Fantasy

Fairy Tale

| ruthpelletier

By Stephen King

All Posts Contain Spoilers

Stephen King baffles me.

To be fully transparent, I kind of love Stephen King. I’ve been reading his books since I was a kid; I’ve read at least a dozen over the years, including some of his real stinkers (‘Cell’), and I have always (always!) enjoyed them. However, I have also always been left with a nagging inability to say what, exactly, it was about them that I was enjoying.

King is usually thought of as a master of plot, but he isn’t. Some of his books are very well plotted, yes, but he’s not at all reliable in this space. Think about a book like, say, ‘Tommyknockers’, which goes totally off the rails, or the Dark Tower series, with its weird introduction of Stepthen King, the Author, as a character in the middle (I actually loved it, but it was weird). Really, when people say that King is a master of plot, I think that what they actually mean is that he is an amazing generator of premises, which is true, but a premise can only you take so far.

And it’s certainly not the quality of his prose. I don’t mean to imply that King is a bad writer – he’s not. He leans a little too hard on a conversational tone (especially in his later career), and he’s repetitive, but I would challenge anyone to publish the millions of words he has published and not repeat themselves sometimes. Let’s just say his prose is utilitarian: no one has ever accused him of writing poetry.

But, as I said, I have enjoyed every book of his I’ve ever read, and his success is undeniable. He’s doing something right, I’ve just never really known precisely what it was.

I just finished ‘Fairy Tale’, his latest, and, unfortunately, I am not closer to figuring it out. ‘Fairy Tale’ is less horror, more fantasy, better in line with books like ‘The Stand’ and the Dark Tower books than, say, ‘Salem’s Lot’ or ‘Pet Semetary’.

‘Fairy Tale’ is the story of Charlie, an American high schooler. Charlie seems typical, but isn’t: he lost his mother in an accident when he was quite young, and his father descended, for a time, into alcoholism. Now, his father is sober and rebuilding his life, and Charlie is doing well: an excellent student, a varsity athlete, a well-liked and kind boy. One day, though, as Charlie is heading home from practice, he hears the frantic barking of a dog from the spooky old house down the street from where he lives. When Charlie goes to investigate, he discovers Mr. Bowditch, the owner of the house, fallen, with a badly broken leg, and guarded by an ancient German Shepard named Radar. Almost immediately, Charlie falls completely in love with Radar, and this attachment draws him further and further into Mr. Bowditch’s life. As Mr. Bowditch begins to heal from his accident, Radar begins to fail. And as Mr. Bowditch comes to trust Charlie, he lets him in on the secret that Bowditch has guarded his entire life: in the shed in his backyard, there is a doorway into another world, a world full of all the fairy tale creatures we have glimpsed in stories. And, in that world, there is machine that can save Radar’s life.

I felt reading ‘Fairy Tale’ what I usually feel when reading a King novel: mildly contemptuous and yet totally absorbed. So much of what he writes seems obvious, simplistic, or even stupid, yet I could not put the book down. Parts of ‘Fairy Tale’ are downright corny, but it did not stop me from caring what happened. And not because I didn’t know what was going to happen – on the contrary, ‘Fairy Tale’ is very predictable. I cared only because the book was fun to read.

‘Fairy Tale’ is a classic Hero’s Quest, and it has the feel of a book that has been kicking around in someone’s head for a while. If I had to bet, I would guesss that King has been stewing on fairy tales for years, thinking about the darkness of the original stories, the ways in which we moderns have sanitized them, the themes and tropes which are worn so smooth at this point that they are functionally universal. I suspect he has wanted to answer those stories for a long time now, to explicate and pull the darkness back into the fore.

Stephen King

It’s not hard to see why, and, though it has been the project of many authors before him, it’s obvious why King would consider himself the man for the job. He is a man with a skill for re-imagining old stories, for layering darkness onto familiar scenes. And, certainly, he has applied himself to fairy tales with aplomb.

I wondered while reading “Fairy Tale’ whether what King brings to the table is less any specific writerly skill than his un-self-conscious enthusiasm. King throws his whole self at his stories: though they are always outlandish, he never hides behind irony or sarcasm (or even metaphor.) He keeps no emotional distance from his content – whatever comes pouring out of his pen, he gives it as much life as he can. Maybe there is something infectious about that kind of sincerity.

‘Fairy Tale’ often gave me the sense that I was along for an eccentric journey with an enthusiast. It wasn’t the itinerary I would have picked, if I were traveling alone, but my guide was so into it that it had an unexpected pleasure.

King’s enthusiasm (for his topics, his characters, and his authorial predecessors) protects his readers from feeling stupid. I’m not sure that I can think of many other authors who could write about, say, the old woman who lived in a shoe without making their readers feel like complete idiots. King is creative, certainly, but I don’t think that’s enough. I think his books work (insofar as they do) because he is also totally confident. King loves stories and he doesn’t see any reason why he should be embarrassed about telling any of them.

He might be on to something there. Maybe the point of stories isn’t that they are new, or surprising, or instructive. Maybe the point of stories is merely that they transport and entertain. Maybe the secret of King’s success is that he’s not worrying about being “good”, he’s just enjoying himself, and his enjoyment spills over onto us. It doesn’t matter if the ground is well worn or not; what matters is whether the ground is fun to walk on.

And King has an unsurpassed sense of where the fun ground is. Perhaps this, more than anything, is the secret to his success: he has a tremendous instinct for fun. He’s never let me down on this: he has never sacrificed his fun in order to be literary. Even when his plots are bizarre (‘Cell’), they are fun.

And ‘Fairy Tale’ is fun. It’s fun to read. Like all King’s books, it’s easy and weird and fun. No one else could have written it. Probably, no one else would have tried, but certainly no one else could have succeeded.

