→ October 18, 2015
→ By

Lord of Light.

I’m en route to Arizona to cover the Fall League this week, so I’ll be at games Monday to Friday and hope to see many of you out there. That also means I won’t be commenting as much on the LCS till I get back home.

I have a vague recollection of someone telling me while we were both in college that he loved Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, winner of the 1969? Hugo Award for Best Novel, because it was so funny. Perhaps the memory is off, because the book is intensely clever and sardonic but only rarely funny. It’s also a bit inscrutable and, while very intelligent, it didn’t seem to have a clear point to me – if its intent was metaphorical, which I can only assume it was, I had a hard time relating its players to forces in the modern world.

The book is set in the distant future in a world other than Earth that has been populated – or, really, invaded – by humans, the first of whom are now known as the First and who have used advanced technologies to achieve a sort of immortality, where they can transplant their personae, including their memories, knowledge, and even some special abilities that I have to think inspired Gary Gygax at some point, into new bodies when their old ones are injured or wear out. These humans have taken on the identities of Hindu gods, and have used their powers to subdue the native species of the planet and deny the humans and other denizens, the rights to any advanced technologies, even the printing press, that might lead to a popular revolt against their powers.

Into this comes the Lord of Light, the reincarnation (so to speak) of the one we know as the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, Mahasamatman, or, as he prefers to be called, “Sam.” Having been divested of his mortal coil by the gods in a previous era, Sam returns to the physical realm, brought back by Yama, the “deathgod,” to challenge the status quo and perhaps return power to the people. (Deathgod is the name of my new black-metal project with members of Puig Destroyer.) This leads to a series of intrigues and bloody battles, not to mention numerous body switches, as Sam’s return leads to the revival of Buddhism, albeit with a lot of killing that the real-life Buddha would not have liked one bit.

Some of the repartee between Sam and his various Hindu-pantheon antagonists is indeed humorous, but I sensed more satire or even farce in that and in the cartoonish violence of the numerous clashes between Sam and whoever’s fighting on his side in that particular melée and the main “gods” on the other side who will stop at nothing to maintain their grip on power. Was Zelazny, a lapsed Catholic, mocking the religion-fueled wars that define so much of human history? Or merely taking aim at tyranny and the increasingly brutal steps any dictatorship must take to maintain its hold on power, especially once technologies take hold in the populace and allow for the faster spread of information? (Witness how closed North Korea must remain to keep its people in the most abject state-mandated poverty.) Is he calling into question the historicity of key religious figures, like Gautama or Jesus? Or is there nothing more to this than a giant free-for-all that features power-hungry people playing with weapons that no single person should possess?

I think I got more from Lord of Light as an obvious influence on the work of Neil Gaiman, who’s quoted on the cover of the book, than as a story in its own right. It’s impossible to read this work and not immediately think of what Gaiman did in American Gods, and did far more successfully, not just stealing names but repurposing myths and then writing his own legends, an exponential improvement on Zelazny’s work but one that may have needed Zelazny to come first and open the door.

Evaluated on its own, however, Lord of Light seemed rather soulless, no pun intended. (Okay, pun intended.) Although the reader is obviously supposed to side with Sam, he comes across as a disinterested revolutionary, one driven neither by self-interest nor selflessness, only pushed by the desire to topple the gods themselves. None of the characters earns much development or depth, which is disappointing in cases like Tak, the ape with an apparently human brain and personality, who deserves a back story here as much as any more central character. The gods want power because they want power. They desire their immortality (as opposed to the “real death”) because, hey, immortality – but allowing the proletariat to reincarnate themselves via mind transfer won’t end that practice. Without fleshing out his characters, Zelazny presented us with a work of great ingenuity that ultimately isn’t much less cold than hard science fiction works like Rendezvous with Rama that focus so much on the technical details that the authors forget the need to craft characters with whom the reader can identify or at least to whom they can relate.

Next up: My posts are a bit behind my reading but I’m currently about ¾ of the way through Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, which I already like more than I liked either of the other two Pynchon novels I read, including the impenetrable Gravity’s Rainbow.

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→ June 14, 2015
→ By

The Graveyard Book.

Neil Gaiman won his first Hugo Award for Best Novel for his modern epic American Gods, a masterful blend of pagan mythology and magical realism that breathes some life into the generally-overused Chosen One plot structure, thanks in large part to Gaiman’s prodigious imagination. After withdrawing the related book Anansi Boys from consideration for the same honor in 2006, he won the prize a second time for his young adult novel The Graveyard Book, which brings his same charming prose style and clever world-building mind to a gentler story without most of the violence or sex that populate those two earlier works.

