→ November 9, 2023
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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is one of the biggest successes in self-publishing in the last decade or so, as she ran a successful Kickstarter to give her the time to finish the book, which sold well enough that Hachette’s Hodder & Stoughton picked it up and published their edition a year later. The book now has three sequels, winning the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2019, and all of the sequels earned nominations for the Hugo for Best Novel. This book, at least, has “first effort” all over it, though, and it’s kind of clunky and overdone in so many parts, especially the world-building, which detracted somewhat from a fun if very light story about a group of misfits becoming an ersatz family aboard a spaceship.

The Wayfarer is that ship, and as the series opens, Rosemary is heading for the Wayfarer to serve as its clerk, handling all of the paperwork the ship needs to move through space, across civilizations and, often, punching holes in the fabric of space to create shortcuts across great distances. These artificial wormholes are the Wayfarer’s main source of income, and they do it with a truly motley crew of specialists drawn from multiple species. Each crew member gets their own moment in the spotlight here, so rather than a single plot we get a series of episodes that allow the focus to move across everyone on the ship, from Corbin, the stubborn, meticulous biologist who grows the algae that helps power the ship; to Dr. Chef, the mechanic and, yes, chef, from a dying species who also serves as the ship’s counselor; to Jenks, the engineer who is – slight spoiler – in love with the ship’s AI. Really. (Needless to say I found that one a bit hard to take.)

I think the real problem I had with Long Way was the extensive exposition as Chambers builds out her universe, with giant civilizations of many species, endless rules, fictional technologies, and at least seven characters who need some sort of back stories. It’s a trap many first-time writers seem unable to avoid, and I at least attribute it to the benign desire to get all of these thoughts – the whole universe they’ve built up in their heads – out on to the page, as well as to prevent too much confusion on the part of readers. It also drives me up the wall, because 1) we can learn about this stuff as the story goes along and 2) if I really, really need to understand the technical details of how interstellar travel works in your books, or get a full description of every species’ cultural norms, that’s a bigger problem than just giving us a few pages of extrapolation can solve. Since Long Way visits a lot of planets and has such a diverse crew, we get a lot of that cultural stuff, and the book ends up spinning its wheels for pages and pages while Chambers describes trivial points about handshakes or mating customs.

The book does tackle some larger social themes, although it does so in a cursory way because there are so many smaller stories in the novel’s 438 pages. There’s a bit about cloning, a part about LGBT relationships, some stuff about war and the ethics of supplying one side (pretty timely right about now) when you’re not involved, and more, but none of tit gets more than superficial treatment.

The Long Way has to stand on the strength of its characters, since the plot is modest and the prose more akin to YA fiction, and there Chambers has some more success, although it’s a mixed bag. Rosemary is fine as the closest character we have to a protagonist, as her wide-eyed views and relative inexperience outside of her home planet make her a sensible lens for the reader to view most of the action. Some of the non-human characters are a little overdrawn, notably the navigator, Ohan, so again we get bogged down in details rather than seeing the characters develop. The more I write, the more I realize I just didn’t care for this book at all, other than that it was light and easy to read. It’s not The Calculating Stars bad, but I hope the remainder of the series spends more time developing the characters than explaining its fictional universe.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 done with Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go.

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→ April 4, 2016
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The Magician’s Land.

I loved Lev Grossman’s novel The Magicians, reading the entire book (a review copy from the publisher) on a single cross-country flight right when the book came out, for the deft blend of parody of the coming-of-age magic saga subgenre (Harry Potter, LotR, Narnia) with a fantastic, original story. Quentin Coldwater’s journey from alienated youth to magic school to fighting a save-the-world sort of magic battle followed familiar conventions in structure but always took unanticipated turns, and brought us a small group of well-developed, engaging characters to follow through the trilogy.

I disagreed with most of you on the second book, The Magician King, which felt transitional to me and took away some of the magic (the reading sort, not the kind in the books) for me that had me loving the first book. So I held off for a bit on book three, The Magician’s Land, to see if it would redeem the whole series for me or give me another downer note that detracted from the joy I experienced in book one. It gave me much more of the former, another rousing story that again walks away from cliched plot lines, moving the giant fight scene (masterfully written) to the middle of the book and concluding the series on a fitting note that manages to be a victory lap without giving the main character an improbably perfect ending.

When the book begins, Quentin is an outcast, having lost his crown and even his right to live in Fillory, and is recruited to join a mysterious magical heist. We jump back and forth for the first half of the novel, learning how Quentin returned to Brakebills briefly to teach, then lost that position while rescuing a student, also encountering a demon who appears to be after him personally. Meanwhile, in Fillory, the world is quite literally ending, and Eliot and Janet have to set out on a quest to try to save it – but, this being Quentin’s trilogy, really, he’s going to have to help them do it. Grossman turns several conventions of the genre on their heads with the complex resolution, and while he leaves a few strings poorly tied (such as Betsy’s adventure) and we get the unlikely conclusion where no major character dies, he settles the Fillory timeline in a way that makes internal sense while also giving Quentin and some of his friends a sensible ending.

