The house of the scorpion, Nancy Farmer

[cyphomandra]

I have been having problems with my hard-copy prose reading - for the last week I have been trudging through an appalling book with a horribly overentitled aggravating main character, and then I tried to get out of it into, variously, a) a Captain Alatriste novel that spends the first forty pages sacking a Dutch town in a particularly annoying manner b) China Mieville's Un Lun Dun, which is not working for me at all c) Daniel Abraham's A Shadow in Summer (first in a quartet, and the dialogue is irritating). Having failed at all of these I then went off and read vast quantities of fan fiction, which at least irks me in different ways (failure to pay attention to setting and lack of fight scenes, mostly), re-read Diana Wynne Jones' Eight Days of Luke (excellent. Am composing self-indulgent discussion post in another window) and then finally picked this up last night and read it. And I now feel less like giving up on all prose fiction published in the last twenty years, which will hopefully turn out to be the right decision in the long run.

Matt grows up on the estate of El Patron, who runs the country between the US and the former Mexico - a country brought into existence by the need to grow opium and prevent (or at least benefit from) illegal immigration. Matt is a clone, nonhuman by the rules of this society, but he is El Patron's clone and, as such, has a dubious sort of status - the implications of which have not yet become fully apparent to him.

This is a very well-done book with just the right sort of and amount of world-building (I particularly like the fact that El Patron's bodyguards are all British soccer hooligans, recruited for their lack of contacts or alternatives), and the characters are very good - Matt himself, his foster-mother Celia and the bodyguard Tam Lin especially (Maria, the girl who befriends Matt, is too obvious a character type to quite work for me (defender/love interest) but her casual selfishness is very nicely drawn). There's a nice sense of humour, too (Matt's reaction after finding out another guard has old injuries that prevent him from ever speaking - "He'd assumed the large, silent man was antisocial.").

I'm not quite sure about the ending. It works, but it's also convenient, and I'm not sure it fully resolves everything about Matt and his identity, and how he does/doesn't differ from El Patron. I think I wanted something a bit more ambivalent, although possibly only if it's ambivalent in the right way, and really, at this stage I'm just being picky. What is important is that I have the sequel to Farmer's The Sea of Trolls in a box somewhere, and this weekend (after I finish overentitled sociopath and decide whether or not I'm going to re-attempt yet another magical version of London before I take all of these back to the library) I will try to track it down.

Comments

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I can see why Un Lun Dun wouldn't work for you (I finished it, but aside from one structural decision, there was very little to admire about the book).

What's your beef with the dialogue in A Shadow in Summer? I liked it well enough, though that was mostly for the ideas and politics rather than the word-by-word prose.

[cyphomandra.livejournal.com]

See, I post complaints and then feel guilty - I am making snap judgements based on tiny portions of prose! - so by the time I got your comment I was 180 pages through Un Lun Dun and attempting to think charitable thoughts about the near complete lack of personality displayed by most of the characters (I did like Curdle). Having ploughed on to the finish anyway, I also liked the "7 quest objects? Let's just skip straight to the last one", but the deconstruction of the fated saviour whatsit didn't work for me, largely because Deeba behaves almost exactly like every other portal fantasy protagonist, charging around through assorted scenic encounters while being aided and abetted by a bunch of cheerful freaky sidekicks, who will willingly sacrifice themselves for her as necessary.

I think the bit that pushed me over the edge in this respect was in Webminster Abbey, where Rosa's already been snatched by a Black Window (to remarkably little grieving) and, while trying to trap the right window, Deeba and the others see a window with a woman trapped behind it, desperately trying to escape. And ignore her. It pissed me off immensely. Which is a shame, because I would like to read something that challenged the Prophesised Hero archetype, but this wasn't it.

A Shadow in Summer - well, I'll probably end up giving this another go as well, but I read the prologue and all the dialogue was so intent on shoving the world-building down my throat that it didn't ever feel like anything anyone would actually say. And I can like those sort of "passing the test by failing" set-ups - Sylvia Engdahl's Heritage of the Star (which I suspect has a different US title) does this brilliantly - but it helps if I a) am concerned about the characters and b) do not feel so obviously manipulated.

I am enjoying other books! It just takes me much longer to write up the ones I like, and there's something quite cathartic about bitching about the bad ones :)

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, no, Un Lun Dun is just not up to the standard of The Scar or even Perdido Street Station. (I think it's about on par with Iron Council, but I, uh, really didn't like Iron Council much.) I forgot about the 'skip straight to the last one' bit, so I guess I liked 1.5 structural decisions? The one I was talking about was the need to return to the secondary world to undo the problem you helped create.

I can see how the opening of a Shadow in Summer could strike you that way. Its kind of unfortunate that that was the opening, though, because as far as I'm concerned, it gets better later on. If I'm remembering it correctly, it also doesn't give some of the context that's necessary to understand why everyone's busy being a bastard (well, it alludes to it, but that's not the same).

I am kind of a sucker for quasi-Asian fantasy cultures that aren't blatant Japan/China/India ripoffs, though, so YMMV.