October novel-reading

[garran]

Stubbornly, there is some.

William Gibson, Spook Country
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
George R. R. Martin, Fevre Dream
Ellen Kushner, Swordspoint
Ellen Kushner, The Privilege of the Sword

This batch highlights what is perhaps an unavoidable flaw in my method with these posts, or at least it will if a particular regular commenter asks about the book that I expect them to, because I read that book way back at the beginning of the month, and now my impressions are much vaguer than they were at the time. I can probably find something to say, though.

Comments

[meta4mix.livejournal.com]

Oooh, shiny, a new Gibson novel.

Hmm. What'd you think of that? And for that matter, The Screwtape Letters? ^_^;

[chiave-trust.livejournal.com]

I'll second these.

And depending on what you think about Gibson, have you ever looked into any of Neal Stephenson's work?

Easiest reply first

[garran.livejournal.com]

I have read Cryptonomicon two or three times, but none of Stephenson's other work, though The Diamond Age is sitting on a shelf around here somewhere. To elaborate my canonical cyberpunk author credentials, I have also read some short form Sterling, but never yet any Cadigan, although I keep meaning to.


-Garran

#1

[garran.livejournal.com]

I thought that you were going to be Brendan! Now I have to come up with things to say about Spook Country that don't assume the other party has also read it.

(Oh, there he is. Well, you can all have one slightly disjointed review.)

Spook Country seems to be the second part of a series that began with Pattern Recognition. It is set in the same world, by which I mean both 'in the present day, plus a couple of months' more new articles on slashdot' (I wonder if people reading in twenty years will have trouble figuring out which fads Gibson invented?), and 'in a world where the events of Pattern Recognition have taken place'; at least, there are characters who appear in both. There is a shared concern with art forms that rely on new technology, essentially populist because that technology is so readily available, and another with tracking the weirder cultural consequences of the World Trade Center attacks. I wondered, when I started, whether this was going to displace Pattern Recognition as my favourite Gibson novel; it didn't, but I liked it a lot, both for what they're doing together and for what it accomplishes new.

I don't mean to play up the degree to which these books are a departure from his previous work, of course. They're different, but this one contains a weary protagonist in over her head in the employ of a mysterious corporation, and a junkie who spends pages rhapsodizing articulately about the precise sort of satisfaction he gets from his fix (his analogy makes me hungry!), and a general almost surreal vividness of description combined with a peculiar preoccupation with pop cultural ephemera; it is, in other words, a William Gibson novel. I do think, though, that the writing, on a prose level, is better and more assured now than in anything he did before.

It's 'spook' as in intelligence operative, but it might also be in the sense of being nervously frightened. This isn't really a 'spy thriller' in the conventional sense, but a book about living in the civilian world, and having only an anxious peripheral knowledge of a general cloud of terrorism, counterterrorism, espionage, war profiteering, vigilantism, and so on. Of the three POV characters, two of them are involved with one or the other of the pertinent sides in the particular minor conflict that drives the plot, but neither is in a position to really understand what's going on; by the end of the book, the general outlines of that conflict, and how it came out, are clear to the reader and at least some of the characters, but most of the larger context -- the identities of the major players, how the aftermath will play out for each of them -- remains obscure. This brief interlude with the spooks was not enough to earn their secrets. (I have more thoughts about the ending more generally, which would be thematically appropriate here, but shall forebear for spoilers' sake.)

The section which is an excerpt from a fictional wikipedia article doesn't read like a wikipedia article at all; it would make sense as a journalistic article, or maybe a press release, but the prose isn't flattened out and non-editorial enough. It might be an errant page that hasn't been fixed up yet, but if that were the case I would expect some acknowledgement in the text (a 'citation needed' would have been pretty awesome); I think it's more likely that Gibson is more familiar with wikipedia as a cultural phenomenon than he is with what it's like zoomed in. The section describing a meal at a Vietnamese restaurant in Vancouver, however, is pretty spot on.

I thought the way the plot utilized a particular character's moderate celebrity was very neat.


-Andy H.

Re: #1

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

And also "spook" as in "shade of a dead person, which is always 'there' in a sense, but can only be seen under special circumstances." And in a fourth way that I got really excited about when I thought of it, reading the book, but can't remember now.

