God’s War, by Kameron Hurley

[Since this is a recent book by a living, and not incredibly massive, author, I'm avoiding doing a proper review, and just doing a quick summary of my thoughts - I don't feel comfortable going into too much detail about books where the author might find the review. Actually, I think I've said more in this one than I feel particularly comfortable with. I also have held the review back a while as I'm aware that I'm probably going against popular opinion here, in tone if not necessarily in conclusion.]

 

What is this book?

The first part of a trilogy of far-future science fantasy novels, showing the adventures of a number of assassins and bounty hunters in a country enmeshed in a war so terrible that almost the entire male population has been conscripted. Closest in style and substance to a Shadowrun novel – a gang of hardened, ultra-cynical killers (with varying degrees of hidden goodness) try to complete their mission while getting caught up in the machinations of shadowy and deadly rival groups, in a world where guns and magic coexist. Like some Shadowrun novels, the debt to the noir tradition is clear, but the suaveness and hypocrisy of noir have been replaced with barefaced ‘gritty’ violence and squalor.

The main difference from Shadowrun is the setting. God’s War is set on (what appears to be, although the backstory is never filled in conclusively) an alien planet settled by humans in the far future. Most of the inhabitants appear to be Muslims, or at least follow some religion similar to or evolved from Islam. The story chiefly concerns the desert war between the secular, female-dominated monarchy of Nasheen (whose inhabitants are chiefly ‘cockroach brown’) and the neighbouring conservative theocracy of Chenja (who inhabitants are darker skinned), although the nations of Tirhan (neutral arms-dealers), Ras Tieg (suggested to be Christian) and Mhoria (more European in appearance, with a rigid gender segregation) are also mentioned. The plot also involves a rare visit to Nasheen by humans from another planet. The world features at least two kinds of magic – the magic of the ‘magicians’, which revolves around the psychic control of invertebrates (‘bugs’, often with seemingly supernatural abilities of their own), and of the ‘shifters’, who can change into the form of an animal.

Given current and recent events, the setting of a brutal desert war (complete with chemical and biological weapons), ornamented with a backdrop of mosques and calls to prayer and women wearing veils, inevitably is redolent of modern conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and so on; in particular, it would fit well alongside films like The Hurt Locker, though without that film’s straightforwardness. Whether you consider it from the perspective of a war story or from the perspective of an espionage/detective story, however, everything here is turned up to eleven.

 

What is this book good for?

It’s high-octane, at times very gory, action, with violent episodes punctuated by periods of recovery and fear. It’s an exciting read. Given this, it also does a surprisingly good job of fleshing out multiple key characters, making individuals who in a lesser book might seem blank ciphers or collections of tropes instead seem real and vivid. It does all this in the context of an intriguing and highly distinctive setting, which is intentionally kept unclear and puzzling for as long as possible (as are key things we might like to know about the backstory of the characters). On a more superficial level, there’s a far higher concentration of dark-skinned and female characters than in most genre fiction, which may appeal to those who are particularly conscious of this deficiency in the genre.

 

What problems does this book have?

The biggest problem may be structural. The plot is so full of twists and turns and surprises that by the end it felt as though it lacked integrity as a narrative – things were swerved off the rails so often I lost the sense of there being rails, a clear destination, and consequently I felt the story lacked a driving pace. At times it seemed more like a series of episodes (emotionally if not in terms of plot) – I found myself gripped and thrilled and compelled to complete each chapter, but found it far too easy to not go on to the next chapter, due in large part to this episodic feel. Some of these episodes also became repetitive. Altogether, this meant that the pay-off was underwhelming, with the ending neither being fully fulfilling as a standalone nor enticing as a lead-in for the sequels. The underlying plot is kept so vague and mysterious throughout and wrapped up so quickly that I never particularly cared about it. This was all exacerbated by a common problem with stories that try to sustain a sense of mystery – because so much uncertainty had been maintained about who exactly the bad guys were and why, the ending had to be packed with exposition detailing exactly who everyone was and who was working with whom and why each person had done what they had done exactly. The author actually handled this about as well as could be expected, but it did still undermine the excitement, and I found the climax (indeed, the anticlimax) to be one of the least thrilling parts of the book. Oh, and there’s a very obvious “twist” in the ending that not only is predictable from ten pages in but also doesn’t seem to add very much. And the ending didn’t really feel any different from any of the other encounters in the book, except that the characters finally (at least temporarily) ran out of people to kill (again, a problem with having so much action in a book is that what might otherwise be a notable climactic action scene becomes just another in a long line, and loses its special function as a climax).

A further problem I found – though here perhaps others may disagree – is that the main character really isn’t very likeable. As always in this type of novel, none of the characters are saints, but the protagonist, Nyx, is given almost no redeeming features. And the author seems to be aware of this, since almost everyone she meets goes on about how horrible she is, even her ‘friends’ don’t really seem too enamoured of her much of the time, and she herself wallows in self-pity and self-flagellation. This is, I suppose, interesting – though it would be more so if the character weren’t such a stock figure to begin with – but it does make it a little difficult to emotionally engage. I quickly found I didn’t really care what happened to Nyx as a person, beyond the success or failure of her mission and the wellbeing or otherwise of those she was protecting or threatening. This became more obvious to me later in the novel when we are given more chapters from other perspectives, at which point I realised that I was sighing every time we went back to Nyx. And do bear in mind that this criticism is coming from a boy who usually swoons over cynical kickass tomboys. So I gave her the benefit of the doubt, waiting for her to become likeable, or at the very least enjoyable. Didn’t really happen – in fact, as the angst quotiant increased as we went through the novel, she just became less and less fun to read. When you’re reading a book not caring much about the plot and trying to see over the protagonist’s shoulder to see whether anything interesting is happening to the peripheral characters, something has gone wrong.

Finally, there’s the problem inherent whenever you turn things up to eleven: it doesn’t really make it any louder. You learn very, very quickly in this book that everybody in it is quite likely going to be brutalised and mutilated before it’s over. But there’s a limit to how many severed heads and pools of blood and exploding brains you can really get worked up about. For a start, the existence of magic means that most of this violence doesn’t have any long-term effect, with most injuries, even seemingly fatal ones, being reversible; and even when somebody does die permanently, it comes as no great surprise. This level of violence just encourages the reader to avoid emotionally commiting to any character – as does the hypercynical narrative voice, which tosses off maiming and bereavement in wry and uncaring tones, just mentioning these things in passing. Well, if the characters don’t seem to care and the narrator doesn’t seem to care, why exactly should I care either? The suffering felt distant, unreal, cartoonish. It felt sensationalised, glamourised, even faintly distasteful.

Post-finally, I also found myself wishing for more depth. The setting, as I’ve said, is intriguing, but once you work out how things work most of its features feel somewhat superficial, there appear to be some logical gaps, and some of the more interesting elements are badly underexplored. I could have done with people taking a moment away from the killing to muse a little about sociology, demography and economics. Then again, this is only the first book of the trilogy, so maybe we’ll see the consequences of things fleshed out a little more later on.

In short?

“Intriguing” is probably a good word. The world is highly distinctive, if not necessarily as original as it first appears; the plot and characters and style are very familiar, but for the most part handled well. Its greatest virtue is its action, and its vices are those you’d expect from an action story – a lack of emotional engagement and some wobbly sets at the edges of the screen. The characters and setting were interesting enough that I’ll certainly go on and read the sequels – though I fear that unless things change, after two more novels of this I’m going to be even more tired of the ultra-‘gritty’ noirish stylings, which frankly I found too affected for my tastes [at high points it works, thanks to its audacity, but at low points I found myself thinking of Only Forward, with the difference that here the autoparody seems not to be intentional]. Anyway, I don’t want my problems with that aspect of the book to overshadow all the good points: this is a confident, swaggering, compelling, mostly enjoyable read that also offers a little more originality than you’ll find in many genre novels.

Verdict?

Adrenaline: 4/5. Might have been 5/5, but I found it too easy to disengage in the lulls in action, largely because I wasn’t deeply emotionally engaged.

Emotion: 2/5. Disappointing. Things happen here that I expected would really shake me up, but in the end I was so desensitised by it all that even the death of my favourite character barely got a blink out of me. That said, it throws enough at you that some of it has to stick, and the fact that I was quietly dreading their inevitable demise at all does show that I was feeling something.

Thought: 4/5. In some ways frustrating, because there was a lot of unexplored potential here in the setting for some really thought-provoking material, which wasn’t delivered. On the other hand, seeing it as fundamentally an action romp and expecting no more than that, the distinctive setting and complex characters lifted what could otherwise have been fairly brainless fair, and there were also a few interesting remarks made along the way. The complexities of the plot also deserve mention, even if they ultimately provoked a lot of unsatisfying explanation at the end.

Beauty: 2/5. The prose isn’t bad, not at all, but it also doesn’t stand out as gorgeous. What the prose is describing is mostly very ugly. There are a few points where the ugliness becomes beautiful in its own way, but for the most part… blood, bugs, squalor, violence, cheap brothels, the smell of bodily functions, lots of decapitation…

Craft: 3/5. A mixed affair. I’d see it optimistically: the author clearly has imagination and the courage to display it, and the skill to create effective characters without having much to work with or much time to work in. So I think she’s talented. But she is also a little rough – I’d like to see her improve her structuring, make a few things less obvious, fill in a few shady areas, and tone down her voice into something a little more original and human.

Endearingness: 3/5. I feel like I’m being generous here. I, honestly, didn’t really like it, on an emotional level. On the other hand, I find that I really want to have liked it. I think I like the idea of it more than I liked the realisation. But shouldn’t that count for something? Making me like the idea, even when much of the realisation didn’t appeal to me?

Originality: 3/5. This is a tough one to score. On the one hand, it’s stunningly original – you won’t find many settings that look like this! On the other hand, much of that originality is superficial – you will find stories and characters very similar to this, and that distinctive setting isn’t actually different enough in its internal organs, once you get past the skin, to overcome, or prohibit, that familiarity. What’s more, this narrative voice, and the protagonist that supports it, has itself become a cliché.

Overall: 5/7. Good. I may be being generous – perhaps it should only be ‘not bad’. But I’ll stick with ‘good’ for now – yes, I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt, but I think books like this (confident books, books that look different) probably deserve that benefit of the doubt. I didn’t love this book the way many other people seem to have loved it, but I don’t for a moment regret reading it, and I can see myself recommending it to people. I’m also definitely going to read the next book in the series… but maybe not just yet.

Reading the Silmarillion: Aule and the Dwarves

Aulë, Melkor, and Tolkien – the dangers of industry, and the author’s art

Probably the single most thematically important section of the early chapters details Aulë’s creation of the dwarves. Given how little role the dwarves have to play in the stories that will follow – how little is even said about them explicitly in the mythology – that may seem a strange claim. But of course the dwarves are not the point of this story – they’re just bystanders at their own creation (and near-destruction). The pivotal figure is instead the Vala, Aulë, the Smith. Aulë doesn’t come across all that well in the mythology as a whole, as I said in my last post: at least two of his followers turn very seriously to evil, he himself is said to be the most like Melkor in spirit and interests, and here we see him committing what looks almost like a Cardinal Sin for Middle-Earth. ‘I’m just going off for a nap,’ says God (not really, but you get my drift), ‘you just stay there and don’t touch anything. I’ve decided what intelligent life is going to look like, and don’t you start interfering with that like Melkor tried to do!’. So then Aulë waits around for a bit, but gets bored: ‘oh, I’ll just create a little intelligent life, and overstate my own importance in the same way Melkor did just for a moment, what’s the worst that can happen?’ – ‘Aulë, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?’