Aside from the usual references to other classics of the genre – the Russian professor mocking “Dum-blee-dore” and the nod to seven-league boots (found in C.S. Lewis’ and Diana Wynne Jones’ books, among others) were my favorites – Grossman seems to have centered much of this final leg of the trilogy on the relationship between reader and story, and what stories can tell us about us. All three books have sought to undermine the sense of life as story, that our narratives are arranged for us and that life’s plot threads will all be neatly tied together for us. Grossman has to balance between the use of “destiny” in the constructed world of Fillory – constructed by whom, it is never revealed, although we do learn that it is indeed turtles all the way down – and the lack thereof here in the real world of the books; Quentin and friends have to piece together solutions without magical or divine guidance, don’t always get what they want, and face frequent disillusionment when their lives don’t unfurl like the stories they loved. (Grossman also gives us more of the story behind the stories, although nothing could match the revelation about Martin at the end of the first book.)

Where the magicians do benefit from their lives in two worlds is how Fillory specifically and magic in general gives them a second lens through which to see their secular lives. Most YA magic novels are coming-of-age stories where the characters come of age through defeating enemies in the magical realm. The Magicians novels have characters coming of age in both worlds at once, one supporting the other, not always in clean or planned ways. Where Grossman diverts from this path, keeping everyone intact for the end of the series, it makes for a satisfying conclusion because we like most of the characters, but it does shift a little from the thread of realism in the first two books. A few redshirts die this time around, but the core characters get their mostly happy ending. I’m okay with that, just like I didn’t want to see Harry, Ron, or Hermione die (and I’m still bitter about Fred), but it conflicts with the book’s theme about fiction failing to capture the the freedom and chaos of real life.

Next up: I’m way behind on reviews, but I did just begin Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War today.

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→ May 15, 2008
→ By

A Dance to the Music of Time, completed.

UPDATE, December 2010: The University of Chicago Press has made volume one of the Dance available as a free e-book on amazon.com and on their own site.

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Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is a masterwork of dry English humor and brilliant characterization. Part of both the TIME 100 and the Modern Library 100 (where it ranked 43rd), Dance is told by Nick Jenkins over a period of nearly fifty years as he moves through the social circles of interwar London, serves in a rather low-risk infantry unit in World War II, and then becomes a distinguished writer after the war and returns to many of the same characters who populated the earlier books. It’s a popular series in the United Kingdom, but it’s not well-known in the United States.

Nick himself is a wry observer but a milquetoast character, and his wife, Isobel, is a phantom in the stories. The main character and antihero is Kenneth Widmerpool, a climber lacking in social skills but not in confidence who always seems to find himself in the right situation, exasperating anyone hoping to see him fail. The series is full of funny, well-drawn secondary characters, from Nick’s alcoholic school-mate Charles Stringham to the “mobile laundry unit” head Bithel to the ice queen Pamela Flitton, who destroys every man on whom she sets her sights. The narrative greed that I look for in every novel isn’t strong here, but the reader is drawn forward simply by the music of time: We’re following Nick as he goes through life, seeing the world through the lens of his professional and personal lives.

Powell’s observations on the rhythms of life display Nick’s interest, but with a surprising bit of dispassion. Broken marriages, personal setbacks, and even deaths are reported as facts intrinsic to life, but by and large unworthy of comment; by the last book, where secondary characters are dropping like flies, their deaths become parenthetical phrases, a reflection (I suppose) on how we perceive the deaths of those with whom we’ve lost touch as we ourselves grow older. Instead, Jenkins (whom Powell admitted was based on himself) prefers to find interest in small stories and little scandals, although as the series advances the scandals do become proportionally bigger and Powell’s writing veers somewhat more towards the risqué and sensational, perhaps a reflection of the various time periods covered by the series.

The twelve novels, comprising roughly 65-70 long chapters over about 3000 pages, don’t quite match Wodehouse for laugh-inducing content, but Powell infuses the writing with wit. His characters names can totter on the line between the ridiculous and the plausible, from the Walpole-Wilsons to Flavia Wisebite (and her ex-husband, Cosmo Flitton) to Scorpio Murtlock. When books written by some of the secondary characters are mentioned, they have glorious titles like Camel Ride to the Tomb and Dogs Have No Uncles. The punch lines, when they do arrive, are funny because of the context; having one character pour the contents of a sugar-bowl over another’s head is not intrinsically all that funny, but when it happens in Dance, it rises to another level of humor. Jenkins plays the Bob Newhart role of the one sane or normal person surrounded by wackos on lunatics, leaving him, with some later help from Isobel, to offer his commentary.

I have a strong feeling that J.K. Rowling has read Powell’s series and paid homage to it through two minor characters in the Harry Potter series. One minor character in the series is a mystic and spiritualist named Dr. Trelawney, who speaks in aphorisms and vague pronouncements, greeting people by saying, “The Essence of All is the Godhead of the True,” and expecting (but rarely receiving) the reply, “The Vision of Visions Heals the Blindness of Sight.” The similarity to Professor Trelawney in name, in bent, and in obsession with visions is unlikely to be a coincidence. I also saw similarities between Powell’s character Sillery and Rowling’s Professor Slughorn; both are slightly unctuous men who ran salons in their college’s houses and seemed to devote significant energy to determining whom to invite, measuring their gatherings’ success by the names and status of the attendees.

If you enjoy English writing, Powell’s depiction of upper-class English society from the immediate aftermath of World War I into the turbulent 1960s is worth the significant time investment. Next up for me: I’m already a third of the way into Emile Zola’s seminal socio-political novel Germinal.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,