Finding the good in others
Jun. 23rd, 2007 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandra(as might be apparent, I'm catching up on a backlog. I also have scattered notes on various anime and manga that are currently awaiting some general organising principle that does not solely involve me going on about Full Metal Alchemist)
Graves Gate, Dennis Burges. According to the cover copy this book contains “jolting surprises” and is “absorbing” and “engrossing”, as well as being “really original” and “[s]o twisted even Holmes couldn’t have figured it out with Stephen King’s help!”. In fact, even if they hadn’t also put the twist on the cover, it’s pretty obvious within the first hundred pages, but it takes the characters (who are flat and persist in holding endlessly characterless conversations) well over three hundred, with the final solution occurring to the narrator after a particularly painful visual demonstration of musical chairs in a pub. I picked it up because it also said “featuring Arthur Conan Doyle” on the cover, and it does, but he shows up only intermittently and only really comes alive in one scene near the end, when he stalks out of the room in disgust at events. Most of the time the reader is stuck with the narrator, an American reporter with the unlikely name of Charlie Baker, and his love interest, Adrianna, an upper class Englishwoman in a marriage of convenience with one of those gay English aristocrats, who says unEnglish things like “trash bin” and behaves in a number of completely contradictory ways.
And yet, for all the problems I had with this book (not least of which is the discovery, in the afterword, that it’s the first of a series), it has one great moment, near the end, where a dreamlike reality is constructed and then, violently, blown apart. Oddly, the villain is the most believable and interesting character in this, and he’s more real when he shows up than when he is encountered at a distance (through interviews, journals and the media).
The other thing I got out of this book was the momentum to track down the two David Pirie books I didn’t own, which will shortly be appearing on this booklog.
The Necessary Beggar, Susan Palwick. A good, thoughtful book. One member of a family murders a Mendicant, an appalling crime, and as punishment the whole extended family are exiled from Lémabantunk, their home, into an Other World – a refugee camp in Nevada, in an US which could be tomorrow. The book follows the family, particularly Zamatryna (who is 6 at the time of exile) through their time in the camp, with its slow bureaucratic despair and into the world with all its strange customs and expectations, its choices about who is listened to and who is neglected. Throughout it all Zama keeps a secret, a beetle from Lémabantunk that holds the spirit of the Mendicant her uncle killed. In Lémabantunk, the dead are present in all things, but cannot speak to the living; in Nevada, things are different.
This is a book about considering others, and the consequences of this: what happens when you keep secrets from people for their own good, and what happens when you finally share them; when you should, and shouldn’t act for others. And it’s a book about two worlds, the fantasy one of Lémabantunk, which feels real, and the real one of Nevada, which feels real in an entirely different way, even when I wish it weren’t (as any encounter, however fictional, with the American health care system seems to make me do). I do have problems with some of the elements of the book – Jerry seems too good to be real, and independent of that there’s an emphasis on pairing everybody off (specifically, married) that jars a little. But the emotions are always real, and it’s the sort of book that makes you feel better for having read it. I’ve just picked up Shelter, her next book, and it’s going very near the top of my pending pile (which, currently, consists of two bags of books in the car (library and book sale), a box by the door, and the latest Liz Williams, sitting smugly on my pillow.
Graves Gate, Dennis Burges. According to the cover copy this book contains “jolting surprises” and is “absorbing” and “engrossing”, as well as being “really original” and “[s]o twisted even Holmes couldn’t have figured it out with Stephen King’s help!”. In fact, even if they hadn’t also put the twist on the cover, it’s pretty obvious within the first hundred pages, but it takes the characters (who are flat and persist in holding endlessly characterless conversations) well over three hundred, with the final solution occurring to the narrator after a particularly painful visual demonstration of musical chairs in a pub. I picked it up because it also said “featuring Arthur Conan Doyle” on the cover, and it does, but he shows up only intermittently and only really comes alive in one scene near the end, when he stalks out of the room in disgust at events. Most of the time the reader is stuck with the narrator, an American reporter with the unlikely name of Charlie Baker, and his love interest, Adrianna, an upper class Englishwoman in a marriage of convenience with one of those gay English aristocrats, who says unEnglish things like “trash bin” and behaves in a number of completely contradictory ways.
And yet, for all the problems I had with this book (not least of which is the discovery, in the afterword, that it’s the first of a series), it has one great moment, near the end, where a dreamlike reality is constructed and then, violently, blown apart. Oddly, the villain is the most believable and interesting character in this, and he’s more real when he shows up than when he is encountered at a distance (through interviews, journals and the media).
The other thing I got out of this book was the momentum to track down the two David Pirie books I didn’t own, which will shortly be appearing on this booklog.
The Necessary Beggar, Susan Palwick. A good, thoughtful book. One member of a family murders a Mendicant, an appalling crime, and as punishment the whole extended family are exiled from Lémabantunk, their home, into an Other World – a refugee camp in Nevada, in an US which could be tomorrow. The book follows the family, particularly Zamatryna (who is 6 at the time of exile) through their time in the camp, with its slow bureaucratic despair and into the world with all its strange customs and expectations, its choices about who is listened to and who is neglected. Throughout it all Zama keeps a secret, a beetle from Lémabantunk that holds the spirit of the Mendicant her uncle killed. In Lémabantunk, the dead are present in all things, but cannot speak to the living; in Nevada, things are different.
This is a book about considering others, and the consequences of this: what happens when you keep secrets from people for their own good, and what happens when you finally share them; when you should, and shouldn’t act for others. And it’s a book about two worlds, the fantasy one of Lémabantunk, which feels real, and the real one of Nevada, which feels real in an entirely different way, even when I wish it weren’t (as any encounter, however fictional, with the American health care system seems to make me do). I do have problems with some of the elements of the book – Jerry seems too good to be real, and independent of that there’s an emphasis on pairing everybody off (specifically, married) that jars a little. But the emotions are always real, and it’s the sort of book that makes you feel better for having read it. I’ve just picked up Shelter, her next book, and it’s going very near the top of my pending pile (which, currently, consists of two bags of books in the car (library and book sale), a box by the door, and the latest Liz Williams, sitting smugly on my pillow.