Tolkien gets bashed a lot for his supposed anti-industry stance, and his repeated ‘oh it’s all Aulë’s fault’ plot points are a big piece of supporting evidence for that. I don’t want to get into that argument itself here, but I think that this incident does raise two important issues.

The first is simple: if Aulë’s so flawed, why isn’t he Melkor? We’re told they’re alike, but why are they on different sides if they’re so alike? What is it that keeps Aulë on the side of good? And it turns out that this is more important than just a character point – this goes to the heart of Tolkien’s political and moral views.

First, it’s worth making clear the similarities. Aulë, like Melkor, wants to create. Aulë, like Melkor, wants to overstep his allotted role. Aulë, like Melkor, chooses to work in secret. Secrecy and honesty seem to play an important role for Tolkien: again and again he contrasts the images of the good Ainur, cavorting with each other in the bright light, and the evil Melkor, solitary, fearful, hidden in the shadows of the earth, in the deep dark unknown places – just as, before, the good Ainur were joined together in a choir, while Melkor went alone into the outer void. Aloneness is not necessarily bad in Tolkien’s world – we are told that Ulmo stays apart from the congregations of the other Valar, and Ulmo hardly seems evil – and yet, is Ulmo wise and good because he keeps to himself, or is it that Ulmo can keep to himself and not turn evil because he is wise and good, the most deeply instructed of all the Valar? And Ulmo may be alone, but he is not secretive – he communes regularly with Manwë. In any case, secrecy may not be evil per se, but it certainly seems both suspicious and dangerous.

So Aulë goes out into Middle-Earth and creates the dwarves. He desires learners, so that he may be a great teacher; he is ‘unwilling’ to abide by Eru’s intentions. In a way, Aulë has lost faith in Eru: he sees the wonders of Middle-Earth, and regrets that there is no-one to enjoy them. He doubts the wisdom of Eru’s decisions. In this, he is like those whom Melkor swayed to his side in the great music, by disheartening them.

But the difference comes when Ilúvatar sees what has been done and chastises Aulë. We see it within one sentence: “Ilúvatar spoke to him; and Aulë heard his voice and was silent.” That’s not just a conversational nicety that Tolkien’s reporting, it’s a fundamental theological point. Remember the events of the Ainulindalë – when Melkor’s theme intruded into the music, Ilúvatar merely smiles and introduces a new theme, but Melkor responds to the correction by contending against Ilúvatar further. Melkor tries to drown out Ilúvatar with a great clamour of trumpets; Aulë hears his father’s voice and is silent. It is all said in that; but Tolkien spells it out more clearly by having Aulë explicitly yield to the correction and repent. Yet it is not repentence that Ilúvatar is seeking: Ilúvatar does not have mercy on Aulë and the dwarves because Aulë regrets what he has done – indeed, Ilúvatar does not permit Aulë to undo his ‘error’. There is no forgiveness in any sense that involves an undoing of what is done. Here we have reached one of those peculiar places of agreement, where a certain strain of christianity shares its habitation with that great modern antichrist, Nietzsche: both Nietzsche in his love of life, his adulation of strength, his contempt for any sort of weakness or uncertainty, and the christian in his submission to God, his faith in God’s goodness, his willingness to put his life in God’s hands, both share this emphasis on affirmation – and affirmation begets responsibility. The responsible man is not the man who is willing to undo what he has done, but the man who is willing to live with what he has done, to leave it done. Aulë is hubristic in creating the dwarves – but he is also hubristic in seeking to exterminate them, for regret itself is a form of hubris. No, Ilúvatar does not have mercy on Aulë because he wants to destroy the dwarves – he has mercy on him ‘because of his humility’. Because Aulë has responded to correction – because he has put his work in God’s hands, not sought to keep control of it for himself. That is why Aulë is not Melkor: because when Melkor creates in the great song, and is corrected, and sees his theme taken up and taken over by Ilúvatar, he does not let go of that music, take pride in having added something new to the song, and abide by the correction – Melkor rages to keep his music his own. Aulë submits his work to the will of his Father. This has been a common theme in Catholic teaching for a long time: that the greatest sin is not in the error itself, but in holding to error once one has been shown that it is an error.

But why does Tolkien include all this at all? Why does it matter to him? Although he is clearly an author with firm moral views, I do not for a moment suppose that The Silmarillion should, as a whole, be treated as a moral discourse. So why does he seem to care about this relatively obscure issue, about the morality of rebellious creation?

Because this is the sin that he himself was guilty of. This is the second interesting issue raised by this episode. Melkor, Aulë, and Tolkien, were all authors: they all created what had not (it seemed) been part of God’s plan. Rather than being contented by the world as it was, they sought to to create something new. And Tolkien, we must remember, was a worldbuilder first and a novelist second: these stories are excuses, justifications, for the world he had created in his head. Even today, many worldbuilders of a religious persuasion experience moral qualms about their work – and Tolkien was working in an age where the entire concept of ‘fantasy’ as we know it was far less established. Earlier writers could generally only get away with fantasy by casting it as the strange dream of the protagonist, or a legend preserved by some old manuscript of forgotten more magical times… Tolkien created a world that set out to be as solid as our own (that, technically, was our own, but with this identity barely mentioned). It is hard not to imagine that in Tolkien’s childhood – an orphan raised by a priest – between hubris and indolence the practice of inventing imaginary worlds was not something that was unambiguously encouraged in him. Famously, he later referred to the creation of languages in particular as “The Secret Vice” – humorously in part, no doubt, since he hardly seems to have been convulsed by guilt over this ‘vice’, but the idea that it might be considered a vice at all indicates an underlying moral doubt. So Aulë’s speech to Ilúvatar – the speech that exonerates Aulë of guilt, that distinguishes Aulë from Melkor, that asserts the legitimacy (and perhaps the foolishness, but at any rate the legitimacy) of this sort of creation, is perhaps the place in the book where Tolkien’s voice is heard most directly and most intimately in the words of his character, which lay out a moral and theological theory that was of import to no-one more than to himself:

“I did not desire such lordship. I desired things other than I am, to love and to teach them, so that they too might perceive the beauty of Eä, which thou hast caused to be. For it seemed to me that there is great room in Arda for many things that might rejoice in it, yet it is for the most part empty still, and dumb. And in my impatience I have fallen into folly. Yet the making of things is in my heart from my own making by thee; and the child of little understanding that makes a play of the deeds of his father may do so without thought of mockery, but because he is the son of the father. But what shall I do now, so that thou be not angry with me for ever? As a child to his father, I offer to thee these things, the work of the hands which thou hast made. Do with them what thou wilt.”

Of course Ilúvatar has to accept the offering – if he hadn’t done, Tolkien would no doubt have burnt the manuscript.

Ugh.

No, that’s not my reaction to the Tory party’s race to crucify the most poor people before luncheon*. I’ve been ill. Nothing serious, but considerably unenjoyable nonetheless. I can now at least walk around and even use my eyes for things without spikes of nausea shivering/sweating and head pain; now I just have the hacking cough, the feeling that my nose and eyes are on fire and blocks of lead at the same time, and the continual need for industrial numbers of tissues. So considerable improvement!

Might be nice if I could go outside without freezing to the bone, though.

Well, anyway, that’s my quota of trivial self-pity done for the day.

When I’m feeling a bit better, by the way, I intend to read the second half of Kameron Hurley’s “God’s War”, review it, and maybe do another quick Pratchett, and post at least one essay on the Silmarillion. Not really been feeling like reading much at the moment, unfortunately.

 

*Sorry, I don’t mean to sound all partisan. And really, it’s not the policies I have a (big) problem with. I’m not right-wing, and I don’t like the Tory party, but sometimes they can sound like rational people who are able to have a rational debate. I generally think they’re wrong, but as long as they’re decent about it I can cope with that. But lately they’ve just been… disgusting. Vile. Nastier than they ever were as the nasty party. I’m just waiting for Josephs to leap back from the dead and reintroduce forced sterilisation for all comprehensive school students. And why do they (and by ‘they’ I’m now including their papers too) have to bring the “sordid sex lives” of poor people into it? The man is contemptible because he killed six of his own children and in general appears to have been a right tosser in many regards – not because he had a live-in mistress or because he and his wife has threesomes with other men. [They should be careful. Start going back to demonising those with 'vile lifestyles', and they'll get their party mired in sleaze again, because it's not like Tory MPs have the greatest reputation in the world for sexual puritanism.] You can make a dispassionate (though mostly wrong) argument about the necessity for further austerity or for getting people back to work with a great big whip… but you don’t have to come across like a manipulative, hypocritical, cold-hearted slimy little tosser in the process.

Sidebar: the total number of families in the UK with more than ten children and claiming some amount of unemployment benefit? Apparently around 130. Cost to the taxpayer under the new rules? That’s… wait a sec… forgive my maths if I’m wrong… but calculating very approximately… isn’t 130 families of ten people each all on benefits approximately the same cost to the State as… about forty Tory cabinet ministers? Just going by their salary, ignoring security budget, subsidised food and drink, free housing and all that? Now I’m not some woolly-minded radical who’s going to suggest just abolishing the cabinet or making them all eat locusts or anything, but I think it helps to get a sense of perspective by comparing the relative sizes of things sometimes.

…And while we’re at it, how damn incompetent are these people when it comes to PR, anyway? Now, I’m not a fan of PR. I prefer honesty from politicians (and from businesses) and I think people would respond well to more of it. But sometimes, you just look at how badly people in power handle really simple perception issues and wonder how they’re able to tie their shoelaces together, let alone run the country. Here’s a tip: if your government is going to announce a tax on bedrooms because some people have some spare rooms they’re not using right this moment and that’s unfair on other people… don’t have it announced by the guy who lives in a £200m mansion on his family estate where he’s known to have at least four bedrooms going completely unused. Or another: if you’re going to make your big thing about how some people defraud the state by claiming benefits they’re not entitled to, like pretending to be disabled or something, how about your able-bodied minister and his able-bodied protection detail don’t make the announcement while sitting around laughing on camera while parked in a clearly-marked disabled parking bay in an empty carpark! And don’t then let him say he wasn’t near the car himself when half the workers at the place have taken pictures of him in the car with their mobile phones! He’s not the scarlett pimpernel, he’s the chancellor of the exchequer, he should probably assume that now and then people might notice him!? [Either that or he hasn't caught up to the invention of the camera, yet.]

How difficult are these things to keep clear? What sort of brainless, thoughtless buffoon, would… oh, I see. The sort who’re running the country. The sort of Tory MP, the sort of Tory MP, who can actually make grown, sane, non-hallucinating drug-free consenting adults look at Boris Bloody Johnson and see him as the more reliable and dependable alternative….

Seriously, these days, since the last few years of Blair really, politics in this country has been less a clash of ideas or a strategical conflict and more a waiting game to see which set of baggy-trousered drunken circus clowns can fall into the most blacmange the fastest. It’s like watching a tennis tournament where every game is a bye and it ends up being won by the one one-legged whiff-whaff-playing street begger who actually turned up…

 

 

….aaaaaanyway, that’s my quota of nation-pity for the day too. Sorry about the tangent, but it least it made ME feel a little better…

Mort, by Terry Pratchett

The Colour of Magic was the author having fun and happening to strike gold; The Light Fantastic was an only partly succesful attempt to recapture that winning formula; Equal Rites was a mostly succesful but still flawed attempt to tell a different type of story in a similar setting; Mort is where Discworld is really born.

