→ March 17, 2008
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Darkness at Noon.

Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (#8 on the Modern Library 100) is Koestler’s confessional after he visited the Stalin-era Soviet Union and became disillusioned with communism. It’s powerful both as a political statement and a literary work, but the narrative starts to come apart in the third chapter (of four) and I found myself losing interest.

Darkness tells the story of Rubashov, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution who is arrested in the opening pages and charged with plotting the demise of the Soviet government, which was a capital offense and a pretense used to execute hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens during the 1930s. Rubashov knows this is coming and there’s a slightly cathartic aspect to his arrest. The book then drifts into several key anecdotes from his career as an agent of the revolution, which come to his mind as he’s encouraged and then coerced into confessing to the trumped-up charges that will lead to his death.

As a political statement – it’s not even an allegory due to its intense realism – it’s potent. The ease with which the prison officials discharge their duties is stomach-churning. Rubashov’s own role in sending several loyal Communists to their deaths, whether in service to the party or to save his own skin, is hardly more palatable. And the relentless subjugation of the individual in the service of the masses comes off as incredibly wrong-headed to anyone raised to believe in the sanctity of life.

Koestler makes use of multiple literary symbols to enhance his arguments both about the empty promises of Marxism and about Rubashov’s own guilt and struggles with his conscience, notably through the recurring toothache that appears during periods of extreme guilt over a Party member he betrayed or simply his betrayal of the Party’s original goals. The metaphor of the empty space on the wall where the portrait of the Revolution’s fallen leaders was also clever.

But Darkness didn’t pass the interest test for me. The book is divided into three “hearings” plus a short fourth chapter describing Rubashov’s public “trial” and execution. (I’m not spoiling anything there – you know from the start that he’s going to be shot.) During the third hearing, Rubashov, previously a strong man with complete conviction in the rightness of his actions, sees those convictions weaken and devolves into a rambling, irrelevant ex-revolutionary – exactly what the Party wants him to become. It undermines the book’s essential conflict between Rubashov (the ideologically pure Communist) and the Party (the Stalinist regime, enforcing its will on the people at any cost), and it also meant that there was no admirable or sympathetic character in the story – his prosecutors may have been evil, but Rubashov was weak, and there’s no sympathy in seeing a man hoisted on a petard he helped construct.

There’s no avoiding a comparison of Darkness to the other two classic anti-communist novels of the 20th century, 1984 and Brave New World. Darkness has an insurmountable advantage of realism, both because Koestler went to Russia during the Great Purge, and because his setting is contemporary and characters very realistically drawn. But the other two books were, for my money, better reads, perhaps because their authors took one step back from reality and created environments in which they could control the action. Koestler created a scenario with an inevitable conclusion, and I imagine to a large degree that once he began writing he found the characters moved of their own accord, which created a predictable narrative that, for me, reached the “just shoot him already” stage with fifty pages to go.

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→ March 13, 2008
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Harry Potter and the two-part finale.

The final Harry Potter book will be
split into two films, with the first to be released in 2010. So at least one of the books will receive enough time for a proper film treatment.

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→ March 10, 2008
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The Pickwick Papers.

My wife has long told me that I am afraid of long books. I think she’s right. Since college, I’ve only read a few books that were as long as 600 pages (not counting Harry Potter books – I’m just talking literature here), and I’ve been pretty selective about starting any book of more than around 400 pages. This does limit one’s options, especially in the realm of serious literature.

The flip side, however, is that I get great satisfaction from actually reading a book of that length. I’ve built reading long books up so much in my mind that completing one – especially doing so in a relatively short length of time – feels like a great achievement. As a result, I was very pleased to find Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers to be a great read, and, with some help from a too-long travel day and a stomach virus, managed to knock it off in just two weeks.