There’s an exception to that last bit, and it’s at the start of the book, perhaps the most overused trope in all of young-adult literature (and not a few Disney movies): The orphaned child protagonist. The toddler to soon be known as Nobody “Bod” Owens wakes in a house where his parents and sister have just been knifed to death in their sleep, escaping only due to happenstance and his own wanderlust, ending up in the local disused graveyard where the deceased denizens protect him from the killer. Bod grows up in the graveyard, raised by the Owens (dead for a few hundred years), watched by the not-quite-dead guardian Silas, forbidden to leave the cemetery grounds for fear it will expose him to his would-be murderer, Jack.

Of course, you know the story has to end with Bod facing Jack one final time, and since this is a children’s book, Bod’s going to come out all right, so the onus is on Gaiman to create tension within each of the episodes leading up to the 80-page chapter where the final confrontation occurs. Gaiman infuses Bod with the curiosity of most children, only partly sated by the attempts of the graveyard’s dwellers to educate him, leading him to various excursions outside of and underneath the cemetery itself, setting up the series of events or points of interest that will all come into play in the last battle.

The core story is straightforward, as you’d expect in a self-contained, 300-page young adult novel, but Gaiman has populated his necropolis with a small cast of eccentrics – I suppose expecting the shades to be simply drawn was unreasonable – that bring to mind everyone from Robert Altman to Jasper Fforde. They’re not weirdos, just dead and a little outdated, and have much to teach Bod (and the young reader) about the value of life and living it with just as much (or little) fear as is necessary.

But the book is just as much for the parent reading with or alongside the child; this is very much a book about rearing a son or daughter and learning to let go the older the child gets. Bod’s search for independence and agency is far from unusual; all things considered, he’s a rather compliant child, curious but only occasionally reckless, bailed out a couple of times by Silas or one of the other spirits who’ve been raising him. He touches something hot (metaphorically speaking), gets burned, and learns not to do it again; no matter how many times you say “don’t touch that,” you know the child won’t really believe you until s/he tests your admonition out in the flesh. And when Bod has to fight the final battle without Silas’ protecting, albeit with lots of help from his noncorporeal family, he comes of age right before us in a satisfying but far from entirely happy ending.

My daughter just turned nine, but I think the traumatic introduction where Bod’s family is killed offscreen might upset her a little too much; she was fine with Lily and James Potter dying, but that occurred before page 1 and it’s a lot less real to read of someone dying via spell than dying via blade. I’ll keep the book and leave it to her own judgment to decide when she wants to tackle it.

Next up: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.

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→ January 27, 2015
→ By

Anansi Boys.

This will serve as your umpteenth reminder that my rankings of all thirty MLB farm systems go up on ESPN.com on Wednesday, for Insiders, with the global top 100 on Thursday and each team’s top ten and farm report on Friday.

Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys takes one of the many pagan deities he invoked in his magnum opus, American Gods, and repurposes him as a peculiar Florida father who constantly mortifies his son, Fat Charlie, who isn’t fat, and then mortifies Fat Charlie further by dying in ignominious fashion. Flying back from a somewhat grim expat life in London, Fat Charlie runs headlong into his past, only to discover that he has a brother, known only as Spider, who appears to have inherited all of dear old dad’s powers – including the power of persuasion, which comes in rather handy in this story. Spider’s arrival turns Fat Charlie’s life inside out, costing him his job, his fiancée, and his freedom, eventually leading Fat Charlie back to Florida and the four crones who helped him bury his father and reconnect with Spider.

Anansi Boys – there’s a pun in there, in case you missed it – is two books in one: a madcap farce, and then a more serious meditation on dualism and the nature of identity. The shift is jarring; you’re laughing for 150 pages or so, and then you realize you haven’t laughed in a while, even though the pace of the narrative hasn’t shifted or slowed at all. The farce starts the moment Spider shows up, turning Fat Charlie into the straight man and the mark for no end of cons, with Spider using his apartment as home base for what looks like a long, unending con that also brings Fat Charlie’s unctuous, embezzling thief of a boss into the circle, a move that endangers Fat Charlie’s freedom and perhaps his life. Spider hones in on Rosie, Fat Charlie’s ill-matched fiancée, even trying to use his irresistible (because they’re magic) charms on her harridan mother, who has wanted Rosie to dump Fat Charlie since the moment they got together. Key to all of this is everyone else’s inability to distinguish Spider from Fat Charlie, even though they don’t look alike.

The eventual denouement comes about when Fat Charlie ends up in jail, accused by the sleazy boss of the embezzlement he himself undertook, triggering a come-to-Anansi moment for Spider that puts Rosie on a cruise to the Caribbean with her mother and without either man, the boss on the run with blood on his hands and money in various Cayman Island bank accounts, and Daisy, Fat Charlie’s one-night stand/arresting officer, going all Falling Down over the boss guy getting away with murder. One critical coincidence, where Gaiman has Rosie run into the boss on the fictional island of St. Andrews, speeds us towards a single climax that involves every character, one that forces Fat Charlie to cross over into the “beginning of the world,” the homes of all of the animal-deities, including Anansi himself, to undo the bargain he once made with Tiger and to finally understand who Spider is to him.