Mort takes a lot from Equal Rites, most importantly the central revelation that Discworld out to be a series of books about real people in a pastiche fantasy world, not just a pastiche of fantasy. In this case, the real people don’t live in Bad Ass, but on another side of the Ramtops, in the Octarine Grass Country, but that doesn’t make too much difference. The novel’s central character, Mort, occupies a similar niche to Esk in the previous novel: a strange, overly-intelligent child is born to a rural farming family, and has no place among them, but is called to power and purpose in an entirely different setting. Mort isn’t exactly Esk: he’s gangly and daydreamy and bookish, rather than concentrated and practical – in fact, he’s essentially a non-idiot-savant non-wizard version of Simon, Esk’s counterpart in the preceding novel. And his family isn’t exactly the same as Esk’s – the Octarine Grass Country is more southern, more prosaic, than the wild mountain northernness of Bad Ass. [Both setting and character are perhaps closer to Pratchett’s own background: born in a small market town outside London, complete with an annual fair, he credits his education to the time he spent in the public library reading everything he could find.*] But the contours of the situation are the same.

(If written today, surely both books would be marketed as ‘YA’).

Anyway, rather than becoming a wizard, this time the misfit hero becomes Death, or at least Death’s apprentice. Needless to say, things go wrong.

Continuing and expanding a structural trait of the two preceding novels, the main body of Mort is split into two plots (actually, by the end, three or four). The main plot follows Mort’s attempts to come to terms with the role of Death, while correcting for and covering up the results of a mistake he made (or possibly chose to make), alongside Death’s adopted daughter, Ysabel, and butler, Albert. This section clearly grew out of the ‘Death’s domain’ section of TLF, in which Death and Ysabel are introduced (in the latter case, with little explanation – was Pratchett already planning Mort, or was she a random loose end he later decided to do something with?). The counterplot is a lighter-hearted affair in which Death goes on holiday to find out what’s so great about life, ultimately ending up in Ankh-Morpork. At first glance, this seems like comic relief, although in many ways it’s the real core of the novel: it’s through this establishment of Death, not only Death as a character but what it must mean to be Death (he’s never invited to parties, for a start), that the main storyline gets its depth. Pratchett does a good job of conveying that ‘Death’s apprentice’ is more than a joke, more than having a strange employer – as he often does in his best work, he takes a whimsical concept and fleshes it out into something powerful and dark.

On another level, it may be worth mentioning that Death’s time in Ankh-Morpork is vital for another reason: to continue Discworld’s meditation on the difference between London and the rest of the UK. Well, OK, more universally on the difference between town and country, but as both Pratchett and I have grown up in the shadow of the Smoke, it’s hard for me to see it outside of that context (perpetuating, of course, the traditional British obsession with role and strangeness of London – Equal Rites in particular can be seen in light of the rich literature of bright northerners coming south to seek their fortune). In Mort, Ankh-Morpork is even symbolised by a carbuncle, much as London is known as the Great Wen. In any case, in TCOM, Ankh-Morpork was only one fantastical place among many, but both TLF and ER placed the rural/urban distinction at their hearts (in the former case, through Rincewind’s homesick citydweller; in the latter, through Esk and Granny as naïve country women encountering the city for the first time). In Mort, the contrast is less explicit, as the characters largely do not overlap, but nonetheless the powerful big-city light is being shone on the small and trivial world both of Mort’s home and of the petty politics of the Sto Plains, while the honesty and simplicity of the rural setting is being used to accentuate the decadence of the city.

Hmm. OK, I’ll admit: I’m finding it hard to right about this one. You’ve probably noticed. There’s a very clear reason why it’s hard to say much about this book: there’s almost nothing wrong with it. It’s not really deep enough to go on about its themes, but it’s just too damn good to explain its flaws at length.

It isn’t perfect exactly. The two plotlines, while working well together, do feel a bit disconnected. The overall plot still feels a bit rushed and not entirely coherent – although it’s considerably better in that respect than any of the previous books. [I think ER hit a higher level in the early sections, but Mort has fewer flaws]. It has considerable pathos; it has excitement (and a duel! and an elephant!); it has a lot of humour. It’s the funniest Discworld so far, with a good mix of jokes, from the broad to the sophisticated. It’s clearly a major milestone in solidifying the nature of the Disc and setting the benchmark for future novels. Some fourth-wall-breaking persists, and I didn’t entirely appreciate it, but it is better handled than before, and not a major problem.

Frankly, the only serious defect of this book is that it’s just too short.

Oh, and I should also add: it’s full of sex. I mean seriously full. In Equal Rites Pratchett quite straightforwardly set out to talk about sex (in both senses of the word) and Mort continues in the same vein. It’s a little awkward really. In many ways, this is a book it would be great to read to, or with, a child – except that you literally cannot go three pages in any direction without a nod, a wink, an innuendo, a risque diversion, or a barefaced “gurgle of passion” off in the bushes. As an adult, it just makes it more fun to read – Pratchett is one of the few authors who can walk the line between seeming prudish and seeming lecherous, and his embrace of sexuality is just one part of his embrace of life in all its glories – and most children wouldn’t notice a lot of it and would shrug past the rest (I know I did when I first read it), but boy would I have a red face trying to read this to someone under the age of majority…

Anyway. Short version. Very good book. Still a bit shallow and a little wobbly around the edges. But not only a good omen for his later books, but also a reminder that early Pratchett wasn’t just there to grow up into later Pratchett. If he’d stopped writing at this point, Mort wouldn’t be a bad magnum opus for an author to have.

But, of course, he didn’t…

Scores!

Adrenaline: 4/5. I found this gripping! Could easily have been 5/5, except that honestly the exciting part is only a small portion of the whole.

Emotion: 3/5. Not exactly grabbed by the neck and shaken, but there’s no denying there’s pathos to it. And continues ER’s trend toward deeper characters – nobody here stands out to the same extent as Granny, but there’s a decent ensemble cast.

Thought: 3/5. Not a work of high philosophy, but also not afraid to at least look at some serious questions of life, death, and everything in between.

Beauty: 3/5. May be being harsh, because this is a book with a lot of great lines, and a lot of great images too. On the other hand, it still feels a bit raw and ungainly here and there.

Craft: 4/5. Between a well-structured climax, plot twists, and a lot of great humour, this is definitely a notably well-put-together book. Not perfect yet, but progressing.

Endearingness: 4/5. Again, no one character stands out, and I didn’t fall in love with anyone or anything. However, it was fun, funny, moving and clever, I’ve read it a bunch of times and I’m going to read it a bunch of times more.

Originality: 4/5. It’s a strange book. A lot of the individual elements seem cliché, but they’re handled in surprising and original ways. It’s not particularly predictable, and features a lot of things that would never have occurred to most authors.

Overall: 5/7. Good. The same score as Equal Rites – but ER is down at the more-than-just-not-bad end, and Mort, I think, is up at the almost-very-good-indeed part of the spectrum. It’s the best Discworld so far (and frankly I’m a bit embarrassed about giving it such a brief and incoherent review, so sorry about that…). But on to the next!

[Actually, the next is Sourcery, which to be honest I’m looking forward to mostly as a stepping stone to Wyrd Sisters. Then again, I’ve been pleasantly surprised before when revisiting books I last read a decade and a half ago]

*Fun coincidence: he was born in Beaconsfield, the same town where his stylistic predecessor GK Chesterton is burried.

P.S. Krull!

Things I’ve Seen on TV (3): Page Eight, Veronica Mars, Angel, Farscape, Boston Legal, Breaking Bad

Hi. Some time has passed, so here’s another roundup of some of the things I’ve seen on TV. [Or, more often, on DVD, but never mind].

I just give them a quick and simple score out of 4: 1 for rubbish, 2 for not-rubbish-but-you-have-to-like-the-premise/genre/cast/etc, 3 for things I would recommend to people even if they didn’t like the genre much because these things are really good, and 4 for things that are flat-out brilliant and everybody ought to watch.

 

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PAGE EIGHT

This one’s slipping from my mind a bit, so I’ll just get something down while I still can.

Page Eight is a one-off (so far, the writer has suggested a possible series, don’t know if that’s happening) conspiracy thriller starring Bill Nighy. Well, ‘conspiracy’ is pushing it, and ‘thriller’ is definitely pushing it, but it certainly does have Bill Nighy in it.

So, a thriller. Only, the most thrilling thing is one character going for a stroll. Not joking. There’s one chase scene, and the person being chased is walking slowly, without any signs of panic or alarm. That’s the peak it hits of adrenaline-bursting thrills.

And yet… it’s actually very good. It’s written and directed by David Hare. Yeah, that’s the one, the guy with a BAFTA, an Olivier, a Golden Bear, two Oscar nominations and a heap of other stuff. Maybe that’s why it’s good.

All through the film (film? episode? whatever), it felt like the writer was setting out to write it properly. There’s nothing I like more than a writer who gives a shit. As a result of this care and attention, it’s – despite the lack of action – genuinely gripping. It’s also a little bit moving, a little bit funny, and keeps the mind happily active trying to work out what’s coming next.

Michael Gambon is here, which is always good, though neither he nor, frankly, Rachel Weisz has much to do, vis a vis the acting stakes. Ralph Fiennes has a slightly tougher, but very brief, role as an intimidating, quite unpleasant-seeming Prime Minister. In fact, the whole cast is great, but my special mention would go to Alice Krige as Gambon’s current, and Nighy’s former, wife. However, the heart and soul of this film is the millimetre-perfect performance of Nighy, who brings a bone-weary but indomitable integrity to the character of Johnny Worricker – once a bad husband, still perhaps a bad father, long-serving MI5 officer, loyal friend, and, hopefully, a good man. Now lumbered with the responsibility of potentially explosive intelligence about what his own side knew and when, and desparately in need of someone he can trust.

I hope he does return for a full series. As with many conspiracy thrillers, the secret here is not really all that exciting, but Hare and Nighy navigate the course so proficiently that it doesn’t really matter. Only the film’s relatively low-key style and its inevitably short length prevent this from being a masterpiece. Give this team the time and space to craft an entire series, rather than just a glorified pilot, and who knows how good it could be.

[Or bad, of course – not every great pilot turns into a great series. Maybe Hare can’t find enough material to keep his characters going. Maybe that quiet patience will fail to rise to a crescendo and instead will turn into a dull, monotonous drone. Maybe. After all, there’s nothing earth-shattering about the plot, or the characters, all of which are perfectly ordinary and familiar. But these characters deserve a chance to plead their case on a bigger canvass. The sheer and unusual competence of both the creator and the actors demands it.]

Verdict: 3/4. Highly promising, if it gets made into a series. Otherwise, a non-essential but nonetheless thoroughly rewarding 99 minutes of class.

 

 

VERONICA MARS

Oh good. An American high school. I’ve not seen one of those on TV before! And what’s this I hear? A socially outcast teenage girl (played by a beautiful woman in her twenties) kicks the ass not only of bullies, but also of all sorts of local hoodlums, scoundrels, philanderers, and even murderers? Through a combination of precocious intelligence, superpowers, and mordant sass? Yup, this is a real original here.