The Pickwick Papers (#76 on the The Novel 100) was Dickens’ first novel and is unique in his canon as both a comedy and a picaresque novel, making it much more readable than that scourge of all of our high school years, Great Expectations. Pickwick follows the four members of the “Pickwick Club,” a sort of traveling social group of four men, led by the elder Samuel Pickwick, and his three followers. Like most picaresque novels, the book is structured around a series of stories, and was in fact sold in monthly installments as it was written, but the stories last longer and are more interconnected in Pickwick than in other classics of the genre, like The Adventures of Roderick Random. The central storyline, emblematic of Dickens’ later subject matter, is a lawsuit, allowing Dickens to satirize the justice system, crooked lawyers, and greedy people, but threaded through it are the romantic follies of his followers and his loyal servant, Samuel Weller, as well as the Pickwick Club’s run-ins with the fraudster Alfred Jingle.

The novel is a masterpiece of plot construction and comic invention. Dickens weaves the subplots together and deftly paces the stories to keep them fresh in the reader’s mind without revealing too much of any one subplot at once. Although the story relies heavily on coincidences – mostly characters running into each other – it was a common plot device of the time. And the wit in his prose is tremendous, from Dickens’ descriptions of some of his fringe characters (“his forehead was narrow, his face wide, his head large, and his nose all on one side, as if Nature, indignant with the propensities she observed in him in his birth, had given it an angry tweak which it had never recovered”) to satires large and small on all manner of persons.

If you’re up for the 840-page read, I recommend the 2004 Signet Classics edition (linked above) because of the presence of a short afterword by Jasper Fforde, who sings the novel’s praises and also mentions the fate of some of the landmark buildings mentioned in the book, a few of which survive to this day. And if you’re not up for it, I suggest that you hop over to Project Gutenberg, download the free e-text, and read Chapter 49. It’s a self-contained story that is just brilliantly delivered, and a good taste of what the best parts of The Pickwick Papers have to offer.

Next up: Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler.

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→ February 29, 2008
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Song of Solomon.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is one of my favorite novels of any time period or genre, and since Song of Solomon is considered her second-best work, it’s been on my to-be-read list for a long time. It’s not quite the masterwork that Beloved is, but it’s still a great literary achievement of phenomenal scope, another example of how Morrison can take universal themes and express them through individual characters and simple stories.

Song of Solomon is the story of the Dead family, a black family separated by disagreement, by location, and by financial situation into two branches. The book’s central character, Macon “Milkman” Dead, is born in the opening pages, and the central plot strand follows his lifelong search for identity, although it’s not until the book’s final third that he realizes himself that that’s what he’s seeking. Along the way, he breaks with his father and forges a relationship with his paternal aunt, then reunites with his father and sets off on an ill-fated mission that harkens back to the origins of the family split. The novel uses this quest by the grandson of a freed slave to explore questions of racial identity, the double oppression faced by black women, and the uplifting and destructive powers of love.

The book is rife with references to the Bible and Greek mythology, including the unusual character names that are par for the course with Morrison, all bringing us insight into the characters themselves. Milkman has a sister named First Corinthians, named by her father by the random selection of a Bible verse, but named by Morrison to signify the woman’s role as someone who attempts to bring people together. (The apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was occasioned by reports of possible schisms in the fledgling Christian church in Corinth.) Morrison also works in allusions to other stories and novels, some obvious, such as the way the character Circe serves a similar purpose to her Greek namesake, and some more debatable, such as the resemblance of Hagar, named after Abraham’s servant and concubine, to Nately’s whore from Catch-22. The heavy yet seamless use of allusions and references make reading a good Morrison novel into a textural experience.

Next up: The Pickwick Papers, by my high school nemesis, Chuckie Dickie. I’ve got 600 pages to go, so it might be a while before my next book writeup.

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→ February 17, 2008
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Atonement.

Warning – review contains spoilers, since there’s no way to discuss the book’s merits without discussing the ending.

Ian McEwan’s Atonement is a wonderful novel undone in just sixteen pages, the length of an ill-considered epilogue that says the first 95% of the novel doesn’t mean anything like what you thought it meant. It succeeds from a critical perspective, but as a reader, I felt cheated.

