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.

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

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.]

Reading The Silmarillion: Up to Thingol and Melian (1)

Some thoughts that have come to me as I’ve read the early chapters of The Silmarillion.

 

Strength and Might – who would win, Melkor or a honey badger?

Tolkien’s world does not operate by straightforward, mathematical laws. He has no ‘magic system’. Many things seem to happen more by the demands of the narrative than out of some structured D&D calculation system. One of the first indications we get of this fluidity in The Silmarillion is in the question of the relative power of various supernatural beings. Who is stronger than whom? In most fantasy worlds, this is relatively easy to work out; not so in Arda. The key figure to consider here is the Vala, Tulkas. The Valaquenta describes him as the ‘greatest in strength and deeds of prowess’ of all the Valar. Three times early on his superiority to Melkor is established: in the beginning of days, Melkor is chased out of Arda entirely by Tulkas; when Melkor destroys the Lamps, he is chased away by Tulkas and forced to lie hidden in the ground so that Tulkas cannot find him; and then a third time, when the Valar break up Utumno, Tulkas wrestles with Melkor and casts him on his face – a humiliating, and seemingly quite simply accomplished, victory. There is no indication that Melkor can even hope to defeat Tulkas. And nor is Tulkas’ power limited to wrestling: we are told that it is largely Tulkas’ strength that literally constructs the world, guided by the craft of Aule.

And yet this cannot be right – Melkor, after all, is, we were told at the beginning, the strongest of all the Ainur. He ought to be stronger than Tulkas. In fact, so should a lot of other people be. The Valaquenta tells us that among the Valar there is an inner circle of the most powerful of all, the Aratar. The Aratar “surpass beyond compare” the other Valar, and Tulkas is not one of them; and in turn Melkor seems almost as powerful as all the Aratar put together. [Should we perhaps talk of three orders of Ainur – Aratar, Valar, Maiar – rather than just two?]. So why does he keep getting bullied by Tulkas?

One answer is that this happened just because the plot says it should – or, more charitably, because there are forces at play in this world that cannot be understood by its inhabitants, or by the reader. I think this is true to a degree. But a more systematic answer would be that rather than there being a single thing, ‘power’, there may be at least two different forms of power, which need not go together. On the one hand, there is ‘strength’; and on the other hand there is something we might call ‘might’. Strength is chiefly concerned with prowess in combat, and here Melkor is weaker than Tulkas (indeed, as we’ll see later on, he’s weaker than a lot of people). But there is something else as well, might, with a far greater scope. Tolkien’s continuing technique throughout The Silmarillion is to combine detailed descriptions of some things with a mysterious absence of description of other things; and what exactly ‘might’ or ‘power’ or ‘majesty’ entails is never specified. In what way is Melkor the most powerful of them all? One particular way is seen in the chapter regarding the coming of the elves, when Melkor creates the orcs – there is no suggestion that Tulkas could do anything like that. Even Aulë only creates seven dwarfs. Melkor seems to be able to whip up entire hordes of evil things. But I think a deeper answer is that real power may be spiritual and mental power: Melkor’s ultimate power appears to be charisma. Whether by playing on loyalties, or offering temptations, or employing fear, or misleading virtue, or just aweing into obedience, Melkor is extremely good at swaying people (willingly or unwillingly) to his service. And it’s not just Melkor: we see how Oromë is able to gain the trust of the elves almost instantly, despite their justified fears, “for the light of Aman was in his face, and all the noblest of the elves were drawn towards it”. Again, when Elwë sees and falls in love with Melian, it is because “he looked at her, and the light of Aman was in her face.”

What is the light of Aman? The literal interpretation is that it’s the light of the Two Trees; in the same way, a considerable distinction is made throughout the book between elves who have, and who have not, seen the Two Trees. And yet I wonder whether Tolkien is not just trying to get at something more fundamental: that the power, the angelic nature, of these beings, is visible at a glance. They are, literally, being from outside and from before the world, who have dwelt at the hand of God. Perhaps this is the true power of the Ainur? The Trees, then, could be seen as a vessel either for Yavanna’s power, or more likely for the power of Eru himself; their light lends power to, shares power with, mortal beings (and even with the Ainur, who are nothing in power before Eru).

The discussions of how Melkor cannot even create automatons of his own, but must always warp the works of others – specifically explained as a result of his bitterness and his envy of others – may be important here. Melkor’s evil has not just injured the world, but has even damaged his own abilities – his power has been stunted. It’s tempting to wonder whether he has become stunted in other ways too, aside from just his inability to make things. Perhaps his failure to win bouts of fisticuffs is also an expression of this? If so, the most obvious conclusion is that Melkor lacks courage – that perhaps he could defeat his enemies, but that fear cripples him. This doesn’t seem farfetched – after all, the first two conflicts end with him giving up and running away, and in the second case with him hiding like a worm in hole in the ground hoping nobody finds him. And on the other side, Tulkas’ character is described almost exactly as a being who is bursting with confidence, who does not doubt himself in the slightest, who does not stop to think long enough to despair. His surname is Astaldo, ‘the Valiant’; “he has little heed for either the past or the future”; he fights not out of necessity but because he delights in it. All he does is run, wrestle, feast, ‘betroth himself’ (nudge nudge) to pretty Valië, and sleep heavily. At first glance, these seem incidental character traits, a stereotype of a certain sort of happy warrior; but I think that in fact it is no mere coincidence that the Valar with these traits is the strongest in battle. I think Tolkien’s idea is that he is the strongest because he has these traits – because he does not care for the past or the future but delights in his own activity. He is strong because he is valiant; Melkor, meanwhile, is the complete opposite of valiant, and I think it is no surprise that he ends up getting beaten up by a procession of people who theoretically he ought to be able to crush like a bug.