OK, she doesn’t have superpowers, technically. What she has are the con-man skills and investigatory connexions and tech that come with being the precocious daughter of a private investigator (and former local sherriff). Let’s face it, in the context of high school, those may as well be superpowers.

Now, from that intro, you might expect that this isn’t something I like. I might have expected that too; indeed, I did expect that, which is why I never watched it until now, despite so many people saying it was good. I mean, true, I do have an embarrassing weak spot for teenage angst soap stories – but it’s almost always against my better judgement. Yes, I’ve watched almost all of Smallville – but I still thought it was almost entirely shit.

But Veronica Mars is not shit. It’s a very long way from being shit. In fact, and I do know that Buffy fans will disagree and with some cause… I think this is the best show ever made of its genre.

Why should you care about that if you’re not inherently in to American high schools as a setting? Well, actually there are a lot of reasons why people should watch Veronica Mars. [And boy, I’ve looked at the viewing figures, and if you persuade yourself and your dog to watch it you’ll double the audience it originally had. If a minor network showed six straight hours of a drunk man vomiting, it would get better ratings than Veronica Mars. Its viewing figures would have been good, if it had been a complicated, obscure work of high-art auteurism on a subscription channel – way more watched than Luck, Treme, or The Wire – but for a pop culture high school drama on a major network, they were abysmal. So, why should anyone buck those figures and watch it? Well…]

First off: didn’t you hear? It’s a beautiful, intelligent social outcast girl kicking ass. Of course it’s a great show.

Or is that just me?

Second – the darkness. Let’s recap the initial premise: Veronica Mars used to be popular. She’s living in a fabulously wealthy town, and her family has never been rich, but her father was the Sherriff, so that gave her sort of honorary rich-kid status. Her best friend was Lily Kane, daughter of the fabulously wealthy tech-baron Kane family, and her boyfriend was Lily’s brother, the moody-but-likeable Duncan. Then, one day, Duncan completely stops speaking to her, for no obvious reason. Oh dear. More importantly, soon afterward, Lily is brutally murdered. Oh dear oh dear. Veronica’s father becomes convinced Lily’s father is the killer, becomes obsessed with bringing him down – the people of the town don’t buy it, and vote him out of office. He becomes a national disgrace, a laughingstock, with the last of his credibility destroyed when ‘the real killer’ is found. He’s forced to become a private detective to pay the bills. His wife, Veronica’s mother, is hit badly by her husband’s demotion and humiliation; she wants the family to leave town, but he’s too proud; she takes to drink, and eventually runs off, leaving her husband and daughter no idea of where she might be. Veronica becomes outcast from her circle of rich friends – rich boyfriend has left her, rich best friend is dead, powerful father has been thrown down, of course she’s not popular anymore – but tries to force her way back in, gate-crashing a former friend’s party. She ends up drunk, drugged, humiliated, and raped at least once, waking up the next morning with no idea who raped her (or anything about the rest of the evening) but the certainty that it happened. The show starts a while later (it feels like quite a while, although it may only be six months officially, I’m not sure); Veronica has given up on popularity. Instead, she’s working for her father, ignoring the vile things people say behind her back, taking any opportunities she finds for little moments of vengeance against those who have wronged her, and now and then fighting for justice.

But she doesn’t believe the incompetent police have caught the true murderer of her best friend, and she still doesn’t know who raped her.

So, like I say, it’s dark. It has a bubbly, cheerful, exuberant high school side, in which Veronica takes on a case of the week (sometimes to fight on the side of righteousness, more often for cash) and uses her sleuthing skills to right wrongs and expose ill-doing and protect the weak and innocent among her classmates, and this might almost be too chirpy and sweet, if you overlooked the old-before-her-time wisecracking, complete social isolation, and borderline sociopathy (she’s a nice girl, honestly, but her ‘get tough, get even’ approach makes her ruthless and vindictive toward those she dislikes, which seems to be most people). But then there’s the dark side, the season-long arc investigating those two tragic crimes. It’s not a show that wallows in darkness, or that becomes morbid, but it’s not afraid to be unpleasant, or depressing, or creepy. It doesn’t let this fantasy high school world become detached in a bubble away from reality – Veronica may be a child, but she’s got serious, adult concerns. And while, as I say, most of the show is light enough to be a fun watch, it has the confidence to go to the dark places when they’re justified, which makes it a far more powerful experience.

Third – the writing. The writing is fun… more than that, it’s actually funny, with frequent laugh-out-loud moments (particularly in the second season). It’s not the greatest comedy material ever, sure, but it’s witty, it’s smart, it’s fast… but at the same time, it’s able to bring in pathos and depth as well. A good parallel might be The West Wing – this isn’t written in the same style as Sorkin exactly, but it shares that duality of humour and real character. And in terms of the larger scale, the plotting of the cases of the week is as original and unpredictable as can be expected from the constrained format (there aren’t a lot of possible plots with a small cast in a high school), while the arcs are superbly plotted whodunnits which rack up the tension and keep the viewer guessing. The biggest problem is that there is sometimes a lack of emotional continuity – Veronica will make a big discovery one episode, only to put it on the back burner for a bit while the show does a more self-contained episode, and then pick the big plot up again the week after, which doesn’t feel entirely realistic.

Fourth – the acting. Kristen Bell, particularly in the first season, is outstanding. It’s a great role for an actress, because it lets her character act – and it turns out that Bell has the voice, mannerisms, and even face of a chameleon (she’s beautiful, but is able to be beautiful in different ways – there are shots of her in this that strongly remind me of, to the point of sisterhood with, five or six different actresses from other shows who I would never before have said looked remotely alike). There are little vignettes of Veronica, slipping into different accents, personalities, appearances, to fool her mark, that are just a delight to watch in their effortless ease. There are also some strong performances in the background – particularly Jason Dohring managing to make ‘troubled bad boy rich kid’ a genuinely interesting role, and Enrico Colantoni as Veronica’s father, creating an acheingly wonderful (though possibly not healthy) parent-child relationship.

But there are problems – and I don’t just mean the token black sidekick, who manages to evolve out of the role of token black sidekick only by instead becoming a sidekick who is also frankly a git. No, the biggest problem is that the first season is too good, wraps everything up so brilliantly, reaching back throughout the season to bring in things that looked like throwaway moments at the time, culminating in a really great season finale… it leaves the show with nowhere to go but down. With the two big season arcs of the first year resolved – or, at least, as resolved as it appears feasible for them to be – I worried that the second season would either have to retreat to the banality of high school permanently, or else introduce an unrealistic second-season ‘big bad’ plotline. The show worked so well in the first year in part because it was realistic – heightened realism, to be sure, but fundamentally a fantasy version of life in the real world. Bringing in an equally major plotline out of the blue in the second season would strain credulity just too far, and lack the emotional impact of the initial arc.

But that’s what they did, and to their credit they did a good job of it. It was unrealistic both in its existence and in its near-cartoonish excesses, and it strained credulity, and I never cared as much about it as I ‘should’ have done, or as I’d cared about the first season arc… but it wasn’t egregiously awful, and the quality of the show as a whole let me see past it. I didn’t mind so much that the big plot didn’t seem as skillful when the scene-to-scene writing had if anything improved.

The trend continued, however, in the third season. This time, they knew they couldn’t have a third massively epic storyline, so they went for a series of smaller arcs, culminating with a hurried and underwhelming silly little damp squib of a series finale. The succession of quite-major-but-not-that-major plots frankly feels just as incredible, in the bad sense of the word, as a single larger arc would have done, and lacks the emotional investment.

The bigger problem with the third season, however, is the character. Over the course of the three years, the character of Veronica gradually evolves from a sassy outsider with an individual spirit into a teen-by-numbers bitchy robot who isn’t overly likeable and, more importantly, isn’t particularly interesting. It feels as though over time they forgot that the character wasn’t meant to be an identikit blonde cheerleader, and they gradually drifted in that direction throughout the series (albeit without ever quite getting there, to be fair to them). Coupled with the sidelining of some characters and the annoyance of others (including the token sidekick (side-rant: surely not all black teenagers in America have as their only hobbies ‘talking in mock jive for self-effacing humorous effect’, ‘playing basketball’, ‘doing what they’re told by white people’, and ‘being 100% only interested in black girls so that they’re never ever seen as in danger of a relationship with the white heroine and so the question never has to be addressed in even a single line’? Oh, please…)), it makes the third season a lot less enjoyable to watch. A simple metric of Veronica’s shift is her appearance – her hair gets longer and blonder and more hollywoody, and her face becomes more painted over with makeup as the series progresses, epitomising the levelling down of her personality.

Finally, there are a couple of points where the writers didn’t bite the bullet. There’s one point in the first season where they back away from what could have been a really interesting sub-plot implication (which wouldn’t have interfered with their main plot) because it was a bit too radical an idea (though making perfect sense within the show). More importantly there’s another point toward the end of the second season that suggests a brave but exciting direction for the show in the third season, that would really have given the third season some purpose… but they back down from following it up. There are, more minorly, a few other times where they refuse to allow change, probably to keep the same actors in the same roles even when the role has been played out.

These reservations, however, are relatively minor. It’s true that Veronica Mars wasn’t the greatest show on TV, and you need quite a tolerance for teenagers and saccherine silliness to watch it at all. But at heart this was, at least at first, a seriously good TV show. It took a setting that is beyond familiar, that is hard to make work, and it made absolutely the most of it – a show that in other hands would have been terrible and indistinguishable turned out funny, tense, imaginative, well-crafted, dark, gripping, and touching. More people should have watched it.

Verdict:

Season One: 3*/4. I haven’t given a ‘star’ before, but I think it applies here: the final episode (and what it reveals) lifts this up from an ordinary ‘quite good’ show, but it’s still not a brilliant must-watch show. So, 3*.

Season Two: 3/4. Not quite as good, lacks that kick of excellence, but still a better show than most of TV and worth recommending to people.

Season Three: 2/4. If you’ve watched the first two seasons, you may as well watch this. It’s a broadly enjoyable and clever show still – just not what it had been, and maybe not all that great anymore.

 

 

 

FARSCAPE

This could easily have been terrible; it wasn’t. Alternatively, it could have been great; but it wasn’t.

It’s a hard one to assess. Low budget SF with puppets playing heavily on the culture-clash humour inherent in its scenario of a human astronaut lost in alien space trying to get home, not understanding the creatures around him… such a razor-fine edge to walk. It frequently doesn’t manage it. Much of the writing and acting are just far too far over the top into self-parody; the overall narrative direction suffers from the late-nineties time period, as this is a show that wants to have season long arcs but is still anchored to an episodic adventure-of-the-week preconception; character development relies too much on the viewer’s interpolation of the meaning of the general brusqueness and tightlippedness, and seems to sway back and forth without clear purposeful drive. The gimmick, if you will – that these are characters thrown together by convenience who don’t like each other very much – is rarely lived up to. It’s sometimes dull, and often silly, and sometimes there are great big head-slapping plot-holes that you just wish they’d found a way around because as it is they’re just painful to watch.

But.

