All the Pretty Horses, a book review

All the Pretty Horses — the first book in The Border Trilogy — won the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The book is crafted with care, with awe-inspiring descriptive prose, authentic characters, and dialog that draws the reader into the story’s landscape. I first came across Cormac McCarthy’s writing in the novel The Road, which has a completely different mood, but a similar style.

All the Pretty Horses is written without conventional punctuation; there were many passages that reminded me of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, with ideas strung together with conjunctions (particularly and), which evokes a gentle cadence (the meditative rhythm of riding a horse through the prairies?) and possibly compensates for the lack of commas:

"When the truck finally pulled out and they saw him still standing they 
offered their bundles for him to sit on and he did so and he nodded and 
dozed to the hum of the tires on the blacktop and the rain stopped and 
the night cleared and the moon that was already risen raced among the 
high wires by the highway side like a single silver music note burning 
in the constant and lavish dark and the passing fields were rich from 
the rain with the smell of earth and grain and peppers and the sometime 
smell of horses." 
[Ch. IV, p. 219-220, The Border Trilogy, Everyman's Library edition]

I was curious, so I searched around and discovered a term for writing that uses several conjunctions in close succession:  polysyndetic syntax.  Further, The King James Version of the Bible uses similar syntax, and All the Pretty Horses is permeated with a biblical mood.

There are no quotation marks used, and I found that the dialog occasionally blended into the story, which had the effect of drawing me further into the novel. The dialog is sparse, but has a genuineness that enhances the mood and reveals layers naturally, where descriptive prose would sometimes falter.

The protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a fully realized character, and he is perhaps the coolest sixteen year-old I’ve come across in fiction. It is 1949, and John Grady’s world has been irrevocably altered: his grandfather died, his parents are divorced, his father is fading, his girlfriend has dumped him, and his mother is selling the family ranch (excellent material for a country song; some band should experiment with his words as lyrics). Rather than move into the city, John Grady decides to run away to Mexico with his best friend, Lacey Rawlins. John Grady has a special relationship with horses and the expanse of an open landscape. He expects Mexico to be more like the ‘old world’, before the advent of cars, high-rises, and the claustrophobic concept of subdivided land. John Grady and Rawlins have a few adventures before they find work on a ranch, and John Grady inevitably faces disillusionment, but endeavors to unearth the inherent beauty and quality in the world.

In Mexico, John Grady’s expertise with horses is appreciated by the ranch owner — the hacendado, Don Héctor— and he is promoted to a high level of responsibility. John Grady begins a dangerous liaison with Don Hector’s daughter, Alejandra, but I found the romance less convincing than the bromance between John Grady and Rawlins. Alejandra’s character, and the result of the affair, felt like a plot device, though a device that was worked into the story quite smoothly. John Grady’s conversations with Alejandra’s grand-aunt, señorita Alfonsa, were more poignant. But I’m quibbling…

All the Pretty Horses is not a long novel, but Cormac McCarthy is a marvelous writer, and he has infused the story with surprising depth. I’m looking forward to the other two books in The Border Trilogy (The Crossing and Cities of the Plain), but I have many books to read before I continue the journey (including Blood Meridian, by McCarthy) .

Highly recommended.

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The Wasp Factory, a book review

Sadly, Iain Banks passed away earlier this month, but his fiction lives on. I’ve read (and enjoyed) quite a few of his science fiction novels, but have never read any of his mainstream fiction books. I’d heard a lot about The Wasp Factory, and decided to give it a try. As he explains in his introduction, it was his first attempt at mainstream fiction: he’d written a few science fiction books, but couldn’t get them published. The Wasp Factory  gained him instant notoriety; he garnered critical praise, but there was also some disgusted furor.

The novel’s narrator, Frank Cauldhame, is an intriguing, but seriously warped, individual. He is an intelligent, obsessive-compulsive teenager with a personality that displays a strangely innocent morbidity; he performs truly despicable acts, yet he can be accepted as a sympathetic character. His dysfunctional family is intriguing, but not fully explored: this is Frank’s story, and the other characters are satellites who orbit about him.