While American Gods had the feel of an epic, almost a great-American-novel attempt, Anansi Boys is a romp, both for the reader thanks to the Wodehousian man-in-trouble segments where Spider is screwing up Fat Charlie’s life, and for Gaiman, who gets to indulge in the sort of otherworld-creation that helped make American Gods particularly memorable. The inclusion of some (presumably Gaiman-authored) folk tales around Anansi slows the story down at times, although they tend to be short and I imagine Gaiman intended to give Fat Charlie’s deal with Tiger and subsequent attempt to unravel it more context. What Anansi Boys might lack in scope, it more than makes up for in narrative greed.

Next up: I’ve just about finished Vernor Vinge’s 2007 Hugo winner Rainbows End.

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→ December 31, 2014
→ By

Among Others.

Jo Walton’s novel Among Others, winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel in 2012, is nothing like any of the other major science fiction or fantasy titles I’ve read. The story is instead a tender coming-of-age narrative with just a dash of magic thrown in, and the book as a whole functions as a paean to the classics of both genres, succeeding because of the appeal of its narrator-protagonist even though there’s minimal action in the novel itself. (The Kindle version is still just $2.99 through that link, more than worth the price.)

Morwenna Phelps (who goes by Mor or Mori) is a 15-year-old Welsh girl who has been left disabled after what is described for much of the book as a battle with her mother, an evil and/or insane witch, a battle that killed Mor’s twin sister. Mor is now at an English boarding school where she’s been sent by her estranged father, with whom she has no relationship (he walked out when she and her sister were babies) but forges a tenuous bond over their shared love of science fiction and fantasy novels – Mor reads more than any human being I’ve ever met, on the order of about 300 books a year given how quickly Walton has her going through titles in the story. As Mor goes through typical teenage stuff – dealing with cliques and ostracism, gaining and losing friends over trifles, taking her first steps into dating – she’s also dealing with the aftermath of what happened with her mother, trying to make sense of everything through books and through her limited magical abilities, which she’s reluctant to use.

Mor reminded me greatly of Flavia de Luce, the chemistry-obsessed heroine of Alan Bradley’s six mystery novels (beginning with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie), but a few years older and therefore dealing with more real-world issues – the stuff we might see Flavia encounter now that Bradley has agreed to write four more stories with his star moving to boarding school in Canada. Mor’s experiences in boarding school are tame by today’s standards, but the point isn’t to watch her suffer or squirm – it’s to watch her cope using her relationship with fiction both in direct (finding shared interest in books with peers and adults alike) and indirect (taking lessons from the novels she’s read) fashion. Among Others is a wonderful book, but seeing it win all of these genre awards reminded me of Argo and The Artist doing the same in cinema: They won movie awards because both movies were about how great the movies are. Maybe Walton won because she wrote a book about the power of science fiction and fantasy novels, not to mention a guide to the best of the genres up to the late 1970s. The same novel without the elegaic aspect would have been just as successful as literature, but would it still have earned the same plaudits?

The magical/fantasy aspects of Among Others are part of the background fabric of the novel, rather than central to its story, which I believe is essential for genre fiction to be more than just, well, genre fiction. Mor’s magical skills are mostly limited to her ability to see ethereal creatures she calls “fairies” for lack of any more accurate term, and some power to cast spells that she barely uses; when the soft climax of a rematch with her mother occurs, Mor doesn’t use magic to fight, relying on her emerging self-confidence and ability to control her racing mind to defeat her mother’s ambush. But the bulk of the magic has happened already in the book’s past and comes to the reader slowly via Mor’s diary entries as she opens up to a few friends, particularly the fellow outcast Wim, about what actually happened and what she’s able to see. This book is all epilogue, creating a challenge for Walton to grab and hold the reader’s attention; she does it best because Morwenna herself is so compelling, insightful and intelligent beyond her years, yet still in many ways a child, trying to navigate adolescence on top of the challenges of having an crazy, power-hungry witch for a mother. If Walton wants to give us more of Morwenna’s story, before or after the events of Among Others, I’m all for it.

Next up: After I finish Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat today, I’ll start Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke, one of the Albert Campion mysteries and apparently an inspiration for J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike novels.

Have a safe New Year’s Eve, everyone.

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→ February 3, 2014
→ By

The Last Dragonslayer.

In case you missed anything, here’s the full set of links to the top 100 prospects package. The piece on 10 prospects who just missed the 100 will now run on Wednesday, rather than today.