The Night Circus

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By Erin Morgenstern

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

‘The Night Circus’ is exactly the kind of book I would never pick up on my own. It positively bristles with red flags. The cover, all black, white, and red, is adorned with fruity Victorian imagery; the blurbs are literarily unpersuasive: “Nothing short of a wild ride – Elle”. The synopsis on the back is deeply alienating:

“The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Amidst the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone from the performers to the patrons hanging in the balance.”

That sounds like a frankly terrible book. Le Cirque des Rêves? A dual between two young magicians, who will then “tumble headfirst into love”? The language is all so overwrought: “utterly unique”; “breathtaking amazements”; “fierce competition”; “mercurial instructors”; “only one can be left standing”; “dangerous consequences”; “lives…hanging in the balance”.

However, I was gifted ‘The Night Circus’ by someone I respect and love, which, as we all know, obligated me to read it under Book Law. They assured me it was a fun read; nevertheless, it’s been sitting on my shelf for years now. I have been avoiding reading it, sure that it contained nothing more than cliches strung together with breathless writing. But it was a tough week at work, and I needed something easy to read, so I finally grabbed it.

Here’s the thing: ‘The Night Circus’ is not a “good” book. It’s also, as promised, a really fun book to read, and I basically swallowed the whole thing in one sitting. While, yes, trading heavily in cliche, it still wasn’t quite what I expected. It had a little more pull, a little more substance than I thought it would, despite doing exactly what I thought it was going to do. It was both totally predictable and weirdly compelling.

I’ve been puzzling over that for a few days now, that tension between the predictably stupid romantic plot and the success of the book as an entertainment. And what I’ve decided is that a large part of what makes ‘The Night Circus’ work is Morgenstern’s restraint.

Now, you might think that ‘restrained’ is a weird word for me to use to describe a book about a nocturnal Circus of Dreams which houses a pair of dueling magicians, and you’d be right: on most levels, ‘The Night Circus’ entirely lacks restraint. It is, as expected, totally extra: too lavish, too ornate, too magical, too sincere. However, in one very specific and interesting way, ‘The Night Circus’ is very restrained: it is restrained in explanation.

What does that mean? Unlike other kinds of genre novels, sci-fi and fantasy books have a particular challenge: world-building. Because they are set in worlds that are meaningfully different from our own, they need to provide some guidance to their readers about how the realities of their books actually work. Usually, this information is woven into the story, and that’s part of what makes writing genre difficult: you need to orient your readers without dragging down the story.

If they err, most authors err on the side of explanation: better to be pedantic than to leave your readers confused. In most genre narratives, most questions get answered in the end. Morgenstern, however, does not over-explain. On the contrary, at the end of ‘The Night Circus’, the list of things you won’t understand will be dramatically longer than the list of things you do.

You will not know what the contest in which these two magicians are competing is about. You will be told it’s about competing views of the world: you won’t know what worldviews are or how they are proved. You won’t know how long it’s been going on. You won’t know how it started. You won’t know how many times it has been fought in the past.

You won’t know anything, really, about the two “mercurial mentors” who have decided to pit children against each other in a fight to the death: you won’t know who they are, where they come from, how many children they have killed in this way. You won’t know if they are the only magicians who fight children to the death, or whether it’s a common hobby among the magic class in this world. You won’t know if they feel bad, and you won’t find out what happens to them in the end.

Erin Morgenstern

Perhaps most importantly, you will not know what magic is, or how it is used. Now, of course, magic is basically un-explainable from any physical point of view, but most books of magic do a lot more world-building. You don’t learn anything about other magicians, how magic is used outside of duels, how it’s learned, how it’s practiced. Both our child magicians are trained, but all we are really told about that training is that spells are demanded of them and that they “read a lot”. You aren’t told how many kinds of magic there are, or how people come about acquiring the ability to do it (though you are told that some people have “natural ability”).

All this unresolved ambiguity is a bold choice on Morgenstern’s part. Not answering reasonable reader questions is risky, as likely to leave them pissed off as not. But, when it’s successful, it can give a work a feeling of focused integrity, as though the author has enough confidence to let the story stand as it is.

And ‘The Night Circus’ has that vibe of non-neediness, a quiet certainty that its story stands alone. It’s…pretty successful, I think. Yes, Morgenstern is a little too focused on the ambiance (and the costumes) at the expense of the story, but I suspect that more explanation would have hurt the book, not helped it. Partly, that is because I’m not sure she’s talented enough to discuss mechanics persuasively, but partly, the story genuinely benefits from the lack of precision. In a book that is meant to be sensual, which focuses on the experience of magic, too much logistics might have blunted the effect. Instead, what you get is a hazy, imprecise sense-novel about love and magic. It has no rigor, but it is vividly imagined. It is absorbing, which is good enough.

Piranesi

| ruthpelletier

By Susanna Clarke

All Posts Contain Spoilers

I think ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell’ is a masterpiece.

I’ve read it several times over the years – it is one of those rare books that gets better every time you read it. It’s magnificent: subtle and funny and sad and totally ingenious, one of those books so enjoyable to read that you look forward to rereading it.

‘Jonathan Strange’ came out in 2004, Susanna Clarke’s first novel. We, her fans, waited fifteen years for her to publish another, and when ‘Piranesi’ finally landed, in 2020, I think it was…thinner than we had all hoped. ‘Jonathan Strange’ is a great honking book (my copy clocks in at 850 pages) – the kind of book you can stretch out into. ‘Piranesi’ is a tight 275 pages, clearly not the leisurely stroll of Clarke’s first novel.

I often save books I’m particularly excited about for treats – I have saved “Piranesi” for a year now. Holding off has allowed me to gather a sense of the public’s response to it, and, while most people seem to love it, there is one thing I have heard over and over again: it is very different from ‘Jonathan Strange’.

Which is obviously emotionally complicated news for everyone who loved ‘Jonathan Strange’. The relationship between readers and authors is very, very complicated. On the one hand, you, as a reader, want the authors that you love to be able to grow, to experiment and try new things and develop. Some people (Tom Clancy’s fans) want to read the same exact book over and over again; everyone else appreciates some variety.