That, of course, implies that the other Valar, who are also weaker than Tulkas, must themselves lack courage to some degree. But surely, that’s impossible – they’re gods! They wouldn’t be so flawed, would they?

Of course, I’m reaching here. No explanation is given in the text as to how we’re to interpret the anomalous power levels of these characters. It’s also worth remembering that in many pagan myths exactly this sort of thing can be seen time and again: gods are at one moment omnipotent, and at another moment bested by mortals. Nonetheless, I think the theory I’ve put forward remains fairly true to the spirit of Tolkien, and helps build a bridge between the pagan dressings of the book and the deep Christian sentiment that underlies it – a way to unite pagan tropes, like the happy warrior, with Christian theology… bringing us back again to the old idea that despair (a loss of faith in the goodness and power of God) is at the root of all evil.

 

These Gods May Be Angels, But They’re Still Dicks – the moral ambiguity of the Valar

God, in the Christian perspective, has no flaws of any kind. In our Christian/post-Christian society, we tend to think that’s just how godhood works. But the old pagan gods were very far from perfect; and over the early chapters of The Silmarillion we see some strong hints that the Valar, the gods/angels of Arda, aren’t perfect either.

The only unambiguous example of this in these chapters is the continuously-wrongheaded Aulë. After Melkor, the two biggest named evil demi-gods in the mythos are probably Sauron and Saruman – the Valaquenta tells us that Sauron was at first Aulë’s follower, and fans of the mythos will know that Saruman too begins as one of his people, and was actually selected by Aulë to fight Sauron. One lucifer among your most trusted lieutenants is perhaps unfortunate, but two seems like carelessness. Nonetheless, Aulë’s big sin in these chapters is not his poor oversight, but his decision to preëmpt the will of Eru by creating his own servant race. In this, we see quite clearly that the Valar are not all-wise, and hence are not entirely good*.

But that’s not the only example. The wisdom of the Valar is put to the test right from the beginning: first, they live a hedonistic life of partying in Almaren, completely forgetting about the threat of their big bad brother; then, when Big Brother does come to town, they more or less run away to their own gated community in the west and leave the rest of the world enslaved to Melkor.

It’s worth looking at how the different Valar seem to disagree here. First, there’s Manwë, the ruler. Manwë is the appointed lord of the realm of Arda; but he is also from the first “brethren in the thought of Ilúvatar” with Melkor (the same claim occurs in both the Valaquenta and the Ainulindalë, so it seems as though it’s meant to be significant). Now, on the one hand this just reinforces the idea that in some way Manwë is an analogue for Jesus (Jesus and Lucifer often being spoken of as brothers, or even twins, in mystical tradition); but it should also perhaps sound a note of caution. Is Melkor’s brother completely to be trusted? Tolkien doesn’t say that he isn’t – but it’s hard to read the events of the early chapters as a ringing endorsement of him.

Manwë’s policy is isolationist – run and hide and pull up the Pelori behind them. We are told not only that Manwë is dearest to Ilúvatar, but also that he understands most fully his father’s purposes; surely whatever Manwë decides is right? But is it? “Understands his purposes” does not necessarily mean “knows the wisest way to fulfill those purposes”. And while Manwë may know Ilúvatar’s purposes the best, we are also told (in the Ainulindalë) that it is Ulmo who has been most deeply instructed by Ilúvatar. Meanwhile, Ulmo and Manwë together have most faithfully served the purpose of Ilúvatar – but does ‘faithfully’ mean ‘successfully’, or merely what it says, ‘most full of faith’? Because Manwë and Ulmo often do not agree with each other.

If Manwë is, as it were, the Valar with the best spiritual judgement, the Valar whose heart is in the best place, Ulmo often seems like the wisest, as well as the kindest. It’s hard not to read a tone of reproach when Tolkien, contrasting Ulmo with the other Valar, says that Ulmo has kept all of Arda in his thought, and that he has never forsaken elves and men. Tolkien may not come out and criticise Manwë and the others for their isolationism, but he does seem to praise Ulmo for defying it. Ulmo does more than disagree with the isolationism – when the other Valar are giving their care and love solely to Valinor, Ulmo never even visits Valinor, unless he has to! But in that, there is another question: given that Melkor himself became corrupted having spent too long by himself in the outer darkness, is it entirely positive that Ulmo is repeatedly spoken of as being ‘alone’, that he seems to disdain the presence of his brethren, out in his long travels through the outer ocean? And yet we have to sympathise with Ulmo (undoubtedly the coolest of all the Valar), because he is the one singled out as caring about the tragedies that have befallen the world. Manwë seems to see evil as a case of bad governance, but it’s Ulmo who sings the deep sad songs down at the roots of the earth – it’s Ulmo, we are told, who maintained all life in Middle-Earth after the other Valar departed. And so it should ring alarm bells for us when we see that it’s Ulmo who dissents from the will of the Valar when it comes to the first elves – Ulmo wishes them to be able to live their own lives without interference, while the other Valar are eager to rule over them, to bring them into Valinor. Is that entirely to best serve the Children, or is it in part that, like Melkor, the Valar are eager for worshippers? Tolkien doesn’t say – he merely shows us the tension and lets us feel uneasy about it even if we are not sure what the problem is. There are few easier ways to hint at complexity than to have supposedly wise characters disagree with one another. And the Valar are constantly disagreeing.