I can’t say I ‘enjoyed’ the book; it is too macabre to consider it an enjoyable reading experience, but I found it interesting and well-structured. As usual, Iain Banks was able to wedge in examples of his dark humour, and I particularly enjoyed Frank’s re-telling of his uncle’s successful, yet bungled, suicide.

A warning: animal rights activists and feminists should probably be tranquilized before reading the book.

The plot is well thought-out, but I thought the twist was over-telegraphed; perhaps I knew the twist and had forgotten I knew it (i.e.: a subconscious knowledge), but once I’d caught on, it seemed rather obvious.

There were quite a few grizzly sections in the book; and, to balance things out, the next novel of his I’m planning on reading is The Crow Road, which is supposed to be a more light-hearted read (but, if I know Iain Banks, there are some grizzly events within it).

 The Wasp Factory is too twisted for a recommendation, but it was an interesting novel.

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The Einstein Intersection, a book review

Will our stories outlive us; and, if so, how will we be perceived when they are found?

Below is a short review of Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection (1967); I’ve posted a more thorough review at Retrospeculative.

I think in this short novel, Delany is showing off (or he was a heck of a lot smarter than I was at the tender age of twenty-three), but if the reader can struggle through the confusing patches, there are delights to be had. Delany is definitely not for everyone, but there is some wonderfully lyrical writing, and the novel is quite satisfying if you’re able to immerse yourself in his world-vision. It amazes me that Delany was published in a pulp fiction market. His working title for the book was A Fabulous, Formless Darkness (from a William Butler Yeats work he’d quoted), but it was ‘re-worked’ by the publisher, Ace Books (of  garish covers and low-priced packaging fame). Ace‘s main audience was teenage boys who wanted formulaic plots with the usual science fiction stereotypes. Delany employed the stereotypes, but twisted them into unusual perspectives. Even though he set his stories far in the future, they were designed to describe the world as it was.

The novel takes place on Earth; however, it is set tens-of-thousands of years into the future: myths run rampant and are only partially explained at the crossroads of logic and irrationality (with tongue firmly planted in cheek, I’d suggest searching at the corner of Einstein Street and Gödel Avenue). Two of the major themes are travel, through space,  time, and thought, as echoed in Delany’s travels through the Mediterranean, Spain, and Greece (which he relates in between-chapter notes), and difference from the ‘norm’, as demonstrated by the mutating aliens, who are attempting to maintain a sense of conformity while sifting through the gossamer memories of a sentient species — humanity — that has vanished.

The reader is immersed in the alien’s milieu, just as the aliens are immersed in the quagmire of humanity’s psychic memories. Within the body of the novel, Delany has included some travel-notes, which he wrote while wandering through foreign lands, creating the novel. At one point [p.119], he writes: “…perhaps on rewriting I shall change Kid Death’s hair from black to red.”  But the reader has already encountered the character, and his hair is red, which demonstrates Delany’s interest in time, events in time, and awareness; what has been, what might have been, and what is. And he has also set up a conscious association between the author, the reader, and the words on the page (something he does to a dizzying degree in Dhalgren). At another point [p. 65], Delany implicitly states that “…the central subject of the book is myth.”

It is a book full of myth and peppered with confusion; nevertheless, if you enjoy a story that requires some cobbling together and leaves you thinking after you finish, I highly recommend it; along with Dhalgren, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series, it displays Delany at his mythical best.

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The Teleportation Accident; a book review

In retrospect, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, a mixture of : Douglas Adams; Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint; David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas; Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five; and something undeniably new (I now feel the need to read Ned Beauman‘s first novel, Boxer, Beetle).