On the other hand, though, you love the authors you love for a reason, and it is not in your interest, as their reader, to encourage them to grow out of doing the thing that you loved in the first place. And authorial growth is rather like random mutation: a few changes are beneficial; most are deleterious.

The answer to this problem is trust. Over the course of their authorial life, writers earn their readers’ trust. They demonstrate reliability in whatever traits have made them loved, and readers learn that, even as the author changes and grows, their work will be still worth reading. The amount of trust is contingent on two things: how reliable the author is, and how outstanding they are, relative to other authors, at the thing which has made them loved in the first place. As a equation, it might look something like this:

Trust = consistency x unique value

The unique value is an expression of the thing that this author does that makes you, the reader, love them especially, that sets them apart from other authors. It might be understood as something like

Unique value = rarity among authors x execution

Where how uniquely prized an author is, is a function both of how good they are at what they do, and how many other people do it.

As an example, let’s take Agatha Christie. Christie is among the most trustworthy authors, probably, who ever lived. But let’s break her down by the components of her Trust Equation:

Trust = consistency x (rarity x execution)

Rarity: Low, basically non-existent. Murder mysteries are common as dirt.

Execution: Medium. Strong but not astonishing. She has a few masterpieces, it’s true, but most of her books are solid rather than shining.

Consistency: 100%. This is the variable doing the heavy-lifting for Christie. She just doesn’t write bad books, and she doesn’t go off-script. If you like what she’s selling, you know you’re going to get it every single time. The trust, in this case, is basically entirely a function of Christie’s consistency.

Let’s take another example: Jane Austen. What do the variables in Austen’s equation look like?

Consistency: Medium. ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is one of the greatest books every written, but if all Jane Austen had written was ‘Persuasion’, no one alive would know her name.

Rarity: Medium-high. The satire of manners is not uncommon, but the gently-biting, feminine perspective of Austen’s works belongs to her and her alone.

Execution: Stellar. This is where Jane Austen shines. She doesn’t pull it off every single time, but when she does, there is literally no one better. This is why Austen has high reader trust: it’s worth reading any of her books because sometimes they will turn out to be ‘Pride and Prejudice’.

Anyway, why am I talking about this in an article about ‘Piranesi’?

New authors are, obviously, deeply handicapped according to this equation: their consistency is N/A. Worse: you don’t even know yet what their traits will be. It may be that the things you loved about their first work were completely incidental to their project. This is what makes the release of an author’s second book so suspenseful: it is only in that second book that you really begin to know who they are.

On one level, ‘Piranesi’ is a very difficult book to describe. Our narrator, called Piranesi although he is pretty sure that it’s not his real name, lives in the House. The House is vast: an endless series of huge rooms filled with statues. Some rooms are flooded; some are open to the air. Great tides sweep through the House, flooding whole chambers and receding. Piranesi loves the House; his days are devoting to fishing for food and mapping the endless halls, charting the tides, and caring for the dead. As far as he knows, there have only been fifteen people in the House, ever: himself, the thirteen skeletons he cares for, and the Other. The Other is aloof and strange, but, as the only other living person in the house, he is also Piranesi’s only friend.

One day, though, the Other warns Piranesi: another person has arrived in the House, Sixteen. Sixteen is wandering the halls of the house, trying to find Piranesi, and, according to the Other, destroy him.

Susanna Clarke

‘Piranesi’ is a good novel, but it’s not, I think, a great one. And here is the thing that surprised me: though it is very different from ‘Jonathan Strange’, that is not the problem with it. In fact, ‘Piranesi’ would have been a better novel if it had been less like ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell’.

‘Jonathan Strange’ is, at heart, a cozy novel. It is Dickensian: it lives in detail, in the specific, closely-observed eccentricities of its characters. It is tangible, concrete, minute. It is not a mystery, and it is not other-worldly. That is exactly its charm: it is a story of magic set in our world, one we know well. It is the juxtaposition of quotidian humanity with the supernatural.

‘Piranesi’ is the opposite: it is a spooky, atmospheric novel, alien and vague. ‘Jonathan Strange’ inhabits fire-lit drawing rooms in London townhouses; ‘Piranesi’ echoes in vast, cold spaces. And those echo-y bits are the best parts of the novel: Piranesi, wandering alone through his House, showing it to us.

As I said, on the one hand, ‘Piranesi’ is a difficult novel to describe. On the other hand, it is very simple: it is a Whodunit. What is the House, who is Piranesi, who is the Other, and how did they get there? These are the animating mysteries of the book, and Clarke answers every single one of them. She answers them clearly: concretely, specifically and very unmagically.

And it’s a let-down. The imaginative premise of ‘Piranesi’ is wonderful, majestic and unnerving and grand. When it is solved, it is just a novel of people being terrible to each other in strange places. It is as though Clarke’s mind, which is so rigorous and thorough, could not inhabit the mystery of the House: she needed to solve it for us, but in solving it, she diminished it.

Ever since I finished ‘Piranesi’, I have been wondering whether I would have liked it more or less if I had not read ‘Jonathan Strange’. It feels terrible to hold the goodness of a first book against an author, but it’s impossible not to compare.

I think I would have liked it more, but, after way too much thought, I’ve realized that that is not the right question to be asking. The question I should have been asking is: does ‘Piranesi’ make me more or less likely to read Clarke’s next book?

The answer is definitely yes – I will read Clarke’s next book. Whatever else, both of these books are products of a capacious and thorough imagination – I’m interested to see what she comes up with next.

Perhaps the capacity to surprise is an authorial trait. Perhaps you can learn to trust that an author is capable of re-inventing herself with expertise, that her mind is solving different problems in different ways, that she is building new and better worlds in which to solve those problems. Perhaps, the capacity to surprise will end up being Clarke’s authorial project, the special trait which will make her beloved.