Yavanna, too, disagrees to some extent with the abandonment of Middle-Earth, and returns there to help the growing things. But Yavanna’s aims are very different from Ulmo’s. Yavanna has little or no interest in the Children of Ilúvatar – she is obsessively focused on her own personal hobby, flora and fauna. She spends most of her time in paradise, but occasionally ventures out to take advantage of Ulmo’s work in Middle-Earth by having some plants grow. Indeed, she seems actively hostile toward the Children, seeing them as a threat to her own creations. Since Yavanna’s creations are essential to all life, it’s hard to dislike her too much, but she does come across as rather selfish and self-absorbed. She forgets that the world is intended as a ‘mansion’ for elves and men; so too does Aulë, when he regrets the war against Melkor for the damage it will do to ‘his’ earth.

Nor is Oromë – the third Valar who shows an interest in Middle-Earth – a paragon of virtue. He’s not in Middle-Earth looking for the Children, or even to seriously fight against Melkor… he’s just there for a spot of huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’, a little bit of fun in the immense game-reserve of Middle-Earth. Not easy to like a man who’s that keen on killing things, even when he’s killing evil things – a being we are told is “dreadful in anger”.

But none of all of this shows the Valar to be, as I originally said, ‘dicks’. It just shows that there is dissent among them, and that they are not immune to moral criticism. [In particular, since it’s later shown that they can indeed best Melkor in a fight, as they’ve already done before, their decision to abandon the world, and hence ultimately the elves, to Melkor is cowardly in the extreme.] No, the fact that they’re dicks must be seen through their conversations. Two spring to mind.

First, Manwë and Yavanna discuss how the creation of various things, including Manwë’s Eagles, who will help protect Yavanna’s creations from the Children. Yavanna is of course pleased with the co-operation between them, and in that spirit of co-operation hopes that “high shall climb the trees of [myself, speaking in the third person], that the eagles of [you, addressed very flatteringly as The King] may house therein!”.

What does Manwë say? Does he politely thank her for her understanding and help and for the flattery, or say that he hopes so too? No, he’s a patronising dick. He decides to massively show off his power and how much more important than her he is (“But Manwë rose also, and it seemed he stood to such a height that his voice came down to Yavanna as fom the paths of the winds”), and then says “nay… only the trees of [your husband] will be tall enough.” He doesn’t actually add ‘you foolish woman’ at the end there, but it certainly sounds implied! What a dick!

And as though that’s not enough patriarchal speaking-down for one day, Yavanna goes off to boast to her husband about how she’s gone behind his back to get his boss to help her against him, frankly sounding almost genocidal: “Now let their children beware! For there shall walk a power in the forests who wrath they will arouse at their peril.” Well that’s very nice, isn’t it. Threaten some children with death. That makes you sympathetic. But does her husband get angry about either the conniving or the threats of murder? Why bother, she’s only a woman, after all:

“’Nevertheless, they will [cut down all your trees anyway, you foolish woman]’ said Aule, and he went on with his smith-work.” It’s his wife’s greatest fear, and he can’t even be bothered to look up from his work while flatly crushing her hopes?

What a dick.

The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett.

Well, it seems I’m in a sort of projecty mood at the moment. I suppose that’s traditional, this time of year. Not content with my Silmarillion-reading project (which I haven’t forgotten about, I’m just busy at the moment), I’ve taken it upon myself to embark on another, slightly longer-term project: re-reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels.

[This isn’t an original idea. I first had the notion of doing this three years ago, back when Adam at www.thewertzone.blogspot.com was doing it (he got stuck at Soul Music). I was reminded of my earlier intention, and sparked into actually picking up a book, by seeing Nathan over at www.fantasyreviewbarn.blogspot.co.uk take up exactly the same project (at time of writing he’s made it to Pyramids). I know I don’t really need to attribute such radical ideas as ‘reading a famous series of books in order’, but I feel I should, since I always feel awkward about failing to be original. [[Tangent: a paranoia I often take a little too far, to the point of predictability]]. Anyway, I encourage you to look at their reviews too, since so far as I can make out they’re both pretty sane guys when it comes to literary tastes, and a second opinion is always good.]

Discworld. Obligatory nostalgia moment: The Colour of Magic was one of the first books I ever read. There was The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit, and a handful of children’s books that don’t entirely count (because I don’t remember them well, I don’t remember when I read them, and they’re all really short, and besides, they’re not proper adult books)… and come to think of it I guess there was a whole load of Enid Blyton at some point, but then one day, as I think I’ve described before, I went with my father down to the local bookshop (when such things existed – and this one barely existed, it probably had fewer books than my house), and looked for fantasy novels, and came home with three: Never Deal With a Dragon (what was that doing there?), Pawn of Prophecy (Eddings quickly became my main author), and The Colour of Magic. I promptly inhaled all the other Discworld books then published. I don’t know when that was exactly, but on Goodreads I’ve estimated it as around 1992. Which means that I was about seven, and it was about twenty years ago.