There are times when you can see what they wanted this to be. Namely: good. I know that sounds stupidly simplistic, but I think I’ve explained before that ‘being good’ seems to be a category that can be applied to almost any concept, simply by really trying and not being lazy. A good example of that here is a monster-of-the-week episode like “Born to be Wild”. Look at a teaser synopsis, it looks familiar. As you’re watching it, you feel it’s familiar. But what in most shows would have been a massively predictable throwaway formula is teased out, made unpredictable, given a grey moral dimension… when it’s good, what Farscape does is apply a non-lazy writing effort to its stories, and back that up with moral uneasiness, and a disconcerting weirdness – a sense that the universe is a strange and possibly unpleasant place, and that the protagonists are very small and helpless. It’s a great antidote to something like Star Trek: Voyager – here, things aren’t clear and obvious, the future isn’t clean and polished, and it’s a lot less clear that the heroes will win in the end.

When it’s good, it’s very good. Sometimes, it’s almost brilliant.

But then sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the characterisation seems off, the personality quirks are just irritating, the plot arcs lack direction, and the plot-of-the-weak episodes are disposable. And, unfortunately, it is still basically some kind-of-OK actors running around some cardboard sets, with a puppet.

If you can maintain your suspension of disbelief, and are willing to go with the rough episodes, and in particular to get into it in the first place, Farscape seems like a rewarding show – it can be fun, funny, disconcerting and dark, and clever too. If you’ve been spoiled by better television (in particular the shows that have come out since Farscape was around that have taken similar paths), or if you’re not certain about SF in the first place, you may not feel like making the investment.

So far, I’ve only watched the first two seasons, and it does seem to be getting better, so I’m sure I’ll get around to finishing it off. And who knows, maybe it’ll turn out a classic in the end. So far, it feels like an entertaining footnote.

Verdict:

Season One: 2/4

Season Two: 2/4

Other Seasons: Not Yet Seen.

 

 

 

ANGEL

I should have written this up months ago, but I didn’t get around to it, so it’ll just be a few notes.

Angel is the even more brooding, even more angsty spin-off from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like Buffy, it at first adopts a sort of ‘monster-of-the-week’ formula, before later developing more complicated story arcs. Like Buffy, it is fond of overly-obvious analogous ‘Moral of the Week’ stories too, in which ordinary life things are transparently transliterated into supernatural-monster equivalents. [The ‘be aware of the dangers of date rape’ episode was just groan-inducing]. Like Buffy, it often involves excessive melodrama, and sets that are often not wholly convincing, along with a dodgy mythology and far too many coincidences, not to mention too many plot-by-rote episodes.

But like Buffy, there’s something here that transcends its limitations. The key here, I think, is the ambition of the writers, who are never happy settling with what they’ve got. Each season is different from the last, and there is a real sense of (albeit limited) character progression. The writers aren’t afraid to move characters out of their rut, and they aren’t afraid of one-upping the expectations the audience might form, or of doing something totally unexpected.

Central to this are the two supporting characters of Cordelia and Wesley, both borrowed from Buffy – and possibly the two least promising candidates for character growth in TV history. Both, at first, are played primarily for laughs, yet as the series progresses both show and develop new depths, becoming both more believable and more compelling as characters. Cordelia’s growing groundedness and resignation – her growth from airheaded highschool bitchqueen to (somewhat) wise and sympathetic matriarch of the group – and Wesley’s simultaneously growing competence and darkness, his development from a clumsy public school boy playing at ‘rogue demon hunter’ into a genuine (smart, brave, ruthless, sometimes genuinely frightening) rogue demon hunter, provide the heart and soul of the show. Sometimes, unfortunately, to the detriment of the alleged main character, Angel, who remains mostly static and uninteresting throughout. It doesn’t help that David Boreanaz, while perfectly tolerable in his own right, turns out not to have anything like the acting skill or charisma of Alexis Denisoff or Charisma Carpenter (he’s actually a lot better playing Evil Angel than Angel himself, which I guess is why the writers end up far too happy to find bad excuses to show us Evil Angel).

In some ways, this feels like a more succesful version of Farscape, despite the completely different plots and settings – it feels like it shares that show’s ambitions regarding inter-character conflict, character growth and interesting plot arcs, but does it all significantly better.

As I say above, the different seasons are all very different from one another (and note that I haven’t seen the final fifth season yet, though it’s set up to be the most ‘different’ of them all), so it’s worth commenting on the individual seasons.

Season One is a spinnoff of Buffy: it takes the style and setting and concerns of Buffy, gives us a (mostly) new cast of characters and location, and shows us how these things can work with a more grown-up, urban, noirish approach. It’s mostly monster-of-the-week – some fun, some frightening, but some plain silly. The writers don’t seem to have been certain what they wanted, or else to have changed their minds or had their minds changed, because the first and second halves of the season could almost be different seasons in themselves. Quality is variable – it’s mostly a pretty entertaining, somewhat silly show. Particularly noteworthy is the two-parter late on revolving around the character of Faith: as always, Faith is a paradox, in that in the sitting-around-bantering portions of the show she seems obnoxious, badly written, and frankly badly acted… only to transform once the action and the drama get going. Faith being sincere is brilliant – sympathetic yet frightening, well written, fantastically acted. So every time she appears on screen in Buffy or Angel I start out by groaning, hoping for the episode to be over soon – only to be transfixed by the end. There are two distinct sides to the character, the casual/cool and the intense/broken – and both the writers and the actress are a lot better at one than at the other. Fortunately, the one they’re good at is the one that matters. This two-parter is a direct sequel to the Faith two-parter in the fourth season of Buffy, and like that double feature it’s a lot better than I expected it to be.

Season Two is… angsty. Really, really angsty. The show throws away the monster-of-the-week (well, partly) and concentrates on a season-long arc, albeit a fairly meandering one, that mostly serves to have Angel looking anguished and brooding a lot. There’s no doubt that it’s a big step up from the quality of the first season, and a big step into darkness as well, but I found it hamstrung by its seriousness and its determination to be grimdark. Slaughter, syphillis and suicide – not the most enjoyable viewing, and I didn’t feel it had the gravitas to deserve this darkness (although of course, this being a spin-off of Buffy, there’s always plenty of jet black comedy among the grimness). However, massive kudos must go to the dimension-hopping Pylea arc, in which the writers through the established setting to the winds and take their group of hardened LA demon-hunter detectives and put them into a stereotypical-but-weirder mediaeval fantasy setting. The result is, if the episodes are viewed in one go, arguably one of the best fantasy films ever, and a great mix of pathos and absurdist comedy.

Season Three is where it all works. The content remains dark, but with less brooding and more action; the plot doesn’t meander, but instead rockets along, with multiple significant twists. The supporting characters get most of their development. The antagonists become more interesting. Everything goes completely out of control. In a way I wish it had ended here, because by the ending of season three the show is in an astonishing bleak place – without exaggerating, this could have made the darkest and most depressing season finale in history.

Instead, the show came back for a fourth season, and things almost immediately didn’t seem right – you know you’re in trouble when you have two “amnesia” episodes in a row, and the lampshading “it feels like we’re in a melodramatic supernatural soap opera” comments didn’t really help in that regard. It also doesn’t help when a character from Buffy pops by and casually one-ups the entire show, pointing out how much bigger and more powerful and more important and ‘darker’ Buffy has become (largely because Buffy is more cartoonish and characters can ‘go to the dark side’ with a lot less groundwork being laid, and a lot fewer consequences).

On the other hand, the fourth season does have its virtues – the greatest of which is boldness. My word it’s bold. In terms of stakes and consequences it ends up far bigger than anything else ever on either Angel or Buffy – and that’s before we get halfway through the season. The plot twists and turns like a twisty turny thing, without a moment’s rest – including one particularly fan-baiting revelation. But in the end, the boldness is the undoing of it too. It’s too big, too fast, too loud – it sacrifices a lot of the wit and quiet character of the earlier seasons, and ended up just giving me whiplash. It was a fun ride, but it won’t stay with me as long as the more deliberate pace of Season Three. And with the astonishing plot twist in the final episode, I put down the series, too tired of it to continue… though I’ve no doubt I’ll be back before long to find out just how they try to make the new conditions make some sort of sense.

In the final analysis, then, what we have in Angel is a show full of paradox. It’s a steadfastly genre show, but it also brings a popularist approach, while at the same time daring to go beyond the conventional to try to do something noteworthy and unique. It doesn’t always succeed, and sometimes it’s too grimdark and angsty for its own good. For the most part, however, it’s  a fun show with plenty of action, a whole heap of witty badinage and genuinely funny ironic humour, and a lot of beating people up. And it times, it goes beyond that to be a compelling drama with interesting characters and a challenging plot.

Verdict:

Seasons 1-2: 2/4

Season 3: 3/4

Season 4: 2/4

 

BOSTON LEGAL

A brief update: I’ve now seen Season Two. I don’t have much to say – it’s much the same as Season One, but a bit better.

Season Two: 2/4

 

BREAKING BAD

I’ve now seen the fourth season. I think this is a big step up from the first three: it seems to have more of a sense of direction, and more tension throughout. Cranston’s acting is as superb as ever, but here the surrounding characters are given a lot more to do, and the actors (and actresses) all more than live up to the heavier demands placed on them: although Cranston’s charisma and the centrality of his character still loom over the whole of the show, at the practical level this has become much more of an ensemble work. Dialogue and directing have reached new heights also. On the other hand, it’s still not perfect. The biggest problem is that, while the plot arc seems more solid this season, Walter still doesn’t have the clear character progression he needs. I suppose it’s realistic that his character should waver a little, moving forward one episode only to regress the next, but the bigger problem I have is that I always thought he was capable of what he ends up doing. And indeed he showed himself capable of quite a lot back in the first season. So (except perhaps in the final episode or two) I didn’t get the feeling that Walter had ever stepped up to a new level of bad, but only that he got more brazen about it. He broke bad before the show began, or at least some time in the first season. Then again, perhaps the real problem is our inability to see inside Walter’s skull – he talks so little about what he’s really feeling, or his motivations, and when he does there’s always an ulterior dimension to consider. We rarely get to see what he’s going through, which makes the show considerably less engaging: it lacks an emotional core. It doesn’t have a single really likeable character in it.  And because  we can’t see what Walter’s thinking, it makes it seems like his progressions and regressions – the whole of his behaviour – is governed primarily by the demands of the plot.  Worst of all is his ridiculous stupidity. Walter is clearly an extremely intelligent man, yet from time to time he does really stupid things, and although it’s true that this is to some extent a result of his established traits of vast pride and a short temper it still largely seems as though these lapses are driven by what the writer’s think will make their job easier. And it’s not just Walter. Everyone’s super-smart in Breaking Bad… except for when they’re not. All because of the plot.

Fortunately, it’s a really good plot. And good writing, and great directing, and great acting. So the odd little plot-hole or vagary of character doesn’t sink the ship. It’s still really, really good. It’s just that a couple of little issues prevent it, in my opinion, from being truly brilliant.

[Oh, and sometimes they beat the audience over the head with things, and I still feel that sometimes they don’t quite judge the tone quite right, with the levity undercutting some of the darkness they try to build up, and the more cartoonish elements undermining the gritty realistic bits]

Season Four: 3*/4

A Musical Project

I have a resolution for the year. Well, hopefully less than the year, but you know how bad I am with punctuality.

Some of you may be aware that I have the pop culture awareness of a… some amusingly unaware thing I can’t be bothered to think of right now because it’s a cliched type of punchline anyway. One of those things. I generally ignore everything going on in the world of ‘what’s going on’, except for the occasional film or TV show. ["Wreck-it Ralph" - surprisingly, really good!]