I kind of hope it is. Maybe she’ll never write another ‘Jonathan Strange’, but that’s OK, I think I like her anyway. I don’t trust her totally yet, but we’re moving in the right direction.

The Inheritance Trilogy

| ruthpelletier

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

The Broken Kingdom

The Kingdom of Gods

By N.K. Jemison

All Posts Contain Spoilers

Did you read ‘The Broken Earth‘ novels? Did you love them? Do you want to read more books exactly like that, only 25% less good and waaaaay sexier?

Then have I got the books for you! Let me introduce you to ‘The Inheritance Trilogy‘, which are just like the ‘Broken Earth’ novels if N.K. Jemison spent slightly less time world-building and a lot more time describing what it might be like to have sex with a god (spoiler alert: it’s great, if you survive).

‘The Inheritance Trilogy‘ is a trio of novels (and an appended novella, which I am basically going to ignore) set in a world where the gods walk among mortals. Originally, there were two gods: Itempas, god of light, and Nahadoth, god of darkness. Then, out of the Maelstrom, was born Enefu, goddess of life, and the Three built the world, populating it with humanity and various godlings. However, one day Itempas grew jealous of the love between Nahadoth and Enefu – he struck Enefu down, and imprisoned Nahadoth and all of his offspring who defended him. He gave control of the chains binding these gods to a mortal family who supported him, the Arameri, who now govern the Thousand Kingdoms.

The three novels of this trilogy follow the events of this world: the freeing of the bound gods and the humbling of Itempas, the discovery of demons (human offspring of gods and mortals), and the downfall of the Arameri. Each novel takes a different protagonist, but the cast of immortals remains largely the same.

And before I go any further, let me say this: I know that my introduction was a little unfair. N.K. Jemison is a monster of imagination, and she hasn’t actually skimped on the world-building in ‘The Inheritance Trilogy‘. There is more originality on any single page of these books than most authors will produce in a lifetime of effort, and I flew through them the way you only do when you’re in the hands of a master of plot.

But they truly aren’t as good as ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘. Which, whatever: the ‘Broken Earth’ books are maybe the best fantasy books I’ve read in…a decade? They were magnificent, so “less good than” ‘Broken Earth’ isn’t really a condemnation – most books are less good than ‘Broken Earth’, in my opinion. But, as of right now, these two trilogies are the only two things I’ve read by Jemison, and, yeah, the ‘Inheritance’ books are less good.

And they are sexier. A lot sexier. Which doesn’t make them bad, certainly, and Lord knows I love sexy reading as much as the next reader (actually, if we’re being honest, I probably love sexy reading a lot more than most readers of the Literature section, but a lot less than most readers of Sci Fi/Fantasy). But every reader has a line where sexy becomes silly, and, for me, the sex in ‘The Inheritance Trilogy‘ just stomped past that line.

“Hands seized me.

I do not say his hands because there were too many of them, gripping my arms and grasping my hips and tangling in my hair…

Then we fed each other’s hunger. Wherever I wanted to be touched, he touched; I don’t know how he knew. Whenever I touched him, there was a delay. I would cup emptiness before it became a smooth muscled arm. I would wrap my legs around nothing and only then find hips settled there, taut with ready energy. In this way I shaped him, making him suit my fantasies; in this way he chose to be shaped. When heavy, thick warmth pushed into me, I had no idea whether this was a penis or some entirely different phallus that only gods possessed. I suspect the latter, since no mere penis can fill a woman’s body the way he filled mine. Size had nothing to do with it. This time he let me scream.” (p. 301)

I’m sorry, I know we’re all supposed to be very mature about sex and everything, but this is ludicrous. “No mere penis…”, come on now. And the quote I have selected above is the restrained part – I have spared you all the the section where the narrator is driven skyward in sexual bliss and touches the fabric of the universe.

And, OK, I don’t want to get too hung up on the sex, because really these are super fun books set in a super interesting world where super absorbing problems are playing out, and that’s what really matters, but the sex stuff is a problem for me! Because it’s bad, it’s over-written, it’s too breathy and intense.

And it violates my Ayn Rand Rule.

The Ayn Rand Rule is named, obviously, for the nutball author of ‘Atlas Shrugged’. If you have heard of ‘Atlas Shrugged’, you will probably have heard that it is a long, libertarian screed. What you may not have heard is that the short, feisty, Ayn Rand-esque main character spends a lot of the book getting absolutely railed by tall, dark, handsome captains of industry. And what you don’t know unless you’ve actually subjected yourself to that endless nightmare of a book is that those fantastical sexual interludes are obviously and mortifyingly about Ayn Rand. She’s clearly writing her own fantasies, and it’s repellently prurient: too personal, like peering through a window into her brain while she masturbates.

So, the Ayn Rand Rule: never give your reader a reason to suspect that the sex scenes you write are about you (looking at you, Jonathan Franzen). It’s too much information, it takes them out of the story and draws their attention to you. And sentences like, “No mere penis can fill a woman’s body the way he filled mine” violate the Ayn Rand Rule. When I read that sentence, I’m not thinking about N.K. Jemison’s novel – I’m thinking about how N.K. Jemison’s partner felt when they read that sentence (inadequate, surely).

N.K. Jemison

I know that it’s stupid to object to an engrossing trilogy of fantasy novels because the sex is silly. It certainly feels like an injustice to N.K. Jemison, who I admire and whose work I genuinely love. And, though deeply, deeply ridiculous (no innuendo intended), the sex wouldn’t keep me from recommending these books to anyone who loves a good fantasy novel – they are a great read.

But this is my space to talk about books, and the truth is that the thing I will remember best about ‘The Inheritance Trilogy‘ isn’t the plot, and it isn’t the characters, and it isn’t the beautiful, well-drawn world.

It’s the phrase, “No mere penis”.

The Stone Sky

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The Broken Earth: Book Three

By N. K. Jemisin

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

Normal warnings aside, I am really, really going to spoil this trilogy in here, so if you don’t want to know exactly how ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ ends, don’t read this.