The atonement in question revolves around Briony, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the Tallis family, and the way she lets a girlish fantasy and her lack of knowledge of adult relations (physical and emotional) spiral out of control, thus ruining the lives of two people close to her. McEwan has to stretch a little to get to the critical sequence where Briony falsely accuses a man of rape, including the use of a vulgarity I won’t repeat here and that would be almost out of the question for the man in question to have used in that fashion, but in general, the way he progresses through the novel’s first 95% is strong. The seemingly omniscient third-person narrator takes us inside the heads of the three central characters, and there’s a single jump in time that pushes the plot forward past several years where nothing of direct relevance happens, which turns out to be a solid decision that allows the second sequence of events to coincide with (and create parallels to) the dark opening of World War II. The book’s pacing and prose have the feeling of classic 19th century British literature, and while there’s no confusing Atonement with Jane Austen’s work, there’s no doubt McEwan drew Briony as the flip side of Northanger Abbey‘s Catherine Morland.

McEwan himself is an outspoken atheist, thus the novel’s central theme of a search for earthly redemption without reference to or hope for a spiritual one or one in an afterlife. (To be clear, religion or lack thereof is not an explicit theme in the novel.) Briony’s search for redemption – what she calls atonement, but what really is an external forgiveness from both of the parties she so directly wronged – affects her choices early in life, driving her away from education into a nursing job that takes on importance after the war comes home to Britain during the evacuation of British troops from France in 1941. Thus limited by the need for a redemption in the here and now, she seeks out her estranged sister to try to bring about a reconciliation through admission of her own crime.

Or does she? McEwan throws the entire book into doubt in a muddled, tacked-on epilogue. Is what came before a full representation of the actual history of events? An incomplete one? A complete fiction? Briony tells us how, as an author, she can play God and rewrite events, but can not ultimately redeem them – or herself, or fix the lives she ruined. But what then is the responsibility of McEwan? This is his universe, his reality. He can give Briony the atonement she desires, in full or in part. But he needs to be honest with his readers. In fact, by not telling us until that 95-percent mark that what we have read to that point is a meta-novel, a fictional work within a fictional work, with most details true to the fictional reality (stay with me) but some not, and oh-by-the-way he isn’t even clear in the final pages how much of the preceding novel is reality, he’s dishonest with his readers, using our credulous nature – that we step into a novel prepared to believe its reality, to suspend our disbelief, to accept the characters as real people as long as they’re drawn true to life – to his advantage to pull a nasty trick on us. Instead of a deeper look at redemption, atonement, or just plain old-fashioned forgiveness, McEwan turns the book into a writer’s lament, that one can not undo reality or even find catharsis through fictionalizing real-life events and altering them to suit one’s needs. Well, no shit, Ian.

On page 334, I was prepared to praise Atonement as a clever, well-written work with expertly crafted characters and brilliant descriptive prose. In sixteen pages, McEwan tore that opinion apart, turning the book into a wicked bit of sleight of hand that still has the same characterization and prose but that proves terribly unsatisfying as an actual novel because of the betrayal of the reader’s trust.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 9, 2008
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The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear.

Walter Moers’ The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear was described in a Washington Post review as “equal parts J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, and Shel Silverstein,” which isn’t too far off the mark. It’s a flight of fancy, a children’s book written for grown-ups, showcasing an amazingly creative mind, but a little light on storyline.