Re: #1

[garran.livejournal.com]

Dude! That explains why that particular new-technology art form! As well, the overlaid VR, which is the 'country' of those particular spooks, functions pretty well as a metaphor for the espionage-world, which also takes up the same space as the world of the commonplace through which most people walk oblivious to the bodies at their feet.


-Andy H.

Reposted with extra rot13 because I noticed there was more spoilery stuff in there than I thought

[garran.livejournal.com]

...cyhf Obool Pubzob naq gur fuvccvat pbagnvare ner urnivyl vaibyirq jvgu obgu nygreangr pbhagevrf.

This isn't exactly an extra meaning, but aside from the ghostly celebrities there were some more traditionally unquiet dead, most especially Hollis' dead bandmate. There was almost something haunted-seeming, or at least indicative of some lingering personal residue, in the way that uvf zbarl sryg fb hapbzsbegnoyr va Ubyyvf' unaqf, naq whzcrq fuvc va n irel hayvxryl pbvapvqrapr sbe gur fgbel'f znva fgvyy rkgnag qlfshapgvbany whaxvr. (Gung qbrfa'g obqr jryy sbe Zvytevz, qbrf vg? Abg gung V purevfurq terng bcgvzvfz sbe uvz ng gur raq bs gur obbx naljnl. Nyfb, guvf frrzf yvxr nf tbbq n cynpr nf nal gb zragvba zl fhfcvpvba gung gung tragyrzna, jub ercrngrqyl engvbanyvmrf uvzfrys vagb fheeraqrevat uvf qrpvfvba-znxvat gb n ohyylvat, zbenyyl-fhfcrpg nhgubevgl svther, vf anzrq sbe gur Zvytenz rkcrevzragf.)

Apparently I remember more about this book than I thought.


-Andy H.

Re: Reposted with extra rot13 because I noticed there was more spoilery stuff in there than I though

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

Yes! That was the other meaning! I like your phrasing of the VR-espionage parallel.

I think you're right about the rot13 stuff, although I'd never heard of that before. What Wikipedia says about it is startling, particularly the fast-food-prank connection (several of which incidents took place right here in Kentucky).

#2 (Part 1)

[garran.livejournal.com]

This got long, because apparently I wanted to complain.

I went into The Screwtape Letters expecting it to be an epistolary novel about a Christian devil, but it turns out to be a work of religious philosophy that uses a letter-writing devil as its conceit. Ultimately, I think I would have been better off either reading one of Lewis' explicitly nonfictional theological works, or one of his genuine novels; I didn't end up finding Screwtape quite satisfying on either front.

It wasn't satisfying as a novel, because the plot was so minimal, and the characters so vaguely drawn. The humans are archetypical cyphers, there to provoke or illustrate points about human nature; the other devils, individually, come off roughly like Power Rangers villains. Screwtape himself has personality, but unfortunately it feels like it's the author's, rather than his own; I mean, it does make a certain amount of character sense that Screwtape would be obsessed with God, and would go off on angry digressions about His motives and methods at the least opportunity, but in practise it usually felt to me like Lewis was just explaining his own opinions directly to the reader, with all of the dismayed adjectives swapped out for approving ones and vice versa.

This leads to one of the ways that it was problematic as a work of religious philosophy: his conceit is so conceited! That is, there are a lot of places where Screwtape chortles about how whatever state of affairs he has just finished explaining (usually to do with salvation) is perfectly obvious to him, since he is in a position to perceive spiritual truths directly, but fortunately is completely unclear to most humans, because they're so foolish and muddled and blinded by their mortality, and so they can be easily tricked away from it. But since what he's actually just explained is Lewis' own opinion, often on a matter of considerable religious controversy, this seems like a bit of a rhetorical cheat on Lewis' part; instead of saying, "I think this is so, and here are my reasons," he gets to say, "This is obviously so, and here is a voice from the afterworld, where there is no longer any doubt, to prove it, and call you an imbecile for doubting me." Actually, of course, this creature is just something that Lewis made up!