I’m not sure I’ve read it since.

For a long time now – not twenty years, but a long time – I’ve been telling everyone to, frankly, avoid this book. Early Pratchett, I said, isn’t exactly bad, but it’s nothing like later Pratchett, and nowhere near as good. After all, this is barely a book. It’s some short stories. And they’re not original, they’re just parodies. Anyone can write a short story parodying the Pern novels, that’s not big, and that’s not clever.

Oh boy. I wasn’t wrong about it being different from later Pratchett. I may or may not have been wrong about it not being as good as later Pratchett, we shall see. But I sure as hell was wrong about it not being worth reading.

Because coming back to it now, no longer a seven-year-old: it still isn’t big, but, actually, it seriously is clever.

To start with, we need to be honest about what this book is, and what it isn’t. It isn’t really a novel. What it makes me think of most of all in terms of structure are those old SF novels of the fifties and sixties, the ‘fix-up’ novels, where a clunk of novellas have been slightly rewritten to fit together into a single book. There are four different stories here, with the same main characters and in chronological order, but with little overarching plot – two of the stories have their own prologues, and there are even moments where it feels like Pratchett is recapping the earlier stories in the later ones, like authors do at the beginning of a new novel in a series, in case you’ve forgotten what happened before. It feels like these are four different novellas published in magazines some time apart from one another, although I don’t think that’s actually what happened.

And this isn’t a Discworld book, except in the most obvious sense of it being, you know, quite clearly a Discworld book I mean the whole thing begins the the canonical description of the Discworld so obviously it is a Discworld book. But apart from that, and sharing a lot of characters and setting and a fair amount of the sense of humour with the later books, it isn’t. To explain that, I’ll just point out something that surprised me: this book came out in 1983. That’s surprising not because it’s an aeon ago in terms of the fantasy genre (context: this book was published only six years after The Silmarillion. Rincewind is only six years younger than Melkor, at least in publication date), but because it’s a whole three years before The Light Fantastic. From that point on, Discworld novels flowed at two books a year for a decade. Put simply, The Colour of Magic wasn’t the first of a series of novels sharing the same setting; it was a standalone novel, that later became the basis for a series of novels sharing the same setting. That’s an important difference, I think. In many ways, The Colour of Magic feels more similar to Pratchett’s previous book, Strata, than to the novels that would follow. So there are a lot of things here that don’t add up with later novels – most strikingly the portrayal of Death (at least until the end) is totally out of keeping with later Discworld novels – but there is also a pervasive difference in tone, style, and the feel of the setting.

And this isn’t a wholly original story, either. The entire thing is a parody of the Sword and Sorcery genre, with a lot of more specific parodies along the way (the first section, in Ankh-Morpork, reportedly parodies Leiber’s Lankhmar stories, the second section parodies the work of HP Lovecraft (though still mostly S&S), and the third section parodies McCaffrey’s Pern. [Tangential confession: I always try to just say Pern rather than mentioning the author, purely because I still haven’t learnt how to spell her name without looking it up. Don’t know why, just doesn’t stick with me]. The little parodies are easy to swallow, but the big parodies do feel like a weight on the narrative, unnecessarily limiting the scope and creativity of the work.

The parodic nature of the novel is a particularly interesting thing, philosophically speaking, because in this case what is being parodied is… to put it politely, extinct. Sword and Sorcery is moribund, it’s been adventuring through the elysian fields of departed genres since more or less the time that The Colour of Magic came out. People sometimes say it’s coming back, that writers like Abercrombie and Lynch are infused with an S&S sensibility – I don’t know, I haven’t read them – but it sounds like that’s only true in the sense that ‘not completely avoiding all traces of’ is a comparative resurrection after a long period of complete absence.

On the one hand, that’s bad for the book. A lot of the time I felt I wasn’t getting the joke – either I wasn’t getting the reference, or I understood the reference but just didn’t care because it wasn’t meaningful to me. [For instance, I know enough about Conan the Barbarian from second-hand sources to understand invocations of it, but that’s a very different sort of understanding from the sort I’d have if I’d grown up reading the stuff myself]. A parody loses a lot of its purpose when the thing being parodied is more obscure than the parody.

On the other hand, this may well be what saved the book for me. Because there’s enough here not to need the crutch of parody (just as we can still enjoy Alice in Wonderland despite not spotting the dozen pop culture references a page that it’s made out of), and to be honest I think it works better without it. In fact, the death of Sword and Sorcery has turned this book into almost a two-for-one deal: on the one hand, we get to read a fun, exciting, and to the modern audience quite original genre; and on the other hand, we get to make fun of it at the same time. This isn’t just an intro to Pratchett, it’s also an intro to Sword and Sorcery, and I came away from it really quite eager to find some original Fritz Leiber to read…

So it doesn’t suffer too badly from being a parody; but it does suffer a little, from the sense of mild claustrophobia that a ‘bit’ brings – the author doesn’t feel free, he’s having to do these things because that’s what the thing he’s parodying demands.