After I’d finished the first hundred pages (maybe a bit more) I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it; nevertheless, I kept reading because every once in a while there was a nugget, and I didn’t want to miss one: below are a few that I marked as I read (there are lots more):

“A short-wave radio hummed jazz as if it had forgotten the tune.” (p.133)

“There was enough ice in her voice for a serviceable daiquiri.” (p.149)

“…the sort of moustache that could beat you in an arm-wrestling contest.” (p.163)

“…a tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed.”(p.197)

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It takes quite some time for this novel’s plot to warm up, but there is more going on than I suspected at first (and a whirlwind of threads converge near the end of the book, which has four endings).

The novel begins in Berlin, 1931.

There are quite a few threads introduced at various points, for example:

• Set designer Adriano Lavicini’s Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place, which caused an infamous disaster, with echoes far into the future.

• Evolved dinosaurs: the Troondonians.

• Adele Hitler (no relation), who evokes a strong infatuation from the main character, Egon Loeser.

• A one-sided romance (see previous point).

• A murder mystery with noir elements.

• A scientist attempting to harness the energy of ghosts to provide electricity for the USA.

• A man who cannot tell pictures from the real thing (he suffers from ontological agnosia).

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The main character, Egon Loeser, is difficult to like; however, I find my reaction to be similar to another character in the novel — Rupert Rackenham — who decided that “…in spite of everything, he liked Loeser.” (p.352)

Highly recommended; but be patient, and be aware that this is an odd book…

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The God of Small Things, a book review

The God of Small Things has all the ingredients that I love in a novel; poetic writing, intriguing metaphors, language calisthenics, a character driven narrative, a dream-like sensibility, and metaphysical elements. And I did enjoy many sections; unfortunately, I wasn’t particularly fond of the novel as a whole. But that’s just my opinion; others thought very highly of it indeed: it won the Booker Prize, and garnered many glowing reviews. I just wasn’t drawn into the characters as I should have been.

The idiosyncrasies of the author’s prose style that likely helped win her the Booker Prize didn’t quite work for me. Ms. Roy used an inordinate amount of ink to foray into trivialities; not necessarily detrimental, but in this novel they felt forced at times and intruded on the story. I also began to weary of the interminable metaphors and the circling, echoing cadence as the novel turned about the event that shapes the lives of the characters.

The author, Arundhati Roy, has previously written two screenplays for films, and I do think the book would make an excellent movie: the story is quite moving.

Much of the writing is rich, luxurious, and brutally rhythmic: the novel reminded me of the many jazz songs that I couldn’t quite connect with: a song in which I could detect the brilliance in a phrase here, a bar there; but, overall, it just didn’t work for me. Occasionally, I can revisit one of these jazz tunes at a later date and the brilliance coalesces in my mind.

I probably won’t re-read this small, attractive book that I truly wish I could have appreciated more, as it no doubt deserves.

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The Scar, a book review

“A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole” (Chapter 12, p. 171)

“Scars are memory.” (Coda, p. 635)

China Miéville’s fertile imagination soars in The Scar. Like his first Bas-Lag novel (Perdidio Street Station), it took me a while to settle into the narrative of The Scar; as the novel begins, the language is overwrought and manipulative, but I think this serves to draw the reader into a different experience, a world where possibilities are unlimited. After about three chapters the novel settles into a wonderful groove. It is the concept of ‘possibilities’ that may urge me to reread the novel in a few years, to see what I missed the first time around.

There are several significant characters in the book: the Lovers, an identically scarred man and woman (each referred to as the Lover); Johannes Tearfly (a scientist); Tanner Sack (a genetically remade criminal); Shekel (Tanner’s young friend); Silas Fennec (a spy); Brucolac, the ‘vampir’ (victim of a bacteriological disease, photophobic haemophagy); and others. However, I’d like to focus on two of the main characters: Bellis Coldwine, a linguist and the first-person narrator for parts of the story (and the main character in the novel), and Uther Doul, a scholar and master of martial techniques.