In particular, I have no knowledge of pop music. And I’m using ‘pop music’ in its widest misuse there. All that stuff that people have been listening to since the 1950s – that stuff, I know nothing about it. Sure, friends and family have induced me to listen to this album or that over the years, and some things have come through by pure osmosis, but for the most part I am utterly ignorant.

I’ve decided to do something about this. And because I’m… well, who I am… I’m doing it in an overly organised, logical, ambitious, and failure-prone way. I have made: A List.

This list has several sources. It includes every end-of-year Billboard #1 hit, plus a bunch of their all-time hits where they didn’t make #1 for a year (surprisingly often). It includes every Grammy Award-winning song. It includes the best-selling songs ever, and songs from the best-selling albums ever. And pop chart toppers and all-time sales toppers from the UK, because I’m from the UK and I’d rather learn about our culture than purely about US stuff. And critically-acclaimed songs drawn from lists by Rolling Stone and NME magazines, and Brit Award winners. In fact, in total, The List is drawn from 15 different lists.

What’s the point of that? Well I can’t just go out and pick the songs myself, because I don’t know about them. And I don’t want to ask one person, because then I’d be hostage to that person’s taste and time and place. So I’ve tried to get more of a level of objectivity. Songs are on my list because they were very popular – with the public, or with critics, or with whoever it is gives out awards.

In total, that makes for approximately 574 songs for me to listen to (I say approximately because there might be duplicates I haven’t spotted), from “1999″ (Prince, 1982) through to “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” (Johnny Mercer, 1946). Or, seen another way, from “Saint James Infirmary” (Louis Armstrong, 1928), through to… well, depends how you count, but probably “We Are Young” (Fun featuring Janelle Monáe, 2011 but won the 2013 Grammy).

Don’t worry, I’m not going to update you with each one, though I may give a more general progress report now and then. So far, I’ve listened to 86 songs. I’m not ranking them exactly, but I am jotting down some numerical scores that will allow me to review the best and worst later, and so far my favourite has probably been one of “American Pie”, “All Along the Watchtower”, “Bittersweet Symphony” or “Come As You Are”. However, I knew all those before, which is a bit unfair – the best new discovery for me has probably been “Common People”, with “Blue Monday”, “Bat out of Hell”, and “A Day In the Life” also up there.

On the other hand, the competition for the song I’ve hated the most has been very hot indeed. “Born to Run”, “Bad Day”, “Apologize”, and “Careless Whisper” are all lining up behind Shania Twain’s “Any Man of Mine” and Take That’s “Back for Good”… but something tells me that in the end the title might just go to Willie Nelson’s rendition of “Always on My Mind”, which has to work really hard to overcome the handicap of actually having a pretty good tune, yet somehow, between Nelson’s toneless soulless tempoless and rasping singing and the godawfully cliche backing vocals and over-production, manages to turn that good tune into the vehicle for one of the most repellant musical performances I’ve ever encountered. Rarely have I so earnestly hoped for a song to end… but it doesn’t. And doesn’t. And doesn’t.

And nor does this project! 86 down, 400-and-however-many to go!

Yeah, I’ve not been posting, have I?

And I was doing so well a few months ago! I guess it kind of comes and goes for me.

I’m sorry the Silmarillion project just stopped in its tracks so suddenly. I haven’t abandoned the idea (I’ve got the next post mostly written), but clearly I’m not doing it all at once now.

I should have two new book reviews up fairly soon – one up as soon as I’ve written it, the other one I’ve still got a hundred pages or so to read. I’ll also finally get the next tranche of TV show reviews up in short order.

In other news: the government continues to be insane about house prices. Even insaner, even. Cutting spending for the poor in order to give more money to rich people in a massive subsidy? The criticism that the scheme will just be a way of subsidising second homes seems to be missing the point, which is that if you subsidise 25% of the asking price for every house, the asking price for houses will simply increase – all it accomplishes is a transfer of money from taxpayers to housebuilders. I suppose the theory is that by increasing the profit they make on each house they incentivise housebuilding. That assumes, however, that a) there’s enough demand for more houses, b) planners actually allow more housebuilding, and c) that the suppliers of labour and materials to housebuilders don’t just increase their prices to match the increased demand from the housebuilders (and from the public at large, who will feel wealthier due to the house price inflation). Surely the concept of ‘inflation’ isn’t too hard to understand? Giving everybody in the country more money doesn’t make everyone richer! In fact, it makes poor people poorer in this case, because the subsidy is a percentage of house price, so the rich get more than the poor. In order to do this, cuts in spending elsewhere have to be made, further harming the economy (are world economies now being run by orders of zealous flagellants? It seems that people are so obsessed with saving money and avoiding debt that they’re willing to spend a lot of money and go into a lot of debt to meet these targets. It’s like a man who owes money and decides to pay it back by quitting his job because the rail fares are too high – if he (and we) aren’t making money, we’ll never pay debt back, no matter how much we ‘save’. That’s not to mention that in the case of the UK in particular we have historically high levels of demand for our debt, to the extent that we’re virtually being paid to borrow money. And for long terms! A decade from now, when every penny we borrow costs vastly more than it does today, we’ll be cursing the lunatic strategy of ‘paying off’ debt when interest is low and taking it out again when the interest returns to being high…). Anyway, in the long run, it still supports a schizophrenic policy attitude toward house prices, whereby more houses must be built to drive down prices to allow higher levels of homeownership, while at the same time house prices must be artificially inflated because if ever house prices actually DID decline we’d all go bust because so much of our ‘wealth’ is the number of zeros gradually accumulating on top of our chimneys. Bah humbug.

In other other news: well, Francis seems to be making a lot of good sounds, in style at least. We’ll have to wait and see on substance. A renewed emphasis on poverty can only be good (for the world and for the church). Some people are worried about his hardline stance on liberty issues… but this is missing the point a bit. The Church has been so hijacked by the last two popes that there was never any chance of sanity prevailing in that department. There are no Martinis anymore. But we don’t need there to be. “Victory” for the liberals with this pope needn’t mean the pope reversing existing policy… but simply not putting sex top of his list of priorities. Not coming down hard on anyone who mildly speculates about slightly adjusting emphasis. Not continuing trying to make his opinions ‘infallible’ through fallacious backdoors like the ridiculous wheeze JPII/Benedict pulled over women’s ordination [Short version: "There's no biblical evidence supporting my position, nor evidence from the history of the church, and lots of people disagree with me. So I can't declare it infallibly. But I can declare that the church has already been teaching it infallibly! And no, that declaration itself isn't infallible... but I have sufficient authority to prohibit all discussion or consideration of the topic, even though my opinion isn't infallible. I'm not infallible, i might be wrong, but you're not allowed to think that I might be wrong. Absolutely agreeing with all my opinions in all matters regardless of the bible or church teaching or what the theologians say is the only way that you can exercise the primacy of your personal conscience!"]. And, most importantly of all, not blacklisting the more speculative candidates for cardinal. Cardinals decide the next pope. If popes were to select cardinals based on merit – on being holy and godly, or just on being good at administration for that matter – rather than for political-ideological reasons, enough liberals could slip through that they could select a more moderate pope next time, and so on.

(Why do I care? Four reasons. First, the positions of the Catholic Church affect the world greatly. Even just a change in emphasis that suggested that giving a fatal disease to your partner was a comparatively greater sin than putting a bit of plastic around your penis could make the world a better place. Second, despite not being religious myself, I’m not overly enamoured of secular materialist consumerism either – religious voices can be powerful counterbalances to popular nihilism, and I’d rather those voices actually be on my side, rather than it being a choice between nihilism and conservativism. Third, I was raised Catholic, and have a residual feeling of loyalty much as many people have toward the local football club where they grew up – I may not actually care too much about them as an organisation, but it’s still not nice to watch them getting thrashed. And, fourth, Catholic theology is one of humanity’s greatest philosophical edifices, and although I have some big problems with its assumptions, and hence with some of its conclusions (mostly in the areas concerning the significance of the genitals), on a great many issues it makes a lot of sense, and more importantly approaches questions in a very admirable way. [There are a lot of militant atheists whose skill with logic would be greatly enhanced by studying thomistic philosophy!]. So I approve of anything that allows sane people to use that theology for positive ends, and disapprove of it being hijacked by ad hoc rationalisations for evil policies.)

In additional news: I’m excited by the kickstarter campaigns for the new PS:T successor game and for the Veronica Mars reunion film (though I’m also a bit worried about that last one and not expecting too much).

Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett

[Part Three of an ongoing 're-reading all the Discworld Novels in chronological order' project]

The first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic was an uneven but sparkling exercise; the second, The Light Fantastic, was a disappointing attempt to recapture the success of the first.

Equal Rites is something very different.

In outline, there are strong similarities. The central character of Rincewind may have been dropped (thankfully – he didn’t have much narrative potential, not without allowing him the sort of growth that Pratchett clearly wasn’t willing to put into him), but in some ways this book seems like a re-write of The Light Fantastic – starting from a mountainous, peculiar wooded area near(ish) the Hub, the main character, an unconventional but strangely powerful wizard (strangely and very precisely powerful in Rincewind’s case, since he only knows one spell – it just happens to be one of the eight spells holding the universe together) treks across the Disc to the magical Unseen University, in legendary Ankh-Morpork, and thwarts the invasion of Things from the Dungeon Dimensions.

What’s different here is the tone. This feels completely different from the first two Discworld books – I’d suggest that this is where Discworld proper begins. There are still holdovers from the first two installments that mark this as clearly an early-era Discworld novel – there are some quite clunky fourth wall jokes, and there is clearly a lot more magic and a lot less logic in the world than there will be later. But the core transformation has happened: he’s stopped writing a parody of fantasy characters in fantasyland, and started writing a parody of ordinary people in Britain.

Where the first two novels proceed at breakneck pace from one set piece comedy episode to the next, Equal Rites wants to actually be a novel rather than a loosely-linked sketch show. It takes its time, at least by the standards of the first two books – more than a third of the novel is set-up, before the quest even starts, and halfway through the book we’ve barely started. As a result, there is far more characterisation than in the earlier books – of the protagonist, Esk, but more importantly of the dominant character, Granny Weatherwax, and more broadly of the ‘old remote rural Britain’ setting; when we get to Ankh-Morpork, it has been transformed from a violent and chaotic sword and sorcery city of adventurers into a parody of old London, complete with class structure and register-switching accents. It’s all very comfortable and familiar stuff, but it brings a depth, and in particular warmth, that was lacking in the first two installments.

The main plot, meanwhile, goes for the empathic throat of teenage geeks everywhere, as it focuses on an intelligent, sassy, rebellious, yet studious tomboy defying both gender roles and authority figures at the same time. Obviously, on that level I loved it. The early sections in particular also do a great job of making magic seem magical – and strange, and even disturbing.

Unfortunately, there are some problems. First, Esk is a ridiculous Mary Sue – I wanted her to kick ass as badly as everybody else, but having her be, basically, the best in the world at everything, even though she’s not even teenaged yet, kind of drains the dramatic tension out of things. Second, and more seriously, the end is just awful. Not the actual scenes near the end, some of which are very good – as with the end of The Light Fantastic, Pratchett is able to be surprisingly dramatic and powerful with what ought to be fairly light material – but rather the construction of the end, which involves far too many over-easy resolutions and nonsensical explanations, and too great a compression and ramping up of pace. It feels like the first half of the novel is what Pratchett actually wanted to write about, and the ending is just something he threw in because he didn’t know what else to do.