It has other flaws too. Some of the humour is too broad (to be honest the entire ‘Japanese tourist’ premise is a bit… limp). The world he’s creating is clearly not quite worked out; the style is sometimes a little inconsistent. It feels quite experimental. Because it’s four stories stitched into one, the overall narrative arc is badly impaired. [Hang on, don’t tell me the ‘here are four published stories reprinted as a book’ format is itself a parody of the repackaging of the original S&S serials? Damnit, maybe it is…]. Thanks both to the brevity/disjointedness of the plot and to the unlikeableness of every single character, there isn’t a lot of emotional engagement. And most surprisingly, for a Discworld book… it’s not funny. It’s clearly written as comedy, but it isn’t really laugh-out-loud funny. It’s rarely even giggle-funny.

But what it is is great-broad-grin-across-my-face-almost-every-page enjoyable.

There is something here that has been lost in later Pratchett – that was largely lost in Discworld even by the time of its golden age. It’s fun – but more than that, it’s a certain kind of mad, furiously unpredictable creative genius. This book sizzles. It romps. It’s bursting with energy. It’s filled to the seams with, look, here, a stunning plot twist, or, there, some inspired worldbuilding, or isn’t that a clever joke, or that, isn’t that just clever, I don’t know what it’s there for but I’m impressed by it anyway.

Because the worldbuilding is great. This may not be the mature Discworld, but all the foundation stones are put down here – and yes, the roots may be in parody, but they blossom into something that feels real (in a demented way) and wild and entirely original even when I know it isn’t. Even the outright thefts feel original (a good writer borrows, a great writer steals); and let’s not overlook the sheer erruption of worldbuilding that there is here – not content with just describing the world around the characters, we’re treated to repeated whistlestop guides to the fantastic and incredible (despite never being within a thousand miles of it, there’s more about the Great Nef here than in the rest of the series put together). And the plot! OK, it’s mad, it’s scattered, it doesn’t make much sense on the page, but it’s just so audacious. Leaving aside the actual deus ex machina moments, there’s a less literal deus ex machina in the middle of this that is… possibly the most audacious way to resolve a plot point that I’ve ever seen. Which shifts from ‘is he seriously trying to pull that off?’ to outright awesomeness when you realise that the plot twist is composed of a series of implicit, and godawful, puns.

You have to be on your toes to get that joke, but then you have to be on your toes all the time in this book, not just because of the riotous pace, but because Pratchett is exploding with his own smartness all the time. It would be easy for him to come across as pretentious, but he doesn’t. He is astonishingly erudite, but expresses it in a way so married to zaniness and the pun (and in such a machine-gun way) that it doesn’t feel he’s showing off his knowledge, he’s just… having fun. Despite it’s ‘let’s laugh at sword and sorcery books’ premise, it actually feels like a really personal book – not in the sense of being intimate and meaningful and honest, but just in the sense that it feels like it was written for the joy of writing it. I like books like that. The joy comes across in the ink. And there are a great many very serious, very respected, very literary authors who patronisingly expound their own brilliance in lengthy and erudite novels, who end up showing only a tenth of the knowledge and wit that Pratchett showers on us in this brief fantasy parody.

I’m sure I’ve probably only gotten a quarter of the jokes. Some of the ones I did get, I needed help – I knew I recognised that Hikayat-i-Naqshia reference and got the gist of the joke, but I had to look it up to get the details. A lot of people probably didn’t notice that there WAS a joke there – but it’s the sort of book where you don’t have to understand every reference, or even spot which things are references. Instead, it all works at face value… and when you catch a sly allusion, you grin. It’s not all showing off, either, as Pratchett uses his wit to poke a lot of fun at various parts of the real world as well as at the genre, and even now and then to make some serious points. There isn’t the sustained satire or depth of political/philosophical perspective as in some of the later books, but this is nonetheless clearly the work of a man fully intellectually engaged with the world and society around him.

In the end, I’m not only forced to re-evaluate my old opinion of the book, I’m actually left a little regretful that we haven’t seen more of this Pratchett – and more of this world. Pratchett’s writing has become more and more staid, more and more didactic and formulaic, more and more quotidian – and so has Discworld as a setting. As the Disc has moved into the Century of the Anchovy (or whatever it is…), it has become more modern, more orderly, more predictable, more conventional, less magical… and more boring. Perhaps there was a happy medium sometime in the golden age of the Discworld series, where the unpredictability and creativity found a balance with the realism and the depth. But even if there was, I’d still like to get a few more glimpses of this earlier, wilder Disc. Later Ankh-Morpork is just an attempt to ram together a lot of different time periods of imaginary London (with a few nods to other places), which is interesting in its own way… but I’d like to see more of this Ankh-Morpork, this chaotic and brutal pit of humanity. And I badly wish that Pratchett had seen fit to take us back to Krull, his magical empire at the edge of the world. Most generally of all, the big difference is that there is a lot more magic in The Colour of Magic – literally. This is a world that, as the next book puts it, has an embarrassingly strong magical field. In The Colour of Magic, nothing escapes the influence of magic – as witness the glorious descriptions of the slow light that piles up like snow against mountains and drips like honey dew at dawn. In the later books, magic is indeed an embarrassment, relegated to jokes and a few demonpunk technologies. I enjoy seeing Pratchett write about a genuinely fantasy world. I’m not going to say this is the greatest Discworld book, but it’s absolutely worthy of reading.