I’m a longtime fan of Jasper Fforde’s novels – the Thursday Next series, the two Nursery Crimes books, and the dying-for-a-sequel Shades of Grey – and just tackled his first young adult novel, The Last Dragonslayer, last week. The first in the “Chronicles of Kazam” series, the book is quite Ffordian, just without the sex and swearing we’re used to from the Thursday Next books, yet still very ffunny and still willing to address big themes like death, moral choices, and greed.

Set in an alternate version of our world where magic exists (albeit in decline) and the U.K. has splintered into the Ununited Kingdoms, The Last Dragonslayer revolves around 15-year-old Jennifer Strange, the temporary manager of the Kazam employment agency for sorcerors and, as it turns out, the next in the line of dragonslayers. Here be dragons, or at least nearby, thanks to the Dragonpact that set up boundaries between dragons and humans – but the dragon nearest Kazam is dying and every human wants to rush in and claim some of the soon-to-be-unoccupied land. Fforde loves to riff on capitalism run amok and spares no one here in his assaults on human and corporate avarice, not even the local idiot King of Hereford, who believes Jennifer should be acting in his interests as one of his subjects.

Strange herself has no magical abilities, although she’s running the shop at Kazam, which rents out the services of its various mages for things like home rewirings and pizza deliveries (all those magic carpets have to find some use). She’s the ideal Ffordian hero: uncertain, underconfident, stronger than she realizes, female yet not overtly feminine, and fiercely loyal to her friends and to her principles. One of those friends, filling the role of Pickwick the dodo, is the Quarkbeast, whose only dialogue comprises the occasional interjection, “Quark.”

The successful completion of Jennifer’s mission involves more cunning than fighting, and she outwits several opponents to her half-formed plans to try to do the Right Thing, even though she’s far from clear on what that is. The story moves quickly, unfettered by much in the way of subplots – the missing owner of Kazam will likely wait for another day to resurface, and I imagine we’ll hear more of the origins of both Jennifer and her fellow foundling “Tiger” Prawns in a future book – with plenty of the dry wit that makes Fforde’s books such a pleasure to read. I think it’s appropriate for ages 8 or 9 and up, but wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to any adult.

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→ June 5, 2013
→ By

A Game of Thrones.

I posted my final top 100 ranking for this year’s draft, and had draft expert Jim Callis on today’s edition of Behind the Dish.

—

I received George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones as a gift, and gave it a shot after many of you encouraged me to do so, even though I am generally not a fan of the sword-and-sorcery genre. Unfortunately, the book met my expectations, and while I finished its bloated length, I won’t be sticking around for book two.

The plot appears complex, but at heart is quite simple: two main factions are competing for control of the Seven Kingdoms, jockeying for position under the current King, the slightly naïve Robert, and preparing for an eventual succession. There are two separate plots only loosely integrated in this novel with that main strand – one leading to the possible birth of an heir to the previous king, the “mad king” Aerys II, the other set on the ice Wall that separates the Seven Kingdoms from the unknown denizens of the North. Martin based some of the plot on the English Wars of the Roses, which pitted the Houses of Lancaster and York against each other over a thirty-year period that ended with the rise of the House of Tudor.

The false complexity of the plot was not my main objection to A Game of Thrones, but it is one of the book’s three major flaws. Martin populates the book with far too many people, even requiring an appendix to list most of them by the houses to which they belong or have sworn fealty, and as a result almost no characters receive any kind of depth or development, and most of those outside of the central core are utterly disposable. Martin separates the book into numberless chapters, each of which revolves around one of the main characters, of which there are at least eight: Ned Stark, Lord of Winterfell; his wife, Catelyn; four of their five children; Tyrion Lannister, a dwarf who belongs to the rival house of Lannister; and Daenaerys, the daughter of the mad king. King Robert, Tyrion’s sister Cersei, his brother Jaime (“the Kingslayer”), Daenaerys’ brother Viserys, her eventual husband Khal Drogo, Catelyn’s sister Lysa, and Robert and Cersei’s son Joffrey are all significant characters in terms of ink received, yet all are one-dimentionsal and their presence quickly becomes tiresome. The result is that Martin can weave lengthy plot strands, yet never has to do much more than set the swords in motion to advance any of the storylines, because he’s got so many people running around and never chooses to (or needs to) develop any of the characters.

The quality of the writing is also extremely poor, which I was warned about ahead of time; Martin spends much of the book forcing awkward middle-English phrasing on the reader, or altering spellings the way that bad bars and stores like to include “Olde” in their names to make them seem authentically crappy. His syntax is clumsy, and he spells far too much out for the reader in little details, both scene-setting – his descriptions of food are embarrassing if you’ve read any Murakami, and the made-up foods thing is just annoying – and emotions, where he explains far too much of what characters are thinking or feeling, which ends up leading the reader around by the nose. And I have no explanation for the line where he said a character was behaving like he had a “dagger up his butt.”