Similarly, there are a fair number of places where atheism, in its soft sense of 'failure to believe in God', is discussed, and Screwtape, from his smug position of supernatural insight into the weaknesses of the human psyche, is quite dismissive of it. Atheists, we're told, are people who refuse to actually sit down and consider the world rationally -- they are the sort who believe ideas because they are popular, or daring, or 'modern', rather than because they have investigated what's likely to be true, or else they love feeling superior to the amusing superstitions of those around them, or else they are so obsessed with the evidence of their senses that they cannot really credit anything that doesn't impose itself directly on their perceptions. In any case, they are on some level willfully ignorant, and are, it's implied, most certainly on their way to hell. This was probably the most personally annoying thing about the book; I felt like it was doing its level best to define me out of existence. (Actually, I suspect that Lewis was turning again to a bad habit I noticed in his semi-autobiography Surprised By Joy, where he seemed an awful lot to take his own personal idiosyncracies and assume a priori that they were universal truths of human nature. This suspicion actually makes me feel more charitable toward him; it's never as easy, after all, to consider someone to be a total classless and offensive buffoon as when one is secretly thinking of one's own former self.)

(Oh! I also think he's doing that same thing when he talks about what sorts of women men are attracted to, and what our motivations are in each case. Because yikes.)

[Continued in reply]

#2 (Part 2)

[garran.livejournal.com]

Another reason it was unsatisfying on this level was that the fictional elements made it difficult to be sure which parts he wanted me to seriously entertain. The devils are a good example of this -- they're basically a slightly sophisticated version of the shoulder-devils from comic strips, and I find it extremely difficult to imagine anyone really taking them to exist. Except, Lewis warns against this very thing in his text, saying that the way devils keep us from realizing they exist is to put pictures of men in red tights in our heads, and say that, since we cannot believe in something like that, we cannot believe in them. Okay, so I shouldn't dismiss Lewis' devils out of hand because of the ridiculous elements of their anthropomorphism; but which parts of Lewis' ridiculous portrayals (which in my view encompass most of the book) am I to take it that he wanted me to disregard, and which am I to take it that he really wants to argue for as things that exist? Since his only communication with me is from within a narrative that assumes all of it to be true, there is no way for him to make it plain, and indeed he doesn't.

Since the book didn't actually make me as unrelievingly cranky as it appears from this report so far, I should probably find something that isn't cranky to say, and in fact there were occasional things I did like. I thought that the quasi-libertarian philosophy on love that Screwtape explains as the underpinning of devil society was actually clever and well-conceived; unlike most of the devil things in the book, I found it both novel and believable. I think there were also a number of things I found insightful that I now forget; for instance (since I remember this one), I think that his points about getting caught up in hurtful patterns with the people we live with, and forgetting to apply our general moral principles or our abstract kind feelings for these people in our individual interactions with them, are well-taken. If I had come upon this book as a Christian who already agreed with it on all important points, and just took it as a colourful book of advice, I would probably have been a lot better-disposed toward it than I actually was.


-Andy H.

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

Say, Andy, what did you think about... THE PRIVILEGE OF THE SWORD! OH! SURPRISE!

I want to know about Spook Country too though.

[garran.livejournal.com]

Awesome.

Okay. The Privilege of the Sword is a Twenty Years After sort of sequel to Swordspoint, which as can be seen I read immediately before (since the two were actually released very close to 20 years apart realtime, I'm sure that from a longtime fan's point of view I am an unconscionable cheat for not getting around to it until I wouldn't need to wait at all for Privilege afterward). Katherine, the protagonist, is summoned to the unnamed capital city by her uncle, the Mad Duke Tremontaine; she daydreams about a very traditional young lady's introduction to society, but the Duke, being Mad, proposes to dress her in trousers and train her in swordsmanship, heretofore an exclusively masculine occupation. I liked Swordspoint a lot -- it was clever, well-executed, and charmingly atypical -- but Privilege won me over totally, so much and so viscerally so that I've been kind of at a loss as to how to write about it.

So here's a review that's a little more skewed to the stuff I can talk about analytically than was my actual reading experience. A lot of what made it wonderful for me, I think, was the way that it played off of and expanded on the first book; especially, the changes that Katherine effects just by being there. Where everyone in Swordspoint was to varying degrees brutal, politically sophisticated, and mentally unbalanced, Katherine is naive, straightforward, and naturally decent; her voice is sufficient to shift the genre from bloody and decadent fantasy of manners to coming of age YA, albeit without the safety mechanisms that ordinarily function in that genre to keep sex and violence out of the view of the story proper. And she is a hero, upset by injustice and strongly motivated to correct it, in the way that nobody in Swordspoint can be said to be (though some of them have personal codes). As well as its making her likeable to me, in a way that more morally cautious protagonists are only ever merely interesting, it's also fascinating to watch the way that her enemies, and her uncle's, continually make missteps in predicting what they will do because they have failed to consider this difference in motivations. Her heroism, and his madness, mean that neither can be counted upon to prioritize in ways that others in their aristocratic social world take for granted.