That’s the point, I suppose. No, this isn’t a great introduction to Discworld. But don’t read it like that. Read it as a book with a riotous pace and explosive creativity and rampant wit. And there’s another way you should forget about the other books: the ending. Try to remember that the other books hadn’t been written when he got to that ending. There was no guarantee of sequels then; indeed, after the failures of his last two books, the end of The Colour of Magic might well have been the end of Pratchett’s writing career. And it’s a fantastic ending – predictable in one sense, but bold and original in another. No cliffhanger, it’s a perfect ending to a standalone novel about a world we would never be coming back to.

I’m very, very glad that the other Discworld books were written… but The Colour of Magic would have been a better book if it hadn’t had sequels.

So there we are. I’m not going to go too overboard here: let’s be honest, The Colour of Magic is the literary equivalent of those sweets that pop and fizzle in your mouth. It’s not the rich, indulgent ice cream of a book like Hogfather, the sweet but challenging affogato of Men at Arms, the nutritious and intriguing salad of Small Gods, or the bloody steak of Night Watch… there’s virtually no depth to it all, and it’s not going to linger for long in your memory. But come to this looking for a fun and clever book – and not for a Discworld book like those others – and you might just find what you’re looking for here.

(And, by the way – this is a book that deserves its original cover. Those Kirby covers always looked weird on Discworld books to me… but on The Colour of Magic, the style fits perfectly. Although i do quite like this one too: )

Adrenaline: 4/5. Surprisingly effective. Despite not really caring much about the characters, I found the non-stop pace and well-written scenes pretty exciting.

Emotion: 2/5. I cared only very minimally.

Thought: 4/5. No sustained consideration of anything. But constant cleverness, both in ideas and in erudition, as well as clever plotting.

Beauty: 3/5. Some great descriptions, but overall not a lot of attention paid to beauty.

Craft: 3/5. Mixed. Some great lines, some great plotting… some holes, some badly-judged moments, some laziness. Hugely talented, but not entirely polished.

Endearingness: 4/5. I really liked it. Held back by the parodic structure and the lack of emotional engagement, but overally really enjoyable.

Originality: 3/5. Strangely mixed – at times overwhelmingly creative, but at others sadly derivative, over-reliant on parody and on cliché. Frustrating, because he’s clearly got the creativity to do without those crutches.

Overall: 5/7. Good. I’m surprised, I wasn’t expecting to like this so much. And I can see why people might not like it – it is slight, and it isn’t entirely Discworld as we know it. But I’m a sucker for a fast-paced and imaginative book, and this is certainly that. If I like the first book this much, I’m extremely optimistic – to the point of concern – about the later books in the series…

For comparison, Adam gave this three out of five, and so did Nathan. Which I guess actually lines up with my scale, since on Goodreads I truncate the bottom portion of it (i.e. my 5/7 becomes a 3/5). That said, both of them seem to have been a lot more subdued about it. Oh well.

Reading the Silmarillion: Ainulindalë (2) – The Nature of Evil

There’s no sense beating about the bush. If we want to understand Tolkien’s work, there’s no better place to begin than at the ultimate question: what is good? Or rather, what does Tolkien tell us that good is, within the context of this novel?

But that’s a boring question. Let’s ask a more interesting one, which is in the end the same: what is evil?
There is a popular image of Tolkien as a conservative – an arch-conservative. A Little Englander. A man who wants nothing to change, except sometimes for things to change back to the way they were. A religious man, who wants the Church – the original Church, the one and only – to guide our moral lives. Who wants society to be more or less as it was in the depths of the middle ages; who prizes and fetishises Authority, Hierarchy, Obedience. That’s the generous view. A more hostile view – or worse, a more friendly view from entirely the wrong quarters – paints Tolkien as a fascist, and his work, particularly The Lord of the Rings as a fascist heroic epic. A great many seem to believe that Tolkien was perhaps a racist; or, at best, a man who disliked difference, alienness, diversity. A man who believed that everywhere in the world should be full of like-minded middle-class folk from Oxfordshire. Several well-known writers have taken this line; their quotes are quite well-known also: “small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos”, “a kind of Wagnerish Hitlerism”, “don’t ask any questions”, “a conservative hymn to order and reason, to the status quo”, “a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom ‘good taste’ is synonymous with ‘restraint’… and ‘civilised’ behaviour means ‘conventional behaviour in all circumstances’”.
When we read the Ainulindalë, it’s not hard to find evidence for this view. Melkor, after all, turns to ‘evil’ by failing to carry out the desires of his father. What’s more, the stated motivation for this hardly seems to display an authorial dedication to liberalism. We read that at first the Ainur create a multitude of melodies interwoven in harmony… but that Melkor desires his part to be greater than it is. Thus, disharmony arises. Harmony, of course, was not the immediate state of things: at first, each only knew themselves, and their own part, and only gradually did they come to know each other, and find harmony between the parts. Harmony in music, then, goes hand in hand with fraternity among the musicians. Melkor, however, divides himself out from the others – he goes by himself in empty places, and ‘being alone he had begun to conceive thoughts of his own’.