The book follows Captain Bluebear from his first memories as a tiny cub afloat on the ocean in a nutshell through his first thirteen and a half “lives” – a bluebear has twenty-seven, although these are lives in the sense of chapters of his life, rather than twenty-seven separate mortal coils – each of which is sort of a self-contained story. Most take the form of “Bluebear finds himself in a new environment, gets into trouble (generally not of his own making), and needs to escape.” There are recurring secondary characters through several of the stories, and Moers’ facility with creating both secondary characters and unusual places is incredible – for example, the Earspoonlets:

Even more innocuous and equally beneficial to society were the acoustic vampires popularly known as Earspoonlets, which lived on speech. They were little bigger than dachshunds but had hearing organs of which a young elephant need not have been ashamed. They spent most of their time lying around in public places and pricking up their ears – an extremely amusing sight. Earspoonlets were capable of storing up all they heard for months and regurgitating it before it was fully digested. Thus they were much in demand as itinerant purveyors of information of witnesses of arguments. You could easily annoy them by noiselessly opening and shutting your mouth as if talking. This made them bounce around like mad things, vainly trying to catch the words they thought they were missing.

The whole book is deliberately silly, and there’s little narrative greed to drive you towards the end – no big foozle to kill, no major question to answer, etc. It doesn’t have the relentless plot of the Harry Potter books or the cheerful nihilism of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but instead floats along on its own absurdity. It’s a bit like empty calories, but speaking as someone who loves a rich dessert, empty calories are a perfectly acceptable part of a balanced literary diet – as long as they’re worth it.

Next up: Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

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→ February 7, 2008
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Mansfield Park adaptation.

So we just finished the Masterpiece Theatre showing of the new adaptation of Mansfield Park, and it was enjoyable as a trifle of a movie, but dreadful as an adaptation. I simply could not get past Billie Piper, in the lead role of Fanny Price, as a brunette who dyed her hair blonde in the early 1800s … and then couldn’t be bothered to do her eyebrows!

Mansfield Park is easily my least favorite of Austen’s novels due to its wimpy protagonist, despite all of Fanny’s defender’s claims of her “quiet strength,” which is revisionist bullshit – she’s a damned wimp and even in the one time when she stands up for herself, she’s sorry to have made others around her upset. There’s nice, and then there’s doormat. Fanny Price is a doormat.

The adaptation has turned this somewhat dark novel into a paper-thin romantic intrigue. All of the tension of the novel is gone. Mrs. Norris (yes, like the cat in the Harry Potter series, although here she is a live person) spends the novel tormenting Fanny at every turn; she’s scarcely in the movie at all. In the novel, when Fanny rejects the advances of Henry Crawford, the entire family (she’s staying with her aunt and uncle) turns on her in a relentless attempt to persuade her to accept his proposal, ultimately sending her back to her own poor family as a punishment. Here, she’s not invited on a day trip, and before we know it, Henry has run off with her sister – an event which, by the way, is a total shock in the novel and yet is foreshadowed in the first twenty minutes of the film. And so on. There is no tension in the movie, yet the book is wracked with it. At worst, couldn’t the screenwriters have found some middle ground.

I’m not the only Janeite who thinks so, for what it’s worth – the second of those links focuses on yet more unladylike behavior, as we saw in the new take on Persuasion. I admit that it’s a hard novel to adapt because a faithful version would be oppressive and bleak, but let’s at least stay true to the time period.

The Complete Jane Austen series is continuing with the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice shown in three parts, starting this Sunday; it is well worth watching in its own right, but also stands as perhaps the supreme literary adaptation, period. The series then breaks, resuming on March 23rd with another old edition, this time of Emma, starring Kate Beckinsale.

Filed Under: DVDs, Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 1, 2008
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Life imitates art.

U.S.: ‘Demonic’ militants sent women to bomb markets in Iraq:

Two mentally disabled women were strapped with explosives Friday and sent into busy Baghdad markets, where they were blown up by remote control, a top Iraqi government official said.

This bears a disturbing resemblance to the main plot point of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, except that in Conrad’s book, Verloc doesn’t necessarily intend for the mentally disabled character to die.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: ,
→ January 31, 2008
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Watchmen.

I can not offer any comment on whether or not Alan Moore’s Watchmen is, as so many critics and readers say, the greatest graphic novel ever written.

I can, however, say that as novels, graphic or otherwise, go, it sucks.