That said, it does make me nostalgic for the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions, sadly lacking in later books. Sure, their plot utility is limited, and they are overused terribly in these early books, but they sure are creepy. They have a wonderful combination of simultaneous patheticness and unspeakable danger that really adds an edge to these books, even when they are used as badly as they are in this book.

All in all, then, this is a badly flawed, but nonetheless quite interesting book, that marks an important turn in Pratchett’s writing.

Adrenaline: 3/5. Rather diluted by the rushed and unsatisfactory ending.

Emotion: 3/5. I love Esk.

Thought: 3/5. Pratchett does a good job here with the wry observations, both on life in general and on class structures and sexism and so forth, and the relative sloth of the early chapters is intriguing. On the other hand, nothing really penetratively insightful is said, and it remains a fairly light read.

Beauty: 3/5. Meh.

Craft: 3/5. Would like to give it a higher mark, since elements of this book are very well crafted. Unfortunately… the ending. And that’s really just a symptom of the general poor construction of the plot and of the poor pacing. At this stage, the author was clearly still learning.

Endearingness: 4/5. It’s respectably funny, and did I mention that I love Esk? If she’d been a tad less overpowered, and if her story had been a tad more interesting, I could really have loved this book.

Originality: 2/5. Stock characters, familiar plot, it’s surprising it feels as fresh as it does, frankly – and it’s hurt by reading it immediately after The Light Fantastic.

Overall: 5/7. Good. A promising shift in tone and style, toward a more realistic and complex type of novel – but one unfortunately hamstrung by the limitations of its plot and characters. Nonetheless, I found it a very enjoyable read. In particular, probably works very well as a children’s book, on account of its very young protagonist, themes of empowerment, and the greater latitude children commonly give to unsatisfying plotting.

The Golden Fool, by Robin Hobb

This is the kind of book that they don’t let you write unless the seven previous books in the series have all made them a lot of money. Why? It’s six hundred pages long and it has no plot.

Don’t be misled: this isn’t like a late-Jordan glacial doorstopper where it takes six hundred pages to move from one end of the room to the other. Things happen. In fact, compared to my memory of the book, I was surprised just how much did happen. It’s just that there’s no plot. If that sounds paradoxical, imagine an episode of Deadwood, or The Wire – the episode begins, some stuff happens, and then the episode ends. Sometimes it ends after some big endingy thing has happened, but other times it just… ends. That’s what this book is like. There are plots here – some wrapping up from the last book, some setting up for the next book, some linking the trilogy with the Liveship Trader trilogy… but the book itself does not have a plot. There are maybe four major plot strands, plus the threads of Fitz’s relationships with maybe five or six other characters (which sometimes go along with the plot strands, othertimes not). I felt the major climax of the book (the point where we finally find out what this book and the next book are about, what the big plot of the trilogy will be) happened around three hundred pages in; then there was a heap of dramatic stuff, then another climax around four hundred and fifty pages in. Then some other stuff. It ends with the conclusion of perhaps the most important arc of the book… but the arc is a low-key one and the ending is exceptionally quiet. And the epilogue is pointless and trite.

But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t love this book. In fact, I found the first half brilliant. The character of Fitz gradually thaws, as he accepts the need to return to some semblance of life after his long self-imposed exile, and he slowly finds a place in a world he thought had no place for him. Inevitably, when frozen things begin to thaw, a great deal of damage is done to them, and it’s a painful book for Fitz – or rather, maintaining the metaphor, the defrosted and reanimated Fitz is forced to confront pains dealt long ago, that his (metaphorical!) cryogenic preservation had allowed him to ignore. At the same time – as in the original trilogy – important events are set into motion around him, and the leftover plot of The Liveship Traders bounces at a tangent into the side of this book, leaving everyone a little discombobulated. This trilogy takes the same approach as the original trilogy – it gives us a standard heroic plot, but it tells the story from an unexpected, peripheral perspective, and in the process gives us, as it were, the realistic inner workings of the myth. It’s stunning, in fact, just how cliché some plot points are. I don’t want to spell it out for you, but the big moment in this book, which will shape the final volume fundamentally, is lifted straight out of the fairy tale/epic fantasy Big Book of Clichés. [One hint: it involves a Quest.] But it doesn’t read like a cliché. More importantly, it doesn’t feel like a parody either. What it is is, in a way, a deconstruction of the myth: it takes it from the mythic realm and fleshes it out with motivations and characters and consequences until it looks like an entirely realistic plot point. It was actually a few pages after this happens that it suddenly struck me: hey, did [plot point redacted]? – why yes, yes he did – I hadn’t thought of it like that, but that is actually what just happened.

This is, if anything, a book about a man facing up to consequences. But it’s also a book about masks, and the truth of masks. Everyone – absolutely everyone – in this book is wearing a mask of some kind. Everyone is one thing to some people and something else to others. Fitz, of course, cannot take off his mask, both for psychological and practical reasons, and he is stuck living an artificial life – neither his old life nor the life he has built for himself in his cottage – while his history is known to some, and to others he is an enigma neither one thing nor another; and from his peripheral perspective we see too the multiple personas worn by those around him, as even friends and allies hide aspects of themselves from one another. If I were to make a list of the secrets in this book, who knew them and who knew who knew them, I would soon run out of electrons; but unlike in the cheaper, tawdrier secret-ridden novels, there is very rarely a sense that problems could be solved if only people were just more honest with one another. Instead, even when we can see that honesty is the best end point, we cannot see the tangled and precipitous route that could lead there without setting off landslides of unwanted consequences. This is a trilogy about just how thoroughly entangled in lies Fitz and those around him have ended up as a result of his actions in the original trilogy. And yet the biggest shock to Fitz is when he realises that he is neither the most secretive nor the most multidimensional player on his stage. We spend the time, inevitably, in Fitz’s head, preoccupied with Fitz’s problems – but around him, others too see their carefully constructed façades imperilled by unexpected circumstances. That, I suppose, is the message of the book: that deceit may seem to best for all concerned, but that every lie gives a hostage to happenstance. And at the same time it’s about the truth of masks, and whether a deceit remains a deceit when it is lived as truth for long enough, and whether there is any truth at all under the layers of presentation and manipulation – or whether there are perhaps too many truths, all incompatible.

Or maybe, as Fitz says, it’s about the cyclical nature of life. As I said in my review of the first volume, this trilogy sees Fitz play a new role, as a parental figure rather than a child. It’s an old role, and we see echoes of Burrich, and Verity, and Chade in Fitz’s own behaviour toward his various sort-of-children – and in the process we also see Fitz’s own behaviour in the original trilogy through new, more cynical eyes, as the new generation acts out his own childish mistakes. At the same time, we see Fitz wrestling that parental role away from older rivals, in a way that causes us to wonder about how the adults of the original trilogy dealt with their own predecessors. Fitz is completely conscious of all this, and at one moments welcomes, and the next fights bitterly against, the repetition of history, the comfortable easing of new actors into old roles. It’s a manifestation in miniature of the Prophet’s predictions about the circular nature of time, a demonstration of what it means to wrench time into a new track – and of how difficult that is, and how painful, and how dangerous. And on a more prosaic level, I have to say it’s a joy to read a fantasy book with adults in, behaving in adult ways, worrying about adult things. So often either we’re only given adolescent protagonists, or else the circumstances (war, cataclysm, etc) force the protagonists to concentrate entirely on their present situation; so it’s wonderful to be allowed inside the head of a middle-aged man worrying about his son’s love life, not knowing when to step in and when to let him go. Normally to get that sort of thing you need to go and read Literature or something. Here we get mid-life angst and (rumours of) dragons – what more could you want?

But the virtues of the book aren’t limited to philosophising and character exposition. It’s also a surprisingly tense and exciting book. I’m reminded of the wonderful film, Twelve Angry Men – in which a bunch of guys arguing with each other in a small room for a few hours makes for thrilling entertainment. There are scenes here that go even further in their complete disdain for conventional action – some of my favourites are the scenes where Fitz is watching the expressions of various characters in a room as they each watch the expressions of the others (and of Fitz). So much can be accomplished with only glances. Of course, it’s not a heart-pounding thrill, but it is gripping. And it’s also emotional. Very emotional, without it being necessarily a tear-jerker (nothing, at least, to compare with what happened in the previous books). When a reader knows a character as well as we know Fitz by now, the author doesn’t have to put him through hell to make us feel. She just shows us what it’s like inside the man’s skin; we feel every contusion.

It isn’t a perfect book, largely because of the second half. Halfway through, I was entirely satisfied, but then things went a little off the rails. In terms of pace, the buildup lost momentum and we were treated to a bumpy half-book of climaxes and anticlimaxes, not really forming a clear emotional arc (let alone a narrative one!) – and worst of all, ending with a slow glide to a sudden stop. I just found it hard to care about the contents of the final two or three chapters, compared to the more interesting things that had been going on before. Talking of which: too many things went wrong for Fitz in too short a time, which exposed us to the most offputting side of the character: his whingeing. A little is good, but too much just gets… irritating not because I’m irritated at the author, but just because I feel Fitz’s chafing against constraints and it chafes at me too. And then too many relationship plot points are resolved too neatly and too easily.  And because of this, and because there’s no clear plot, and because the set-up for the next volume has struggled to stand out from all the day-to-day stuff, I’m not left with a great sense of needing to read on. It’s the opposite of a cliffhanger, which is a strange decision for the end of a penultimate book.

Oh, and this is small I know, but it just gnaws at me: Hobb isn’t very good at conveying the passage of time. Sometimes I wasn’t sure, and had to check, whether a day had passed or six months. It ultimately doesn’t matter in this case, but it was a niggling confusion I had.

On the positive side, Hobb continues her thing of being constantly a little mystifying – the mythos never seems entirely worked out. It’s been relegated to little bits around the edges by now, but it’s still there – notably in the one, two, or maybe three different voices Fitz hears when Skilling. One of those voices, I can guess pretty easily… but the other two are mysteries, and seem to push forward the conception of the world. Either that or I’ve just missed something obvious.

Finally: on this re-read, I continue to be struck by the ambiguity of the narration. Oftentimes we read Fitz talking in the past tense about the Fitz of the time of the novel thinking back to the Fitz of the past: it’s clear the Fitz of the past can’t be trusted, and the Fitz of the present makes clear that the Fitz of the time of the novel can’t be trusted either… but should we really trust Fitz-the-narrator? It’s not done in an intrusive, postmodern way – it’s so subliminal I don’t think I really picked up on it the first time I read it – but every level of the narration is imperfect. Fitz himself is imperfect to an extreme: come to think of it, he’s really not that smart (just well-informed, and well-trained, and with a good memory). But that realisation, which Fitz also has, undermines itself: Fitz maybe isn’t all that bright when it comes to judging himself. When he says he is being too harsh on himself… maybe he’s not. Or when he says that he’s learnt… maybe he hasn’t. When he says he was wrong… maybe he wasn’t. Time and again I found myself questioning Fitz’s interpretations of things – not only Fitz-the-character’s interpretations, but Fitz-the-narrator’s as well. In other books, this would result in me getting annoyed with either the character for being an idiot or the author for making their character an idiot… but here there is enough ambiguity, both in what Fitz really believes and in what’s really true, that I felt that this was part of the point of the book. Wilde once said: the old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything. This is a very middle-aged book.

Adrenaline: 3/5. I’d like to score it higher but I can’t. Much of it is a 4, but it slackens in the second half (despite there being more conventional ‘action’ in that half).