Um, I’m also going to spoil several movies.

You know that theory (we’ve talked about it before) that there are only, like, seven plots in all of literature? They, supposedly, are:

  • Overcoming the Monster
  • Rags to Riches
  • The Quest
  • Voyage and Return
  • Comedy
  • Tragedy
  • Rebirth

And they’re pretty self-explanatory. The theory goes that all the works of literature are just attempts on these seven basic plots: retellings, new perspectives, embellishments, interpretations. That these are the only stories there are.

OK, well, that may or not be true*, but I do know that, when you read a lot of stories, you notice that there aren’t so many different things to say as there are books. It’s not just plots – characters, premises, dilemmas, it all comes around again and again.

*I’ve never really been satisfied that any of those plots describes ‘Jurassic Park’. Maybe this is just me getting hung up on dinosaurs again, but ‘Jurassic Park’ doesn’t really fit any of those, does it? Which could it be? The Quest [to get out of Jurassic Park]? Overcoming the Monster [actually many little monsters and no one really overcomes them, just runs away]? I’m not buying it. I propose a new list: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, Rebirth, Jurassic Park.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether there are seven plots or seventy, or whether the above list is exhaustive. The fact is, when you read a lot, the landscape of fiction does becomes familiar to you.

Which can be kind of nice. Familiar landmarks help you orient yourself. They signal to you what kind of story you’re reading, what kind of lessons you’re meant to learn, what sort of characters you should expect to meet and what might happen to them. Often, they tell you how the story wants to be evaluated: it doesn’t, for example, make any sense to complain that there weren’t enough battles between zombies and werewolves in ‘The Notebook’ – ‘The Notebook’ isn’t that kind of story. How do you know that it wasn’t that kind of story? It didn’t have any landmarks of the kind of story where zombies and werewolves battle – no weird contagions which make people sort of bitey, no bodies of eviscerated sheep showing up around the village after the full moon, stuff like that.

But surprises are also nice – think how great it would have been if there had been even one zombie in ‘The Notebook’. Surprises make you realize that life isn’t over yet, that the world is still turning, that it’s worth trying new things, or reading new books. That, even if people have exhausted all the basic plots, they haven’t stopped thinking up new things to decorate them with.

And they don’t need to be big surprises, either; they can be small adjustments to old things, as long as you’ve never seen them before.

Which, I think, in the end, is the thing I ended up liking the most about ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘. Yes, the story was quite strong, and it was never badly written (which is about as good as it gets for genre fiction), and it didn’t get soggy at the end, but what I really ended up loving was that it surprised me.

And it surprised me in the most unlikely way: the villain surprised me!

Villains are never really surprising – even “surprise” villains aren’t really surprising, because you know that, according to the Laws of Fiction, you have to have been introduced to them already. And since, in any given story the number of named characters is relatively small, and since you must be prepared, according to the Laws of Fiction, for any character to turn out to be a surprise villain, even if you are surprised by who the villain turns out to be, you aren’t really surprised surprised, because you knew it had to be someone.

Which is why the last time I was really surprised by a villain was when, in the first ‘Saw’ movie, the villain turned out to be the dead body on the floor in the background! Because that dead body wasn’t a character, really – he was scenery. And scenery doesn’t usually turn out to be the villain*.

*Although, now that I think about it, why, then, wasn’t ‘The Happening’, by M. Knight Shamaylan, a movie in which the villain also turned out to be scenery (trees), more surprising? Maybe because, by the reveal, you were too irritated to be surprised.

This same mechanism is at work in ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘, but not in a cheap, one-shot reveal sort of way. The villain in ‘The Broken Earth’ is also scenery, but in the most fundamental way that there is: the villain is…the Earth.

I know that this sounds cheesy, but it kind of isn’t. I thought it was going to be cheesy, too: when I started picking up on the hints that the Earth was somehow malevolently set on destroying humankind, I thought for sure I was in for some irritatingly-heavy-handed climate change metaphor, where the Earth wasn’t really alive, but had become so destabilized by hubristic human overreach that it was functionally hostile to human life, yadda yadda yadda, we must all honor Mother Earth, so on and so forth, and I was like, anticipatorily bored.

No, that’s not what happens. In ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘, the Earth is alive. Alive and conscious, and angry. It is a living, thinking, speaking core of molten rock and hot gas in the center of the planet, and it hates us.

It’s..pretty weird, actually. It’s a great surprise, because it’s both functionally impossible to imagine ahead of time and totally easy to imagine afterwards: it’s hard to think of dirt as part of any living thing, but the Earth’s molten core lends itself right away to personification. It’s scary and angry already! All of which makes the premise (that we have failed to notice that the earth was alive this whole time) kind of plausible.

The Earth itself is the slow-reveal antagonist of the entire trilogy, but I didn’t begin to really grok that that until the end of ‘The Obelisk Gate‘. Which meant that ‘The Stone Sky‘ was a fun journey of dawning implication for me, especially as I began to figure out that the pseudo-villains of the first two books, the Guardians, are really just under the control of the Earth, via pieces of the Earth’s core which have been lodged in their brains.

N.K. Jemisin (Picture taken from newyorker.com)

Which, again, sounds super cheesy when I say it like that, but it doesn’t play out that way! It’s actually pretty elegant, the way Jemisin rolls everything out, and lets the five or six separate mysteries she has created inform each other until, piece by piece, you realize that they are all the same mystery.

And it takes a while to knit the whole picture together, a satisfying, leisurely length of time, which wouldn’t happen if ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ weren’t surprising. The only way that mysteries can afford to be leisurely (and ‘The Broken Earth’ is a mystery, at the end of the day) is if they are very, very sure you aren’t going to solve everything before the end and get bored waiting for the text to catch up.