Watchmen is a thinly drawn (hah!) paranoid agenda-driven short story, made novel-length by the inclusion of pretty pictures, which, by the way, take the place of the descriptive prose that makes the written novel an art form. There is no character development. The plot is linear, with characters’ stories provided for background, but they neither show changes in any of the characters nor are they remotely interesting as subplots. The story rests on a base of anachronisms, both historical ones (the Soviet Union was already in the throes of an irreversible economic collapse when the book was written) and political ones (nuclear power is mentioned in passing as a major environmental threat). And the whole thing was just beyond boring.

Even when the book got a little interesting in the final two chapters, Moore screwed up his writing. You’re telling me that of the four people in the room in Antarctica in the final chapter, not one of them realizes that the artificial peace is strictly temporary, or at least argues that it is? The smartest man in the world thinks war is over, forever, unless the event that triggers the peace is repeated at unpredictable intervals? If he’s the smartest man in the world, we really are a race of orangutans with safety razors.

I always felt that the TIME book critics added Watchmen to their top 100 novels list as a token entry, as if they felt the need to put one graphic novel on there to head off criticism that they had ignored this burgeoning genre, but reading the book confirmed my suspicions. And really, this was a more deserving entry than Cry the Beloved Country, Brave New World, or Tender is the Night, just to name three works of actual literature? Or, if we’re into tokenism, how about a token novel written by an African (A Grain of Wheat), a token mystery (Murder on the Orient Express), or a token comedy (something by Wodehouse, perhaps).

There is simply no comparison to the thematic and textural depth provided by a traditional novel and the superficial treatment inherent in the graphic form. And, since everyone seems to think that Watchmen is the genre’s peak, I think I can safely ignore graphic novels from here on out.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , ,
→ January 24, 2008
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The Age of Innocence.

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (now known as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), with good reason, as Wharton uses the classic love triangle formula to expose the darker side of the seemingly idyllic Gilded Age of the late 1800s while also incorporating some savage wit. It’s also in the Novel 100 (#61), the Modern Library 100 (#58), and the Radcliffe 100 (#42), although it was published two years too early for TIME‘s top 100 list.

Age‘s main character is Newland Archer, a young lawyer in the social elites of New York in the 1870s who is about to marry the pretty but dull May Welland, a socially acceptable match and one he doesn’t question until he meets her cousin, the Countess Olenska. The Countess has just returned to the United States after fleeing a disastrous marriage in Europe to a man who used her ill (although his exact crime is never defined, I inferred that he was beating her), and Archer finds himself drawn to her in an obsession laden with sexual overtones. He ultimately has to choose between his engagement and then marriage to a woman he likes, but for whom he has no passion, and the woman who ignites his passion but for whom he’d have to abandon his family and status while flying in the face of all social conventions.

For a novel built around a serious idea, the choices people have to make between conforming to societal norms and following the riskier paths that offer a chance for greater happiness, Wharton manages to incorporate some bitterly sarcastic humor.

She sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English- speaking audiences.

No one is spared, but Wharton has a particular enmity for the small-mindedness of the pro-propriety set, who conspire first to send Countess Olenska back to her husband and later to keep her and Newland apart.

On top of the love triangle and its underlying story about choice, The Age of Innocence reflects the social upheaval of the interwar period in which it was written. May Welland represents the longing for the pre-war period, a true age of innocence in which the U.S. hadn’t been embroiled in a major conflict since the Civil War, and prosperity and opulence seemed guaranteed. The Countess represents the future, from the vantage point of the end of World War I, from America’s increasing involvement with foreign nations to the uncertain economic outlook (the book was written in 1920, before the great bull run of the 20s) to the changing cultural and sexual mores of the time. Wharton comes down clearly in favor of the forward-looking viewpoint, but that doesn’t mean that Newland and the Countess live happily ever after.

The Age of Innocence is comfortably in the top 20-25 books I’ve read, more evidence that the most fertile period for the American novel was the time between the wars. It’s an outstanding marriage – pun intended – of wicked humor and social commentary, with a simple plot made interesting through strong characterization.

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