But nothing in the book was as awful as Martin’s obsessions with sex, violence, and especially sexual violence; it is the most rape-y book I have ever read, treating its women as objects and reveling in degrading them, especially female side characters, Martin’s equivalent of the red shirts of Star Trek. Women are raped, often, quite violently (not that rape is ever nonviolent, but Martin chooses to make it more violent), both in the present of the novel and in descriptions of the past. Victors in war in Martin’s universe engage in gang-rape, and it is accepted. Forced prostitution is rampant, and it is accepted. And when he describes rape, or even semi-consensual sex, Martin chooses to describe it in detail to further the degradation of the woman. (The idea that a woman might enjoy sex, or even assume an equal or dominant role in it, is completely foreign to him.) Martin’s women are props, and the only woman of clear strength in the book is a sociopath. That doesn’t even get at the incest in the book, made explicit in one scene but hinted at many other times.

On top of his loathing of women, Martin absolutely loves to devote ink to the carving up of the human body by knives, swords, and even weapons found along the way. Characters are cleaved, dismembered, burst open, disembowed, and eviscerated, and one can almost hear Martin panting at the keyboard as he describes these acts of violence. Given that he takes the rascal’s escape from a plot he can’t untangle – he sends everyone to war and kills a bunch of people off – there’s a lot of cleaving and disemboweling going on, and copious quantities of blood spilled, enough that you’ll need to wash your hands to get the damned spots out before you’re through.

When I commented on Twitter the other day that A Game of Thrones was one of the most misogynistic books I’d ever read, a few of you said that I needed to stick with the series to see some of the female characters develop. That may be true – the situation might improve in later books – but I should not have to read beyond the first 670 pages to see a female character with any kind of depth. That’s not to say that his male characters are much better developed, but they might reach two dimensions while his women are limited to one.

I’ve never seen the HBO series, so I have no idea how that compares or if it addresses any of the book’s flaws. A thin plot in a novel can often seem rich on screen with the right adaptation. All I can say is that I won’t be moving on to book two of the series.

Next up: Jim Thompson’s grim, darkly funny novel Pop. 1280.

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→ March 20, 2013
→ By

The Magician King et al.

I have a new draft blog post up today, discussing two potential first-rounders I saw as well as former Mets draft pick Teddy Stankiewicz. Also, the Kindle edition of the indispensable cookbook Ruhlman’s Twenty is just $3.03 right now.

* The Magicians, Lev Grossman’s fantasy novel that was also a parody of popular fantasy novels, is one of my favorite books of the last ten years for the way it weaves (largely affectionate) satire of Harry Potter, Narnia, and Tolkien into an original story. In that book, Quentin Coldwater, an ordinary teenager in New York City, goes through a familiar series of events, becomes a wizard, and ends up visiting the land of Fillory, which he always assumed was fictional. Crossing the chasm into the world of magic and into this alternate reality brings with it all sorts of unanticipated problems, with some tragic consequences along with the successes and adventure.

Grossman followed that book up with a sequel, The Magician King, which he intended to be part two of an eventual Magicians trilogy. It does suffer a little from Middle-Book Syndrome, but that didn’t bother me as much as the split narrative that gives a lot of attention to the back story of one of the secondary characters from the first book, Julia. Denied admission to the magic school, Brakebills, that accepted her friend Quentin, Julia went through a difficult period of anger and depression, along with intermittent attempts to learn magic on her own, a path that ultimately brought her great pain even as she succeeded.

That pairing – triumph and tragedy, elation and pain – underpins both of the books in the series so far, something Grossman spells out more explicitly this time around when Quentin, setting off on an inexplicable sailing expedition within Fillory that lands him back on Earth when that’s about the last thing he wants, is told that becoming a hero can include tremendous sacrifice. This quixotic mission, which Quentin can’t even fully explain to himself other than to say that he feels like he has to do it, takes Quentin, Julia, and their crew of Fillorians to the barely-known Outer Island, and eventually beyond it to After Island and eventually to the End of the World, all in search of a set of Golden Keys that will save the known universe from the wrath of the gods, apparently themselves magicians of a higher order (although Grossman leaves their true nature somewhat unclear, likely wishing to avoid delving too much into the metaphysical) who wish to end the use of magic by mortals.

Grossman created and developed a strong set of characters in the first book, much as J.K. Rowling did when setting up the universe of Harry Potter in the first book in that series. In The Magician King, however, the only development we get is Julia’s through her history, as none of the few new characters we encounter is around for long enough to get that kind of development. I think ultimately that’s what made this feel like the second book in the trilogy – the story was still compelling, just a touch less so than the first book’s, but the character development and growth is largely absent. Quentin’s progress is halting until the book’s climax, and the others are just along for the ride.