And it worked! I didn’t figure it all out because I didn’t expect the, like, ground beneath everyone’s feet to be the bad guy. Who expects that?!?

As I said at the beginning, there is a lot going right in these books. And there is more to say, I’m sure, about the moral of this story, and about the humane character of the books, about what they mean and about how fun they are. There is a lot to be said for how strongly they are executed, how tight the writing is and how well-paced and well-structured the story is – this is really, really strong world-building.

But I’m mostly just so happy to have been surprised. I’m always grateful for a good story, surprising or not, but a story that shows me something new under the sun? Rarer and rarer, and the more precious for it.

The Obelisk Gate

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The Broken Earth: Book Two

By N. K. Jemisin

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

So, now I’ve had some time to think.

Sometimes, when you’re flying through a book, you don’t stop to think about why you’re loving it so much. This is especially true with plotty books – you don’t need to think about why it’s working, you can just lie back and enjoy the ride.

But it’s a worthwhile exercise, once you pause for breath. And I had a busy week at work, and so was forced to spend time NOT reading ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy, and so I thought about it.

I want to be clear: this pause was not voluntary. I need to work to eat; otherwise, I would have chewed all the way through the series without washing or sleeping. But, like I said, it was a busy week, so I only just now finished ‘The Obelisk Gate‘, the second book in ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ series.

And I know that ‘The Obelisk Gate‘ is technically a separate book, but the entire series really reads like one book, one story, and I am only taking the time to stop and write about this installment for the sake of personal discipline. So, for coherence, I will probably refer to the trilogy as a single work, which it clearly is.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about why the trilogy is so good. And…

I don’t know.

‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy is about a world that is ending. And I suspect that, like all stories that are about the world ending, it is really about the evil which people do, which comes out of us naturally, inevitably, like breath. About the primitive, tribal cruelties that we perpetrate, in all times, all places, when we are frightened.

There’s a question I wonder sometimes: do you have to understand a novel to love it?

There are two ways to say what a novel is about. Let’s take an easy one: what is ‘The Scarlet Letter’ about? Well, technically, it’s about a woman being punished for adultery through sartorial intervention.

But, obviously, that’s not what it’s really about about. ‘The Scarlet Letter’ is about sin, and guilt, and hypocrisy. It’s about how God is all-knowing and all-loving and we are not, and so when man’s law tries to approximate God’s law, the discrepancy will necessarily result in injustice. It’s about humility.

See what I mean? There’s about, and then there’s about about.

I know what ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy is about. Jemisin is a clear, effective writer, much more than most science fiction or fantasy writers. Even when she is describing things which are actually beyond description, she is never hard to follow or understand. She’s really good.

But I am not at all sure that I know what this trilogy is about about.

On the most superficial level, ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy is an allegory about racism and xenophobia and otherness. It’s about human cruelty, and about whether we are capable of preserving our humanity, our ability to be kind to the other, when we are desperate, or in danger, or facing extinction. And the fact that this allegory is obvious a) doesn’t mean that it isn’t a valuable metaphor (it isn’t as though we’ve solved this problem, so, by all means, let’s keep working it through in prose) and b) doesn’t mean that it’s all that’s going on in these novels.

I also suspect that it is about about climate change. Bear with me: the premise of ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy, tectonically-speaking, is that humans, at the acme of their civilization, committed an act which so permanently destabilized the earth’s crust that it threatens the survival of everything on it. This is understood by all living human inhabitants of the earth as its revenge, that the earth is essentially, permanently, hostile to human life. That seems pretty clear to me.

But the problem with explicating allegory is that it makes the work seem preachy, or academic, or pedantic, and that is emphatically not the case here. In fact, the lack of pedantry is partly why I’m having trouble discerning the allegory.

So, am I allowed to love a story without understanding the allegory?

Obviously, the answer is yes – I can enjoy it any way I want. I can even enjoy it while totally misunderstanding the allegory. But (and honestly, this may be wrong) I think that understanding the allegory makes the experience of the books richer. And I know that this makes me sound like a complete nerd, but I am a complete nerd, and I really do enjoy a book more when I understand not only the story, but also the other stories which the story is referencing, the moral questions it is obliquely pondering, the historical events which it is recapitulating. They make me appreciate the story more, the skill of its writing, the depth of its thought.

And when you know, or suspect, that a story has these extra layers, and you aren’t quite getting them, it’s disorienting, like when you fall asleep in the middle of a movie and miss a whole bunch of plot. You might technically understand the ending, but can you say that you really understood the movie?

Not really, and so I don’t feel like I can say that I understand ‘The Obelisk Gate‘, and it’s making me feel very insecure, because I really, really like it. I want to understand it, and so I’ve been thinking about it.

N. K. Jemisin

One of the most salient threads which runs through the first two novels of ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ is that our fundamental selves are revealed through our treatment of our children. This is true on the level of the society as well as on the level of the individual. Children are a major, major part of ‘The Broken Earth’ books – love for them, grief for the loss of them, rage at the people who hurt them.

And cruelty to children winds through the books. There is an idea which pervades the entire trilogy (so far) that, in health, children are loved and cherished, protected and cared for. It is only in sickness that we allow them to be tortured or mutilated, abandoned or killed.

Earth has become a sick place, and the question which Jemisin is asking is, is it possible to be a healthy person in a sick place? Can you bring children into a sick world, raise them in a sick society, love them healthily when you cannot truly keep them safe? When the society in which they will grow up might abuse or murder them, use them or break them? When the very earth on which they walk might drive them and every one they love to extinction at any moment?

What does parental love even mean in that context? Parents love their children, ideally. Parents will do anything, risk anything, for their health and happiness – what does that mean in a world where health and happiness are impossible? What happens to love in a world like that?

It curdles, turns inward into rage, becomes destructive, deadens. Twists and becomes murderous in its turn. Even love becomes impossible, in a sick world.