That’s a tricky statement for those of us who don’t want to paint Tolkien as a reactionnary tyrant. What’s so wrong with having thoughts of your own? Well, maybe nothing at all. The point, after all, isn’t that Melkor has thoughts of his own, but that they are ‘unlike those of his brethren’. And yet is that much of an improvement? Evil is having thoughts unlike those of those around you? Of course not. Tolkien doesn’t mean to say that at all, as we will see in a moment. Tolkien is perfectly OK with people being different, and having different thoughts – creation begins, after all, with each of the Ainur concentrating on their own melodies, and Tolkien will go on to show how they have such different concerns and interests that some seem hardly to interact with certain others. From time to time, they will even come into conflict with one another. When Tolkien says that Melkor’s thoughts became ‘unalike’ from those of his brethren, he can’t just mean that they were different in the same way that they were all different – instead, they must be different in some more fundamental way. And music shows what is meant: the other melodies all harmonise with one another – they are different, and yet alike in their relation to a common music – but Melkor’s melody seeks to drown out that of the others, not harmonise with it.

That’s not a very interesting insight into evil, I’ll be honest. A little more interesting is the implicit reasoning: Melkor seeks power and glory because he has been alone with himself. Tolkien doesn’t spell out what that ‘because’ means, but to me it seems as though the suggestion is that the other Ainur are able to see each other as comrades in a common cause, musicians in the same ensemble; Melkor has been apart for so long that he seems to have lost that sense of fraternity. Melkor’s failure to ‘know his place’ comes from Melkor’s failure to have enough in common with those he is meant to be collaborating with.

If goodness requires a degree of commonality between people, and a willingness to know our place, and yet at the same time we must all be different, what exactly is it that we must keep in common? Tolkien, of course, doesn’t say. Yet there is nothing all that radically conservative in this viewpoint. Even liberals usually agree that a society cannot function without a shared, common framework of beliefs – the difference between liberals and conservatives instead revolves around the extent and specificity of this necessary framework. Tolkien offers no comment on this. Indeed, becoming fanciful for a moment, it’s tempting to read this passage as suggesting that the way in which Melkor’s thoughts become ‘unalike’ is simply that he no longer recognises that they are alike – perhaps his dissent from the community is simply that he does not believe himself to be in community?

Anyway, at first glance this may still not look very pleasant: goodness is being alike? Goodness is knowing your place? But these suggestions are stamped over by Tolkien’s later comments. First, he notes that the disharmony that arises is not simply because of Melkor’s pride. The problem begins with Melkor, but the only result is ‘dischord around him’. That sounds minor; that sounds controllable. What happens next, however, is that some of those around him grow ‘despondent’, and some of those then choose to follow Melkor’s music rather than ‘the thought which they had at first’. Only then do we hear of ‘turbulent sound’ and ‘dark waters’ and ‘a raging storm’ and ‘endless wrath that would not be assuaged’. Melkor is the seed of evil, but he is not the body of it – it is what he inspires in others that brings them to evil.

It’s a very Catholic explanation for the triumph of evil. Even Melkor, by far the greatest of all the Ainur, can do nothing but create a little local dischord; global evil comes not from Melkor’s pride, but from the despair of those around him. Despair – the greatest evil of all, the loss of faith, which is in a way to say the loss of the perfect love of god. And at the root of this is the Catholic doctrine of natural law: the belief that right and wrong can be known by reason alone; the belief that at the heart of everybody is a conscience that can discern each person’s proper actions, and that sin arises from the failure to heed that personal conscience. For humans, of course (as I understand it) this theoretical clarity is obfuscated by the weakness of our intellect and will, and our finite knowledge – for humans, the rational conscience is so likely to go wrong somewhere, to be lead astray by some confusion or temptation, that the best path is to listen closely to God’s more direct advice through Scripture, and Tradition, and the Church, to tell us how to interpret our conscience. But for the Ainur, these limitations are less significant – the Ainur, after all, are angelic beings in the direct presence of God. We can expect their conscience to be pure and their intellect to be acute. So we are not told that many of them were evil, or that many were turned to evil through seduction or temptation. Instead, those around Melkor have, as it were, gone over to the dark side because they have despaired – they have lost their faith in their own conscience, their faith that they must simply follow their own melody. Time and again in Tolkien’s work, it is despair that leads to evil – in The Lord of the Rings, for instance, we may think of Saruman and of Denethor, each of whom first despaired and then surrendered their own principles. That is what despair is: the surrender of one’s own melody.

So if Tolkien’s description of Melkor’s own fall may have seemed a little fascistic, his description of Melkor’s allies should assuage that fear in us: maintaining fraternity, each of us keeping to our own place, our own path in life, must not be confused with doing what we are told, with following the loudest and most glorious noise we hear. That is the route to evil.

And what, in the end, is evil? It isn’t dischord, or disharmony – those are merely the consequences of the fight between evil and good. Instead, we are told, evil “had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes”. Unison, and repetition – that’s Melkor’s world. When somebody tries to tell you that Tolkien is a conservative writer who just wanted everything to be an extension of middle-class England, and that he wanted nothing to ever change, or when people say that his work is chauvanist, or even fascistic, and most of all when fascists themselves appeal to his work… just remember that at the core, his concept of evil is the idea of ‘many trumpets braying upon a few notes’.