That climax might not sit well with readers who loved the first book, but I think Grossman made a wise choice in how he wrapped up the story, at least for now. A big part of the first book’s appeal to me was in how Grossman would create a situation that would feel familiar, often directly recalling something from one of those great fantasy series I mentioned above, but would subvert it through an unexpected or unorthodox resolution. The Magician King is no different – very little is expected here, as triumphs can turn into tragedies in the space of a few sentences. There was one specific aspect that I would have preferred to see Grossman omit, an act of sexual violence that was horrific not just as it was described but for the way the act thoroughly debased the character who was victimized. Rape and sexual assault are valid tools for the fiction writer but should only be deployed when absolutely necessary. This time it wasn’t.

I think The Magician King will stand much more strongly when we get the third book in the series, given how many open questions remained at the book’s conclusion. It isn’t as thin as The Two Towers or, crossing genres, The Empire Strikes Back, stories that seemed to exist primarily as bridges from part one to part three. This book could easily stand on its own if we didn’t have quite so much of the Julia sideline in it. If you enjoyed The Magicians, this is a must-read.

* I’ve also read two other books recently in series I’ve enjoyed, Jasper Fforde’s The Woman Who Died A Lot and Alan Bradley’s I Am Half-Sick of Shadows. Fforde’s book, the seventh in the Thursday Next series and likely the second-to-last as well, follows the literary detective, still recovering from the assassination attempt from book 5, reentering the workforce in a reduced role, even as Goliath Corporation is as determined as ever to figure out her secrets and probably kill her once they’re done with her. Their plans involve sending out synthetic Thursdays that look and sound like the real thing to try to con her friends and family into revealing confidential information. At the same time, the town of Swindon is grappling with news that the Almighty’s recent series of smitings will reach their town in a matter of days, a problem that Thursday’s polymath daughter, Tuesday, is trying desperately to solve. The story is clever, as always, but I have noticed over the last three books that they’re becoming much less funny. The old jokes are wearing off and Fforde seems to be struggling to replace them. Fforde’s site indicates we won’t get book eight, which I think will be the end of the series, until at least 2016.

* I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, the fourth book in the Flavia de Luce series, has nothing to do with MLB’s postseason, but is another murder mystery involving the world’s most precocious prepubescent amateur chemist and detective. This time around, the murder occurs at Buckshaw, the estate of Flavia’s father, as half the town is snowed in during a charity performance by members of the cast of a film being shot at the house that week. There’s a surprising lack of chemistry in the main story here, as Flavia largely figures it out by deduction and old-fashioned snooping, although we get far more insight into the character of Dogger and hints of thawing from Flavia’s sisters, which I hope will continue in the next book, Speaking from Among the Bones, just recently out in hardcover.

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→ March 4, 2013
→ By

The Night Circus.

I have new draft blog posts up for Insiders on Marco Gonzales and Alex Balog and on Ryne Stanek. I also held a Klawchat last week.

Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus mines its source material pretty heavily, stealing the circus idea itself from Ray Bradbury’s seminal book Something Wicked This Way Comes (#29 on the Klaw 100) while also borrowing from Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (#17) and relying on the hackneyed chosen-ones motif found in far too much fantasy and science fiction, including, of course, the Harry Potter series. Morgenstern layers her own imagination on top of these familiar settings, crafting an immersive scene rich with color and detail, but the main storyline never lives up to the standard set by the novel’s background details.

The circus of the title appears only at night, without warning, moving from town to town as if by magic (or actually by magic), creating a furor wherever it goes and leading some fans to follow the circus around the globe like red-scarved Deadheads. The circus itself is just the stage for a battle between two magicians who are themselves pawns of their mentors – a girl trained from age five by her father, a boy adopted near the same age by a rival – in a fight to which they are bound by a magic tie that is never explained. As you might imagine, the two opponents eventually fall in love, an attraction forbidden by the rules of the game they’re unwillingly playing, and one that leads to unfortunate consequences for the other pawns, real people who work in or around the mysterious circus.

Romeo here is Marco, a young boy adopted from an orphanage by the mage Alexander, who takes him in specifically to raise him for this challenge, which may last for years and promises no other purpose for the contestants’ lives. His Juliet is Celia, taken in by her father, Prospero the Enchanter, after her mother commits suicide; Prospero, having no apparent emotional attachment to his daughter, sees in her the gift of magical ability and pledges her for the next challenge with Alexander, a game the two have apparently been playing for centuries. His lack of empathy for his own daughter receives no explanation, nor do we learn about Alexander’s motives – this is merely an academic or philosophical fight over the nature of magic. There’s a battle going on, and the two protagonists fall for each other, which seems to shock Prospero and Alexander because they’re blind to human emotions.