To me, Uther Doul is the most interesting character in the book. He is a master manipulator, a character who subtly nudges ‘possibilities’ to achieve his goals. By the end of the novel I was sure that Doul had manipulated many of the events that appeared to be mere chance at the time. But Miéville has also made Doul somewhat insipid: with his skill, and his ‘possible sword’, he is unbeatable (even against unbelievable odds); hence, he will always win a battle. He almost seems as if he is a character who belongs outside the tale, manipulating the plot, a scientist who studies his experiment through a microscope, but cannot help but prod the experiment to arrive at a desired result (metaphysically, the experimenter is always a part of the experiment). Is Uther Doul Miéville’s alter-ego? Doul certainly manipulates Bellis Coldwine…

It is through the narration of Bellis and her actions and reactions that the story of The Scar unfolds; particularly in her long letter to an unknown recipient, written throughout the course of the novel’s action: the document becomes a ‘Possible Letter’, with its possibilities dependent on who the letter is ultimately addressed to. Bellis is bitter and withdrawn due to her forced escape from New Crobuzon and subsequent kidnapping by the pirates of Armada, the floating city made up of thousands of ships (Armada is an astounding place, though not as Gothically stunning as New Crobuzon in Perdido Street Station).

Scars are, of course, a recurring theme (a minor quibble: almost too many times the concept of scars came up, along with the word puissant), but The Scar of the title is the granddaddy scar of them all.

The Scar, like Perdido Street Station, is, in Miéville’s own words, weird fiction: a mixture of steam-punk science fiction, thaumaturgic-fantasy, Gothic-horror, and the kitchen sink: the reader encounters all kinds of beings on Miéville’s world, Bas Lag: humans, humanoid-animal mixtures (women with scarab-beetles for heads, men with crayfish bodies, mosquito-people, et cetera), alien beings (among others: cacti-beings, eel-beings that swim through the air, a monstrous fish from another dimension, porcupine-beings, and nightmarish creatures that cannot be looked at if you are to survive with your intellect intact), and all manner of creatures and possibilities that are explained (or not) in passing.

I’ve typed a lot, but explained little…

If you read and enjoyed Perdido Street Station, I’d highly recommend you read The Scar, which I found to have a more linear and robust plot, if not quite as much mind-numbing weirdness. Both novels are stand-alone creations, but in The Scar there are references to people and events from Perdido Street Station (a warning: both novels are well over six-hundred pages long).

If you didn’t particularly enjoy Perdido Street Station, or if the concept of weird fiction turns you off, but you’d like to sample China Miéville’s oeuvre, I’d recommend The City & The City, which is an urban science fiction/metaphysical police procedural (apparently Miéville wrote it as a gift for his terminally-ill mother who was a fan of the police procedural). The City & The City is, I think, Miéville’s most accomplished novel, but it is not as hyper-imaginative as his Bas-Lag creations, Perdido Street Station and The Scar.

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The Razor’s Edge, a book review

Of Human Bondage is generally considered W. Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece, but The Razor’s Edge was his most successful novel (economically). Maugham is a character in the story — the first-person narrator — and he assures the reader that it is a true story, with nothing embellished (surely, at the very least, an over-simplification: even assuming this is a true story, Maugham has undoubtedly embellished it). Whether the novel is based on real events has been a topic of debate since the novel’s publication, but I find it difficult to believe it is a true-life story. Similar plots occur in at least three other works of his (The Hero (1901), The Fall of Edward Barnard (1921), and The Road Uphill (1924)). I suspect that the plot intrigued him and, after his visit to India in 1938 when he met Ramana Maharshi (the inspiration for Shri Ganesha in the novel), he finally got it the way he wanted in The Razor’s Edge. Of course, as all authors do, he populated the novel with characters that had similar characteristics to those that he met in real life.

He undoubtedly wrote the novel in the five years during WW II that he lived in Beaufort County, on Bonny Hall Plantation, which was owned by Nelson Doubleday, who just happened to have been in charge of Doubleday, which published the novel in 1944.