Her presence also allows the book to function as a feminist rebuttal, and isn't it wonderful to see an author writing that sort of answer to her own work? Partway through reading Swordspoint it occurred to me that, although this was a book with a lot of sex in it (though few if any sex scenes) and not a lot of heteronormativity, since it's an important worldbuilding detail that it's not considered surprising or outre for men to have male lovers, I hadn't seen any acknowledgement of the possibility that women might sleep with one another. On consideration, I decided that this was probably due to two factors: first, that all of the POV characters (with one brief exception that I can recall) were male, and so they probably weren't in a position to see that this was going on; second, that all the sex in the book outside of the main couple is political, as much about power and social advantage as it is about attraction, and these things are concentrated almost exclusively in the hands of the men. (There is one politically potent woman in the book, but even she wields her influence through the men she sleeps with, maintaining a respectable veneer of disinterest in politics.)

[Continued in reply]

[garran.livejournal.com]

Katherine is a woman, and the main POV, and so we do get to see a lot more of what the woman's world of the city is like (including, yes, confirmation that there are lesbians). She is also a female swordsman, which means that she has a sort of direct agency unprecedented in nobles of her sex. She can act on her own behalf -- or, as she chooses, on that of others -- in the city aristocracy's system of redress-by-duel, instead of relying on male relatives to choose whether to take insult. Her public honour is her own to control, and her opinions, and her outrage, have corresponding weight (though not an overwhelming weight; not enough to render her certainly safe, or her grievances certainly addressed. The sorts of victories Katherine is able to win fall, I think, under "small but important"). Just as she reveals the city's social womanhood, she is also a challenge to it, indicating, and clumsily working for, the possibility of justice where injustice is.

More generally, speaking not specifically of Katherine but still of the interaction between the books, I am a sucker for those scenes in followups where we encounter a character that we, the audience, know and like, and revel in our understanding of just how the unsuspecting newer characters are about to be surprised or impressed. (See also: Bujold's Komarr.) -- Or those where a character learns something, or sees something, about one of the older characters that they can't have the context to understand, but which the reader does, or other things of that sort, where a mythology is first established and then used to effect. At this, and at embracing its romantic fantasy tropes without sacrificing any of its general savviness or complexity in the process, The Privilege of the Sword excels.

I think this is the book I read this month that I am most likely to reread.


-Andy H.

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a spectacular recommendation. I've had Privilege sitting on my bookshelf for two months but haven't yet cracked it; I didn't realize it was a sequel to anything. So do you recommend reading Swordspoint for the oh-just-wait thrill of re-meeting old characters, or reading it second as a progression from YA to decadent adult fantasy?

[garran.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest taking them in order; I do recommend Swordspoint in its own right, so it's not like you'd be reading it just to catch up, and -- although each has a main plot that is basically self-contained -- there are some story threads that continue over both. Reading Privilege first would also spoil certain outcomes and revelations in Swordspoint that I thought were both neat and unexpected.

(There is actually another book, The Fall of the Kings, co-written with Delia Sherman and set a few generations after Privilege; I tried to read it a couple of years ago and bounced off pretty hard, and have been trying to decide whether I think that the context of these books is liable to change that verdict. I probably will give it another try.)


-Andy H.

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

I forgot all about this conversation, then FINALLY read Privilege over my Christmas trip and had a very similar reaction to yours: it "won me over totally, so much and so viscerally so that I've been kind of at a loss as to how to write about it." I am going to have to write my own review, now that the 24-hour get-some-distance period has elapsed.

Anyway, I've been running around telling all my friends who ever liked the Tamora Pierce books that they HAVE to read this one, and no they can't borrow my copy, I have to read it again.

[joshlamont.livejournal.com]

<3 Screwtape Letters