Where Morgenstern excels is creating the setting and background characters that exist behind Marco and Celia and their puppet masters. The precocious twins Widget and Poppet were born into the circus just as it began and grow up over the course of the book into its secret masters, learning much about its running from the inside even as the adults who populate it are largely unaware of its greater purpose – all except the contortionist Tsukiko, whose appearance comes without explanation until much later and whose understanding of the challenge exceeds that of all others. Morgenstern crafts two parallel narratives that don’t coincide in time until the end of the novel, when the battle and romance between Marco and Celia reaches its resolution and the fate of the circus lies in the hands of the twins and their new friend Bailey, one of the circus’ biggest fans.

The conclusion of that central storyline remains a question mark for me as I considered the book after finishing it. To avoid spoiling it, I’ll say that Morgenstern doesn’t do anything too obvious with the main characters, nor does she choose a complete copout where the terms of the challenge are somehow voided so everyone can live happily ever after. There are vague hints earlier in the book of how the romance/challenge will end, but not enough to make that resolution logically consistent with the rest of the novel. As a result, the conclusion sits in that gray area where it wasn’t cheap or cliched, and yet wasn’t clever enough to feel satisfying on an emotional or intellectual level.

The Night Circus does read very quickly, as Morgenstern crafts visually compelling scenes and has a deft hand with the tension dial, creating sufficient narrative greed to help me race through the book. I wish it were a more original work, and that the story lived up to the quality of the settings, instead of feeling derivative and almost unfinished for the way she wrapped up the central plot.

I’m about three books behind on reviews, so I’ll try to post at least one of these a day this week until I catch up to what I’m reading now, which is Kathleen Flinn’s The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School.

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→ December 23, 2012
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Baldur’s Gate for iPad.

I have new posts up for Insiders analyzing the Nick Swisher and Edwin Jackson signings. I’ll write up the Pirates/Red Sox trade if and when the clubs finalize it and we know all of the names involved.

I’ve never gotten into role-playing games as a genre, even though I think I probably fit the stereotype of avid RPG players, aside from the fact that I never actually lived in my parents’ basement. I tried the pen-and-paper version of D&D in high school with some friends but found it way too slow for my short attention span, and most of the computer versions I tried were too focused on combat (“hack-and-slash” games), which becomes really monotonous over a game that’s expected to take 30 or 40 or more hours to play. I played The Bard’s Tale in high school, but that game was horribly designed (you had to keep fighting the same battles over and over again to make your characters strong enough for the final encounter), and also tried the first of the “gold box” D&D games, Pool of Radiance (bad graphics, some clever subquests, but once I got to the Big Foozle at the end of the game he treated my party like we were the 2012 Astros), but neither of these was good enough to turn me into a fan of the genre.

Baldur’s Gate remains the one exception, and I think the main reason is that its writing is better than those of other games in the genre. It’s a D&D game, both in mechanics and in setting, but contains a fairly well-written central story, lots of dialogue (much of it funny, at least the first or second time around), and enough opportunities to roam outside of the linear core plot (also of the Kill-the-Big-Foozle variety) to give the game some replay value. Most importantly, the game worked: Early challenges are balanced enough to give you a shot even when your character is weak, and later challenges are difficult but don’t require advance knowledge or cheat codes to survive them. I played Baldur’s Gate and its two-part sequel through several times, using different character types to vary the experience slightly from time to time. I’ve tried other games that were supposedly similar, but nothing lasted me more than an hour or so.

A group of the original Baldur’s Gate designers have now reissued the game and ported it to new formats, starting with an iPad versionicon, with good-not-great results. The game looks and feels just like the original, with some enhancements that were either only found in BG2 or that appeared in user-created mods, but retaining the original graphics (looking a little dated), voices, and music (both big positives). Aside from the creation of a few new NPCs, one in the base game and a few available as in-app purchases, this is the original Baldur’s Gate game in every aspect. If you feel a little nostalgia for the original game, you’ll love the reissue.

The story, in brief, is a little cliched for the fantasy genre – you’re an orphan, and you’re being hunted by an unknown enemy for reasons that don’t become apparent until much later in the game, but it turns out you’re something of a Chosen One. That’s all blah-de-blah, but the overlaid story of an iron shortage in the region and bandit attacks up and down the coast give the story some texture beyond the linear who’s-trying-to-kill-me plot that drives a lot of these games. You’ll also get a ton of subquests if you talk to every named character you come across, only some of whom want to kill you or pick your pockets, and the game is loaded with enough non-player characters and special items to allow you significant flexibility in constructing your party however you like.