It is probable that Gray Maturin’s character was based on  Doubleday, a very tall, soft-spoken businessman. And it is almost certain that Elliot Templeton was inspired by Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. It becomes less clear, however, whether Larry Darrell (who took The Road Not Taken) was modeled on a real person; some have suggested Guy Hague, others Christopher Isherwood (who wanted nothing to do with the connection), but neither real-life person fits the story well if we are to believe Maugham’s assertion that nothing in the novel was embellished. It is quite conceivable that Larry is based on a type of person; an amalgam of Maugham’s imagination and the people the he had met (there is an interesting site devoted to the identification of Darrell).

Whatever the inspiration for the novel was, it is a good read, particularly the way Maugham juxtaposes the upper-class, the poor, and the saintly Larry Darrell. As usual, Maugham’s characterizations are brilliant, and the descriptions of the different strata of society are wonderful period pieces. Maugham’s female characters are generally not as likeable as their male counterparts, and I found that to be the case in this novel as well. The male characters, although flawed, are presented in a much more sympathetic manner.

Recommended.

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Howards End, a book review

Howards End — written by a man in the Edwardian  era — has a surprisingly feminine touch (an interesting aside: Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty is loosely based on, and is an homage to, Howards End).

Howards End can be roughly divided into four basic character-groups:

The Blasts — Leonard and Jacky — who are socially marginalized due to their financial position in the lower strata of middle class. Leonard makes an attempt to raise his status with knowledge.

The Wilcox family, who epitomize the Capitalist industrialization of England, particularly the loutish Charles, and his father Henry, who has the great fortune to become acquainted with two remarkable women; something within Henry recognizes the depth of their souls, but he is unable to delve deeply enough to fully comprehend them. Henry is cast as the novel’s hero, but I found this characterization difficult to accept. The Wilcox women — with the notable exception of the spiritual mother-figure, Ruth Wilcox — are inconsequential, minor characters, floating through the novel as counter-examples to the Schlegel sisters.

The Schlegel sisters, who are the central characters (their younger brother, Theobald (‘ Tibby’), is an intellectual; emotionally detached from society): they are ‘modern’ Edwardian women, within the vanguard of emancipation. Helen is vivacious and impetuous, and Margaret — the novel’s heroine — is intelligent, imaginative and practical.

And then there is Howards End, which is a country home, but also a character. For the most part it rests gently along the border of the story, but it is the spiritual heart of the novel. The description of Howards End is based on E.M. Forster’s beloved childhood home, Rooks Nest.

Howards End is a humanistic novel, filled with sparkling writing and keen insights regarding the beauty, humor and tragedy of life.

Recommended.

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The Devotion of Suspect X, a book review

The Devotion of Suspect X, by Keigo Higashino (translated by Alexander O. Smith) sold two-million copies in Japan and won the prestigious Naoki Sanjugo prize . The main characters are: Yasuko, a divorced woman with a teenage daughter; Detective Kusanagi; Assistant Professor (of physics) Yukawa; and high school teacher (and mathematical genius) Ishigami.

The novel is a pseudo-Colombo-style, psychological police procedural. The murderer is known near the beginning of the book, and the detective is stuck within the labyrinth of the plot. Detective Kusanagi’s friend Yukawa and the mathematician Ishigami engage in an intellectual struggle — similar to real-life shogi — that results in a slow unraveling of the case’s intricacies.

There are some twists in the plot, but everything is telegraphed to the careful reader.

At first, the ending annoyed me, but then I realized it was apropos: a flaw in one of the main characters causes him/her to neglect one possibility…

An entertaining read; clever, but not too hard on the little grey cells.

Recommended.

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The Sense of an Ending, a book review

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, is a short book; a novella (my copy is only 150 pages long), but a healthy bundle of reality is included in the small package. The book slowly pieces together a mysterious tragedy; it is skillfully written, and highly readable. The narrator — Anthony (Tony) Webster — struck me as willfully dense, yet I empathized with his character weaknesses.

As old-age and death approach, Tony struggles with elusive memories in an attempt to make sense of his life: “History is that certainty produced where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” (p. 17 & 59)

The book ended on a resonant, minor key; and, although not necessary, I think a re-read might provide additional insights.

Recommended

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