and in times of crisis will even turn to and work the pump when the water supply suddenly fails. The greater the house, the more does the butler diverge from this type. Blandings Castle was one of the more important of England's show-places, and Beach, accordingly, had acquired a dignified inertia which almost qualified him for inclusion in the vegetable kingdom. He moved, when he moved at all, slowly. He distilled speech with the air of one measuring out drops of some precious drug. His heavy-lidded eyes had the fixed expression of a statue's.
Something Fresh is worthy enough, although I can't escape the feeling that it's less polished and ultimately less accomplished than some of the J&W stuff written nearly three decades later.
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Across the Nightingale Floor, Lian Hearn (2002), 287 pp (hb).
I had a terrible case of writer's block when it came to this book, for some reason. I hope it's successfully conquered, and doesn't carry over.
Across the Nightingale Floor is blessed with just the sort of title, concept, and front cover design to snare my attention as it sits among the New Releases heap at the local superstore. It's also decidedly not-blessed, in that it has an author using an easily pierced nom de plume, not just one but two official websites, and a fair helping of pre-publication and new publication hype. Lots of hype tends to trip my cynicism trigger, so for purposes of this discussion, I'm just going to set the hype aside and pretend it's not there.
One of the reigning observations of Japanese cultural history involves the dichotomy between the world of the Shining Prince, the highly refined aesthetic realm of the reclusive, retiring Heian court, and the world of warlords and Shogunate, with its contending samurai and their muscular, martial bushido ethos. As with any essentially binary observation about culture, it's more complicated than that, and the strength of the dichotomy starts to break down once nuance and complexity enter the picture. Still, as a first stab, it has its uses. To wit, in the instant case: if Kij Johnson's The Fox Woman belongs in spirit primarily to the Heian world of Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagun, then Across the Nightingale Floor looks to tales of proud warriors, ruthless warlords, and feuding clans for its most obvious source of inspiration. Oh yeah, and it has magic ninja assassins, which makes it unambiguously a fantasy, in my estimation, at least.
Although clearly patterned on historical Japan, Across the Nightingale Floor is explicitely set in a fictional land, with clans, feuds, and institutions created out of whole cloth. The young male lead character, Takeo, lives in a remote village populated by members of a small, heterodox religious sect called the Hidden. The story begins when the dominant warlord of the region, as part of a pogrom against the Hidden, descends on the village and wipes it out. Takeo is rescued by a mysterious warrior, who just happens to be the semi-dispossessed scion of the Otori clan, beaten on the field of battle by the aforementioned dominant warlord a decade earlier. This warrior, Shigeru, is a good man, and he undertakes to adopt Takeo, although not entirely from altruistic motives. Takeo, it turns out, is the son of a once high-ranking, now deceased member of a shadowy, secretive group of spies and assassins known simply as the Tribe. Membership in the Tribe is familial; they have essentially magical powers, which are inherited and then refined through training. It's as if all the propaganda about secret ninja powers of stealth and invisibility were actually true.
Bound up in the story are plots centered on marriage politics, fuelled on one side by motives of revenge, and, I suppose, self-preservation, and on the other by lust for power and dominance. The plotting itself is not particularly in-depth or subtle, and not really an end in itself; rather, it provides a structure for the story to move forward to its dramatic and rather violent conclusion. Also included are a couple of love affairs, one a secret, long-standing attachment between more mature players, the other a passionate love-at-first-sight conflagration between stressed teenagers (I'm being a bit unjust there, perhaps, and it's really not as overtly melodramatic as it might sound from that description). Finally, it's a story of a young man's awakening to and growth in his heretofore unsuspected powers, and of the contending forces (Tribe vs. Otori clan) that seek to claim his allegiance.
I'm particularly susceptible to evocations of East Asian imagery, and the author does a pretty good job, I think, of catering to my susceptibility. The landscape, the villages, the castles, all come to life in a way that strengthens the world of the story. The characterization is not an unambiguous triumph, but the main characters are mostly interesting, and I was never in danger of saying that I didn't care what happened to them, even if I didn't care deeply in all cases.
As fair warning, I would be remiss if I did not point out that the story (to its credit, in my opinion) largely manages to partake of a Japanese way of looking at things, particularly in the events making up its resolution. This means that at a couple of points, it very much follows a Japanese, bushido-influenced logic, rather than a more congenial, "let's blow this thing so we can all go home, kid" sort of logic. It also means that the ending is bloody, though that's far from being uniquely Japanese, of course. Not Ran nor yet Kagemusha levels of bloody, but heads do roll, literally.
Although young love does not attain more than fleeting reward, neither does either party leave the stage permanently, à la Romeo and Juliet. Good thing, because Across the Nightingale Floor is merely the first installment of an apparently already written (but not yet published) trilogy, going by the title Tales of the Otori. I'll certainly be eager to find out what happens in the next two volumes.
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