Now that I think about it, this is kind of what ‘1984’ is also about. Actually, this is exactly what ‘1984’ is about: the idea that in a totalitarian society, even love, even private, romantic love, is impossible, because there is no private space for a human heart to have something normal and good, like love.

And, in ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy, that’s true of parents, too: on a hostile earth, where we are threatened at every turn, where constant fear and danger have made us base and mean and vicious, we can’t even love our children. Because loving children is hopeful, and hope requires a future, and in a world with no future there’s no way to love them – it’s too painful.

I know that I’m not making ‘The Obelisk Gate‘ sound fun – I’m probably making it sound like the world’s bleakest book about parenting. It is fun, in a bleak, scary way. It’s one of the most absorbing books I’ve read in years, and, as I mentioned last time, I honestly just resent the time I have to spend here, writing about it, instead of thinking about it. It’s so, so good.

The Fifth Season

| ruthpelletier

The Broken Earth: Book One

By N. K. Jemisin

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

I think that prejudices must be a little like guns: just as likely to hurt their owner as they are to hurt anyone else.

I’m just going to say this, straight-out: I’m always a little embarrassed to be seen reading a fantasy novel. I’m not defending this position – I know that this is shallow – I’m admitting this as the shortcoming is it.

But there it is: I’m always a little embarrassed to be seen reading a fantasy novel.

Because they look bad. I’m not saying that they are bad; certainly, they aren’t all bad. But they all look bad. For some reason, the marketing for fantasy novels has evolved certain universals (thin covers, big, serif-fonted, foreboding titles with moody, dramatic art behind them) that signal badness. The books all look cheap, interchangeable, and plotty.

See?

Which, fine. Nothing wrong with cheap, interchangeable, and plotty, if that’s what you’re in the mood for. But it’s not ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’, is it? And it always gives my vanity a little twinge, to be caught reading one. It makes me feel defensive, like I want to announce to everyone on the red line train with me, ‘I just finished ‘The Gulag Archipelago’, and so I’m just taking a little break!’

Which is vain and insecure, yes, and emphatically my own problem (no one on the red line gives a flying fuck what I’m reading, I promise). There’s a reason we have that old expression, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’, and even though that expression usually applies to people, turns out it applies just as well to actual books! Because if you avoid books just because they have fantasy-looking covers, sometimes you miss really good books.

I’m trying to explain how it is that I came to be the last person alive to have discovered ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy by N. K. Jemisin: I ignored it because it looks like a bad fantasy novel. I’m sure that I have walked by it in bookstores a thousand times, sorting it pre-consciously into “garbage” into my head and moving on. Even if I picked it up and looked at the back, I would have immediately put it down and walked away, because the back cover makes ‘The Fifth Season‘ look like a garbage book.

But the other day, I was with a friend in Trident Bookstore and she spotted ‘The Fifth Season‘ on the Staff Recommendations rack and said, ‘You’ve read that, right?’

And I said, ‘No, I haven’t even heard of it.’ Which, given the look she then gave me, is clearly much more embarrassing than reading a fantasy book on the red line.

I now know, of course, that ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy has made N. K. Jemisin the only author ever to win Hugo awards three years in a row. The third installment, ‘The Stone Sky‘, also won a Locus and a Nebula. The praise for ‘The Fifth Season‘ is so over-the-top it sounds sarcastic (“These novels are a gift to the whole of our culture,” says The Guardian – seriously?).

I’m not sure even how to describe ‘The Fifth Season‘ in a way that is going to do it justice. I’m worried that a description of the plot mechanics is going to make it sound…generic? And I don’t think that ‘The Fifth Season’ is generic. To be completely honest, I finished it about fifteen minutes ago, and I haven’t had time to digest it yet.

I know I loved it. I loved it so much that I’m feeling frankly kind of resentful that I have to be here, writing about it instead of just starting the next book in the series, ‘The Obelisk Gate‘.

I don’t know whether I loved it because it was “good” – I’m way, way past caring. I just know it’s a great story, an absolutely phenomenal story, set in a world which is complex and well-imagined and dark.

Fantasy is like any genre: it has threads that it can pull, values it can adjust, which are known to its readers, and which refer to the genre as a whole while still belonging to the story specifically. Part of what you admire when you admire a piece of genre fiction is the way that this particular story has used those conventions, has toggled those toggles. It’s a form of creativity within limits, and when it’s done well, the limits make the creativity even more impressive.

And so ‘The Fifth Season‘ plays with some ideas that will be very familiar to even casual readers of fantasy (or even just to people who have seen ‘Game of Thrones’). It takes place on an Earth subject to terrible seismic upheaval; severe tectonic activity causes global catastrophe every few centuries, periods of darkness and apocalyptic death: these are the fifth seasons.

Human civilization has learned to weather these periods of mass extinction through community stability and the careful husbanding of resources. However, planning alone has not saved them – magic is also necessary. For there have evolved among them humans capable of channeling and controlling seismic activity: the orogenes. Orogenes are very powerful and very dangerous, and normal people revile them. It is more common than not for young orogene children to be killed upon discovery in rural areas.

But, whenever possible, the forces of empire gather young orogenes and bring them to be trained in the capital. There, they are taught through brutal lesson to control their powers and put it to good use.

‘The Fifth Season‘ tells the story of three orogenes, all women. One is a child, just discovered and nearly destroyed. Another is a young woman, advanced in her training, as she is given for mentorship to the most powerful orogene alive. And the third is a mother, trying to live in secret, in hiding, after she discovers that her husband has just discovered the gift in one of her children, and so has killed him.

N. K. Jemisin

I’m making it sound kind of garbage, I know. It’s difficult to write about some of these things without sounding silly, and I’m just not a good enough writer to throw around made-up words for magical beings convincingly.

But, and this is all that really matters, N. K. Jemisin is. I made it through this entire novel without rolling my eyes once. That’s astonishing. There is something about the word ‘fantasy’ that sounds soft; it makes people (maybe just me?) think of Tolkieny shit, of mages and dragons and Chosen Ones, where the deepest and darkest metaphor is racism between dwarves and elves.