This, indeed, is an interesting contrast between Tolkien himself and many of those who have followed after him in the fantasy genre. Often we see it said explicitly or implicitly that the battle between good and evil is the same as, or subordinate to, the battle between order and chaos – with chaos lined up with evil, and order with good. [I'm minded of a striking mantra in the Dragonlance books, where, even though evil/good and chaos/order are theoretically explicitly perpendicular dimensions of character, we are nonetheless reassured that 'evil turns upon itself']. In Tolkien, by contrast, evil is if anything associated with an excess of order.

In the end, the fascistic interpretation of Tolkien – perhaps even the conservative interpretation – seem to fundamentally misunderstand Tolkien’s beliefs. Departing briefly from the text itself, we may want to bear in mind that Tolkien himself described his political thoughts as tending toward anarchism; he said that the most ‘improper’ job for any man was bossing another man – even if the boss happened to be a saint; he said (presumably exaggerating) that he would arrest and execute anyone found using the word “State”, so obnoxious was the concept. If he was undemocratic, it was because democracy only elected those who ran for office – who he considered the worst possible people to be allowed to obtain it. His favoured option, he said, would be an unconstitutional king… whose only interest was stamp-collecting. Even his much-discussed antipathy to ‘progress’ was rooted in this anarcho-monarchism: he feared that the end of the ‘inefficient’ old way of life would make his system impossible and require the creation of a strong, Statist, coercive system. His reactionary and antidemocratic urges should therefore be seen not as fascist, not as a desire for authority and hierarchy and obedience and order and reason, but as precisely the opposite: a strong opposition to anything (democracy, efficiency) which could stiffle the individual conscience and the individual voice. He preferred the older, less effective tyrannies, and saw them as protection against the newer and more terrible forms. But this confusion should hardly surprise us, as it is a common confusion regarding the nature of Toryism, perhaps because ‘Tory’ has become synonymous with their replacements, the Conservatives. But in the beginning, ‘Tory’ meant something very different. The name should give it away: it’s a reference to Tory Island, notorious Irish haunt of brigands and rebels. That is to say, Catholic ne’er-do-wells. The Tories became known as Tories because they were Catholics and allies of Catholics – the supporters of Charles II’s Catholic brother, James II… at a time when Catholicism was a despised, persecuted and oppressed minority. That genesis of Toryism seems to me to capture the sense in which Tolkien was a Tory: a persecuted Catholic minority who looked to a powerful monarch for protection against majoritarian, democratic institutions. Many people who might now be seen as rebels, outsiders, the disenfranchised, supported the Tories. Of course, so did a lot of fat rich landowners, and so did a lot of fanatical conservatives and reactionaries, and they went on to be very conservative about a whole lot of things – despite their origin, for instance, it was the Tories who generally opposed Catholic Emancipation in the nineteenth century (and drove electoral reform as a result, hoping, as the Whigs once had before them, that more democracy would help maintain the oppression of minorities). But though the idea of the Tory (particularly Catholic Tory) anarcho-monarchist has fallen out of political (and to a large extent social) relevence, it has a long tradition, and is a better way to approach Tolkien than as a simple conservative.

[An interesting comparison I’ve not seen made that often is between Tolkien’s views and libertarianism. It might be thought that the two could not be more different – and yet. Most libertarianism, classically, has shared Tolkien’s support for a protective central government, though like Tolkien they preferred this government to do very little, and shared his skepticism around democratic institutions and his fear of the tyranny of the majority. Tolkien could probably be seen as a libertarian in very old-fashioned clothing (and probably a bit more to the left, more a One Nation-er than a Neoliberal). Comparisons might also be made between Tolkien and Ayn Rand personally – both writers of very big and very distinctive novels who paint in bright whites and dark blacks and attempt a semi-religious moral importance; both writers, accordingly, who have developed fanatical apologists and vehement enemies. As someone who loves Tolkien and hates Rand, this isn’t a particularly comfortable comparison, but I think it’s there to be made.]

Anyway, enough tangent. I’m not going to pretend that reading the Ainulindalë will make everyone think of Tolkien as a democrat/Marxist revolutionary; I’m not even going to pretend that reading it will give anyone a really clear of what exactly Tolkien thought about anything – I’m not convinced Tolkien knew what he thought on most things, at least in any systematic way.  But the Ainulindalë is where The Silmarillion begins – where our experience of The Silmarillion begins – and I think it lays down important principles regarding how we should approach the stories that follow. Some of those principles I’d like to return to later, but for now, here’s just one of the most important: evil is what happens when powerful people are too proud and wish to dominate others, but it is also, and more devastatingly, what happens when many people lose faith in their own destinies and allow themselves to become voices turned to someone else’s song.

I don’t believe that Tolkien ever intended his books to convey a structure and coherent body of moral ‘theory’ – but I do believe that, reading The Silmarillion, we get a very strong feel of the author’s moral sentiment. If I appear to be ascribing too much to Tolkien’s text or suggesting too close an allegory, it is most likely because I am attempting to bring out this sentiment to greater visibility.

I’ve a feeling we’ll be encountering evil again later on in this book…