Emotion: 4/5. Not a tear-jerker, but a thoroughly emotionally engaging read nonetheless. Few fantasy books put the reader so intimately in the skin of a character as this one does.

Thought: 4/5. Between the elements of mystery and the worrying about what might happen next and the glimpses of different possible longer-term resolutions, and the constant evaluation and re-evaluation of Fitz’s past and present actions and judgements, and a few bits of philosophical and life-experience-y rumination, it’s a pretty intellectually engaging novel too, even if it never actually says anything startlingly original, or engages in any one topic in great intellectual depth.

Beauty: 3/5. As usual for Hobb, it’s polished enough not to be ugly, but she’s not aiming at beauty, I don’t think.

Craft: 4/5. Occasionally heavy-handed, and the prose is nothing remarkable. Plus one or two minor niggles (eg passage of time) and maybe the plot/structure/pacing as a whole could have been shaped a bit more sharply. But in general, a really accomplished piece of writing displaying her characters with acuity and nuance and sophistication, and a book that does well being re-read.

Endearingness: 5/5. So maybe it’s not my perfect book – a thrilling ending and a bit less whining in the second half might have done that – but it’s still a book I love. It’s just a joy to read – for me, anyway. This is the most subjective of my categories, I know – not everyone will love this fairly slow, rambling, ruminating book. But I do. It puts us into the head of an extremely sympathetic (in my view) character, and gives us time to live in there a while while he deals with a range of interesting problems from the intimate to the personal to the political, to potentially even bigger problems than that. It allows the magical and the fantastic to merge comfortably and inseparably into the personal and realistic. It’s just a great book to curl up with. It’s not a coincidence that I finally got around to picking this up to re-read it on the day my cat died – it’s the sort of book to lose yourself in. If you’re me, at least.

Originality: 4/5. It operates within the confines of epic fantasy, and a fairly conventional form of epic fantasy at that. Royals, quests, talk of dragons, vikings, animal companions, prophecies, chosen ones, etc. But within that subgenre, it is completely it’s own thing – it’s original in style and structure and above all in what it cares about. Most epic fantasy doesn’t spend pages musing on the potential hurt feelings of unsympathetic former lovers or worrying about the apprentice fees for dependants, or worrying whether wise old friends are going a bit senile. Most epic fantasy is all about the… well, you know, the fantasy. This is the sort of book that’s determined to remind us that the fantasy only matters because of the reality in its shadow – that motivations are personal, and that consequences will also be personal.

Overall: 6/7. Very Good. When I say that something’s Very Good, I mean it. There are some classic, classic books that I’ve put down as Very Good. This deserves to stand alongside them. It may not have the same sort of impact as a book like A Canticle for Leibowitz or The Stars My Destination, or Dhalgren, but to me it’s just as good (I recognise that this hinges on the fact I love the book; but even if I’d found the book odious personally, the other scores are high enough to make it Good at the very least!). It’s obviously a very different sort of book from those books – it’s 600 pages long, for a start, and a lot of the heavy lifting has been done in the previous four giant books about this character (and three more related volumes). In fact, this is a great argument for the seemingly obscene size of many epic fantasy series: I’ve no doubt that even if she tried Hobb wouldn’t be able to write a short novel as stunning as the ones by Miller and Bester, but because the genre lets her expend so many words on the same characters (and places), she’s now able to do things those authors couldn’t possibly have done in their short novels – the weight of words has sunk us so deeply into the heart of FitzChivalry, in a way that I suspect only epic fantasy or a similarly longwinded genre could ever do (or, of course, the hand of an overwhelming genius – never underestimate genius). Readers who prefer more external, and less internal, action may find this not quite so good as the first volume in the series, but to me it’s the best book of the series so far, and enough to confirm Robin Hobb as one of my favourite authors. In fact, this is probably one of my favourite books ever. [Which doesn’t, of course, mean that it’s the best!]

The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett

When I decided to (re-)read all the Discworld books, in order, I was a smidgeon trepidatious. The early books, after all, weren’t very good, and I wasn’t looking forward to wading through them until I reached the better volumes.

So when I read The Colour of Magic, I got a very pleasant surprise: it wasn’t bad at all, it was fun and clever and witty and imaginative and fun and fantastic and fun. Unpolished, yes, out of keeping with the continuity, certainly, and a little hamstrung by its episodic and parodic form; but good. So maybe, I thought, this ‘complete reread’ business wouldn’t be so bad after all.

When I read The Light Fantastic, unfortunately, I got another surprise.

Perhaps the external history of these books explains some of what I felt the difference between them was. The Colour of Magic (TCOM) was Pratchett’s fourth published novel – The Carpet People was a fairly well-received children’s book but had hardly been a bestseller, and both The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata were commercial flops. TCOM may well have been Pratchett’s last chance, and I don’t imagine he had the highest hopes. As a result, it’s easy to think of a defiant author setting out, on the one hand, to dazzle his audience and get them to finally pay attention, and, on the other, to show people what they were missing. And that’s what we get in TCOM – a superficial but very shiny book where we watch a skilled and intelligent author having some fun. It also marked a turn in Pratchett’s writing, from humorous-but-serious to outright comedy (though still not as comedic as much of his later work).

The Light Fantastic (TLF), on the other hand, was written three years later, as Pratchett set out on the grand career of Being A Professional Author. TCOM had been a massive critical and commercial success, and if Pratchett was going to make it as an author he was going to have to find a way to replicate it. And that, I’m afraid, is what we get in TLF – a replica.

The biggest change is that the episodic structure has, at least in theory, gone, with the entire book having a single plot (which shifts away from Sword and Sorcery toward Epic Fantasy). This sounds like a good idea on the surface, but is practice is a very bad thing. TCOM’s wild, meandering plotting could work when hemmed in by the shortness of each componant story – let lose on a longer format, it turns into an unstructured mess of a narrative. And it doesn’t much help it feel bigger as a story, because it’s still fundamentally a series of comic episodes, which have little connexion to one another.

The humour is turned up to eleven… which isn’t funny. There are still incredibly awful puns, which are mildly amusing, but there are just so many of them that it becomes oppressive; and the flamboyant narrative voice of the original becomes a confused, intrusive, over-stylised mumbling. Every page has at least one passage of the “I could say X… but it would be wrong” or “perhaps I could say Y… but I won’t” – just one among many examples of Pratchett flogging his jokes to death. A few of these, and the in-world justification of laws enforcing literalness in descriptions, would have been funny, and at first were, but very soon I found myself just sighing. In general, then, where the original novel employed a fairly subtle and intelligent wit, with flashes of obviousness, the sequel resorts to constant obviousness, comedic cliché, and an unfitting broadness of humour. There are very few jokes – very few scenes, even – where you can’t predict exactly what the punch line will be, or what will happen next, very early on.

Along the way, much of the heart of the original – both in its characterisation and in its moral sense – have been discarded. In particular, Rincewind, originally an interesting man with hopes and desires and amoral greed and vindictiveness and random acts of kindness and a sympathy for the oppressed, becomes a caricature of himself, existing only to move the plot along by running away from things. Partly as a result of this, there is very little narrative tension.

Particularly galling to me were the jokes that relied on real-world things, like late-night prawn biryanis, which I felt damaged the suspension of disbelief even more than the overly flippant and obvious narration. I also found myself a little miffed when I noticed Pratchett steal a joke whole from Chesterton, only tell it worse. [Rincewind’s preference for tradition over democracy, on the grounds that tradition is a democracy where even the dead get a vote, which is taken from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. In the original, it was of course a very serious political and sociological point, as well as being a witty paradox. In TLF it’s a throwaway line which doesn’t really seem in keeping either with the setting or with the character, has no broader thematic resonance, and isn’t particularly funny either]. In fact that seemed emblematic of a lot of Pratchett’s problems in this novel: it felt like he was putting on someone else’s voice. Pratchett’s thematic and stylistic debt to Chesterton has never been far below the surface of the Discworld (when reading The Man Who Was Thursday my mind instantly wandered, for instance, to Hogfather’s famous punchline about the sun – indeed, the broader themes of Hogfather in particular are extremely Chestertonian), and more broadly it’s clear Pratchett is following in the footsteps of a certain fin de siècle strain of flippant and satirical British humour (Wilde, Jerome, Chesterton, Saki, Wodehouse, et al). But in TLF, it feels as though Pratchett hasn’t yet found a voice he’s comfortable inhabiting. Perhaps, in fact, he’s putting on his own voice – I suspect that he was trying to capitalise on whatever had made TCOM so succesful. Unfortunately, in doing so he loses his authenticity – it feels artificial, which in turn feels unpleasant.

It isn’t a terrible book. It’s still broadly entertaining (particularly if you like puns), has some enjoyable characters (though sadly one of them gets killed off early on), and has a genuinely interesting (and in places even a little moving) character in the form of the aging Cohan the Barbarian. The finale is well-worked and satisfying. It’s short. And for the Discworld fan, it marks a move toward a more coherent world and a more epic scope (though most of the places featured here will still never be seen again). And among the bad jokes there are still the occasional gem of authentic wit.

But by and large, the impression I got from this book was that it wasn’t any funnier or more dramatic than the original, that it was considerably less original than the original, and that despite all this the author was trying far, far harder. The original was almost effortless; this one is laboured.

Adrenaline: 3/5. Bumps up to average on account of the manic pace and high stakes.

Emotion: 1/5. Didn’t care in the slightest. Nobody to care about, no time in which to care. Slight interest around Cohan, but too brief to register.

Thought: 3/5. The odd moment of cleverness keeps it average, but the sophistication has mostly been set aside for cheap laughs (which I mostly didn’t laugh at).

Beauty: 3/5. The odd beautiful remark is still here, but not only are there not many of them, but Pratchett’s continual coyness and self-reference drain them of any impact they may have had.

Craft: 3/5. The worst thing about the book is that it’s not very well written. At first I was going to give this a 2, but I accept that would be harsh – too many good bits. But the plotting is poor and loose, the humour is patchy, and the narrative voice is inconsistent.

Endearingness: 2/5. I didn’t like it. It’s Pratchett, so it would be hard to hate it, but I really didn’t like it much.

Originality: 2/5. Despite being less directly a parody, it’s less original, in my opinion, than the first book. No real surprises or innovations along the way, just a lot of reused ideas.

Overall: 4/7. Not Bad. I think that’s a fair assessment: it’s not actually bad. I probably sound more negative here than I should be, because I’m disappointed – it didn’t live up to what I was hoping for (though it more or less matches my original idea of what these early books were like).  In the final assessment, it’s a fairly enjoyable book, and actually in most of the describable details isn’t much worse than The Colour of Magic; the difference is, the earlier book was carried over its rough patches by its sparkling spirit, its confidence, its easy charm – this is self-conscious and lacking that creative edge.

 

[You may remember that my re-read follows on the heels of that of Nathan at www.fantasyreviewbarn.blogspot.co.uk and was prefigured (if you’ll forgive the theologically grandiose connotations of the word) by that of Adam three years ago at www.thewertzone.blogspot.com. Between the three of us we cover the entire spectrum of views on this book: as you can see, I thought it was worse than the first book; Adam, however, thought it was about the same as the first book, while Nathan bafflingly thought it was even better than the first book, an entire four stars out of five – for reasons that are more or less the exact opposite of my reasons. Huh.]