That said, playing BG on the iPad has its frustrations. Using a touchscreen to play a game that expects the precision of a mouseclick is extremely aggravating – it can be hard to get your party to enter a building or to get a character to attack the right enemy. Sometimes I find my characters are just standing around in the middle of combat while their mates are being disemboweled. (I still don’t know if that’s a game error or mine.) The app crashes way too often, so you’ll want to quick-save (one click on the left-hand bar) as often as you can – and once or twice I’ve crashed while quick-saving, unfortunately. (I also crashed once because I tried to take Boo from Minsc. Squeaky wheel gets the kick, I suppose.) The port didn’t update the graphics, so zooming to try to tap more accurately on the screen just produces a blur. I’ve spoken with one of the designers about the touchscreen issue, which they were already aware of and are working on for future updates. I’ve had to fight certain battles, not just major ones, multiple times strictly because of that one issue – either a character went where s/he wasn’t supposed to go, or I couldn’t get a character to attack the right opponent. I’ve adapted to the latter issue by specifically selecting the weapon (turning its highlight orange) and then selecting the opponent, but that adds up to a ton of extra taps over the course of a game.

The base game app is $10, about the maximum I’d be willing to pay for a port of an older game that is available in a complete four-in-one boxset, with BG2 and the two expansions, for $15 on DVD-ROM for Windows. I’ve played probably ten hours or so in total – I just wiped out the bandit camp, for those of you who’ve played the game before, and don’t act like those little pricks didn’t have it coming – and appreciate the fact that starting and quitting the game is so much faster than it was on CDs when I played it around ten years ago. If it wasn’t so crash-prone, I’d wholeheartedly recommend it, but even with that flaw I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it even if I decide not to go after the Big Foozle after all.

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→ August 21, 2011
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two.

I’m mixed on the final installment in the Harry Potter film series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two. On the one hand, it was pretty true to the book, including a number of key sequences, plot points, and quotes, without feeling terribly rushed about it. On the other hand, it doesn’t stand well on its own – it is very clearly the second half of a film, not a complete film in its own right – and the pacing that worked fine on the printed page proved very uneven on the screen.

Harry has to jump through specific hoops to get to the final, climactic battle with Voldemort, and J.K. Rowling made sure to get several of his friends in on the action in that melee, although for some reason Ginny was barely present in this half of the movie. Some of those hoops don’t translate terribly well to the screen, or just lacked the necessary contest of the books, but the film jumps back and forth between action scenes and Harry’s more cerebral quests, creating pacing issues but also keeping the film from becoming incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the story. (That is, those are the good guys, those are the bad guys, they’re fighting. Everyone can grasp that much.) The battle sequences often seemed cut off by the need to get Harry back on screen, though, meaning it didn’t have the same intensity as part one, which remains the best of the eight films if we view these two parts separately.

The staccato cuts also mean that none of the actors beyond Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) gets to stretch out much, meaning we get more mugging and less acting from some outstanding performers. Helena Bonham-Carter looks certifiable as Bellatrix Lestrange but is largely left making faces at everyone, while Alan Rickman – as central to the success of the films as anyone outside of the three main characters – might end up hoping for a Judi Dench exemption if he wanted a Best Supporting actor nomination. I wrote in my review of part one that Rupert Grint and Emma Watson had shown substantial growth as actors, but here they’re reduced to bit players, and the development of their relationship earns little screen time and scarcely any explanation.

The movie looks amazing, both in scenery and in special effects, with the initial attack by the Death Eaters on Hogwarts the effects highlight of the series. (That scene was preceded by a necessary yet too-short return for Dame Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall.) Rowling has always been one of my favorite authors for the depth of her descriptions, and the films have lived up to the prose in sights and sounds, including some of the more difficult settings like the goblin bank Gringott’s.

But that Gringott’s scene encapsulates why I found this second half somewhat unsatisfying. It looked the part. Everyone involved in the scene did his or her job. But there was so much time spent on setup and so little on the climax of the scene that even though you saw them escape (and do quite a bit of damage along the way), the escape doesn’t stick with you as much as the setup does. I can tell you how it looked, and the tension of the scene before the betrayal, but what happened after that didn’t have the same power.

I mentioned half-jokingly the possibility of Alan Rickman getting an Oscar nomination for his role as Severus Snape, one of the meatiest roles outside of the big three across the series. The films themselves were not Oscar-worthy, but knowing the Academy’s penchant for honoring successful series as they close, I did wonder if they’d throw one nomination at someone in the film just to acknowledge the series’ existence. (That is, something beyond a technical award or an award for costumes or design.) Rickman would be my choice, since Daniel Radcliffe would have a difficult time cracking the competitive Best Actor field. Helena Bonham-Carter was convincingly crazy, but she’s barely in the movie and her part was too thin to be award material. Then again, they nominate so many films for Best Picture that perhaps the academy will shoehorn Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two into that category as they did with Toy Story 3: we hope you feel like it’s an honor to be nominated, because we have no intention of actually giving you the award.

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