There’s nothing silly or soft in ‘The Fifth Season‘. Quite the contrary – this novel is dark, brutal, mean. It is violent, even wrenching. It’s characters don’t find relief anywhere, and neither will you. I don’t know if it’s a metaphor for anything (again, it really has been only fifteen minutes – I’m still sitting in the same chair, for fuck’s sake); sometimes a dark story is just a story about darkness.

But what a story it is.

The Bone Clocks

| ruthpelletier

By David Mitchell

All Posts Contain Spoilers

Sometimes bad novels are so good.

I’ve just finished ‘The Bone Clocks‘, by David Mitchell.  It was a bad book, but not the sort of bad book that you resent having started.  It didn’t have the sort of badness which makes you angry at the author for trying, for his pretensions or mistakes.  It was the kind of bad book you love, that you tear through.  It was a Great Bad Book.

David Mitchell.jpg
David Mitchell

I’m not saying that David Mitchell is a bad novelist, or a bad writer (which are different things); he’s not necessarily either.  He’s definitely not a bad writer: his prose ranges from competent enough to ignore to quite good, depending on the book and the time.  I would say that he’s actually a decent writer.

And, though I have only read two of his other books, ‘Cloud Atlas‘ and ‘The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet‘, neither was a bad novel.  ‘Cloud Atlas’, it’s true, hovered around the same kind of badness that ‘The Bone Clocks‘ possesses, but was original enough that, I think, managed to just avoid the downward spiral of real badness.

And ‘The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet‘ was great.  It was a lovely novel, moving and human, one of the very few books that has ever made me cry.  I think, perhaps, the discrepancy between ‘The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet’ and both ‘The Bone Clocks‘ and ‘Cloud Atlas‘ has something to do with their genres.  ‘The Thousand Autumns’ is simply a little love story; it isn’t science fiction or fantasy, which the other two are.  I think that, perhaps, science fiction and fantasy (certainly fantasy) slide more easily into plotty badness.  Something about the genre tempts authors to the sort of over-written theatrics which make books bad but fun to read.  Novels grounded in reality tend to be a little bit tighter.

The Bone Clocks‘The Bone Clocks‘ is, in many ways, ‘Cloud Atlas‘s half-baked little brother.  It is also a story which follows multiple characters, all supernaturally connected, through time.  But while ‘Cloud Atlas’ follows what seem to be incarnations of one or two people through many, many generations, ‘The Bone Clocks’ is about one long human lifetime, namely the life of Holly Sykes, as it is crossed, intersected over and over, by a, uh, group of reincarnating mystics at war over the harvesting of human children to feed their eternal lives.

It’s exactly the sort of grandiose and silly premise that Great Bad Books are made of.  ‘The Bone Clocks‘ is the story of a magical war between good and evil, and like all such stories, the joy of it is in the ludicrous, and yet somehow absorbing, details.

In the world of ‘The Bone Clocks‘, there exists a class of immortals, called Atemporals, souls which involuntarily reincarnate 49 days after their deaths into the body of a dying child.  One group of these Atemporals, calling themselves the Horologists, are at ‘psychosoteric’ war with the Anchorites.  The Anchorites were once just regular mortals, but they have used dark technologies, gifted to them by the Blind Cathar, to achieve immortality.  However, in order to achieve this, they must routinely sacrifice a child.

Holly Sykes is a psychic, and so her life becomes tangled up in this psychosoteric war.  ‘The Bone Clocks‘ takes places in six chapters over the course of her long life, starting in 1984 and ending in 2043, in a very different world than ours.

And it’s just silliness, from beginning to end: joyful, diverting silliness.  David Mitchell has great strengths as a storyteller: he has a gift for the demotic (his characters sound and act like people on TV), and he’s great at constructing the elements of plot: pacing, building to a climax.  He gives scenes texture, but doesn’t linger – he’s very plotty.

And he’s just the right amount trashy, at least in his sci-fi/fantasy novels.  A multi-generational war of magic between the Evil Anchorites and the Good Horologists, which will culminate in a battle in the Temple of the Blind Cathar?  Come on, that’s almost unspeakably cheesy!

You know what it made me think of?  Do you remember that South Park episode, ‘Cartman’s Incredible Gift’, from Season 8, where Cartman pretends to be a psychic and ‘battles’ a bunch of other fake psychics?  Where all the psychics stand opposite each other and touch their temples and go, ‘Wa na na na’?

The whole book is like that.

And it’s not that Mitchell is pretending that it isn’t cheesy – ‘The Bone Clocks‘ isn’t pretentious, not at all.  Rather, he simply doesn’t seem to care whether or not it’s cheesy, which means that, in a weird way, you don’t.  If he were looking down his nose, using the Anchorites and Horologists as some highbrow metaphor, then ‘The Bone Clocks’ would be insufferable.  But I, at least, didn’t get the sense that that was what he was doing.

Rather, ‘The Bone Clocks‘ feels like David Mitchell got a neat idea for a story and decided to tell it: wouldn’t it be kind of interesting if reincarnation were true, but only some people had the ability to do it?  And then some other people figured out how to do it, but they had to do something terrible in order to achieve it?

What terrible thing would you do to achieve immortality?  That is an old question, one that we ask ourselves over and over.  What price would be worth your boundless life?  At what point during that evil eternity would it cease being your life?  At what price, once paid, do you stop being yourself?

We are obsessed with that question not just because we are fixated on our own deaths, because we are devoted to avoiding them – we ask that question because it’s an essentially fun question to ask.  It’s a fun problem to think about, and it’s fun to think about it here.  It’s not sophisticated, it’s not ‘good’, but it is fun.

Sometimes, silly scenarios are the best way to explore the scariest and most important questions.  Sometimes, silly meditations are the best meditations.  But, honestly, it doesn’t matter, because they’re fun.