Showing posts for Books
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A Game of Thrones
by George R. R. Martin
Published 1996 694 pages
ned start I like it: very easy to read, propulsive. Nearly no downtime — but lots of filler language. I probably only had to read every third word, which made me feel like one of those superreaders who digest books at over 9000 wpm.
George R. R. Martin writes women like r/menwritingwomen, all talk about “lower lips” and “glistening manhood”. There’s altogether too much detail about breasts breasting breastily. This is especially bad in the Daenerys chapters, who in this book is thirteen.
While I’m at it there’s probably a bit too much detail about how many precious gems are inlaid in everyone’s armour or how boiled some guy’s leather jerkin is as well. Appearance-driven character development has been a persistent bugbear of mine and it’s no less annoying when a crotchety old man in a flat cap does it.
In broad strokes, though: GRRM has it got it right. I wish I read this before the TV programme so that the twists could have bodied me properly. The baddies are skincrawlingly repulsive, the action is tight and doesn’t overstay its welcome. The world is rich and alive and internally consistent (except for when somebody reminds us that some artefact or other is thousands of years old; as a rule of thumb I divide all GoT dates by 5).
The received wisdom about the television programme is that it got bad when the producers ran out of material from GRRM, which I never quite understood, because wasn’t GRRM involved in the production? Now I realise exactly how much the TV programme owed to the books, viz. basically everything down to the individual lines of dialogue. No wonder the writing team couldn’t bring the final seasons together: I’m not convinced that they wrote a line of original dialogue that they couldn’t have yanked from the book instead.
Anyway I’m off to collect vol. 2 from the library, I can’t wait to read how this all turns out in the endddd 👁️👄👁️
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The Director
by Daniel Kehlmann
Published 2023 352 pages
The Director is a series of fictionalised vignettes from the life of Austrian G. W. Pabst, a film director from like the 1920s to the 1940s or so. By the time it begins Pabst is already a big-shot, fresh off films with Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks; but he's also an out-of-place emigré fleeing the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. In Hollywood, he's frustrated by his work with Warner Brothers, by the restrictions placed on his artistic vision and an apparent lack of respect from his American producers. We pick up with him and with his family at intervals throughout the 1930s; late in the decade he returns home to attend to his (fraudulently) ill mother, and gets trapped in the country by the Nazi regime.
Much of the main part of the novel is concerned with the lengths to which apparently normal people will go to collaborate with the Nazis when even the merest of their freedoms is threatened. Pabst is portrayed as ineffective and sort of weak-willed,: he neglects to learn English while living in the States and therefore can't understand his producers, nor be understood himself; back in Austria he immediately starts being bullied by his housekeepers, whose thick dialect he also struggles to understand. He seems comfortable only on set, to which, back in Austria, he returns with some acclaim — and with the blessing and support of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. In an amusing but tense scene between Pabst and Goebbels But, he tells anyone who will listen, he's not a collaborator.
This comes to a bit of a head during the filming of his third and last film under the aegis of the Reich Ministry, during which he stretches (and outright snaps) the illusion that he's not a collaborator. The film, The Molander Case, is finished just as the Russians advance through Prague, and is subsequently lost in Pabst & his assistant's escape from the city.
Pabst spends the rest of his career disconsolate at the loss of a masterpiece for which he compromised his values — if, indeed, he had values to compromise in the first place, which the book sort of implies he doesn't? The last few chapters sort of wrap things up in a very tidy way, which The Complete Review wasn't a fan of but which didn't bother me.
I enjoyed the structure — individual vignettes separated by years, rather than a continuous flow of action — and Kehlmann is an expert at building a scene. The characters felt real and the tension of living under the Nazis pervaded. I don't know why I never really considered it before: the Nazis seemed to have as tight a grip on the people of Germany as the CPSU had on the people of the Soviet Union. I guess totalitarianism looks pretty much the same no matter what language you speak!
👀
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Careless People
by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Published 2025 400 pagesRead this after everyone made a lot of noise about it earlier in the year. I don’t know what I expected; pretty much everything in the book confirms exactly what I thought things were like at Facebook. They’re all weirdos and they’re all so self-absorbed they hardly notice when they enable all sorts of awful things elsewhere in the world. No second-order thinking but it’s okay because they’re all fabulously wealthy.
I was swept up a little bit during the first third. I want to hustle in the name of my ideals so bad. But maybe that’s just me being a Man In Tech, or maybe just wanting to be back in my twenties and having made different decisions, which who doesn’t want that.
The last quarter or so felt muddy, almost like Wynn-Williams had to shoehorn in all of the horrible global politics that Facebook did during Wynn-Williams's tenure. And they did a lot of horrible global politics: cooperating on election interference (although: no mention of Cambridge Analytica), building tools for spying in China, the Rohingya genocide (a single chapter called "Myanmar").
The whole thing makes me glad I’m no longer on Facebook; anyway off to WhatsApp to tell all my family that I’ve posted another book review
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Maurice and Maralyn
by Sophie Elmhirst
Published 2024 254 pages
A charming, propulsive read, in spite of one of its protagonists. Maurice and Maralyn is the story of an English couple shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific during a circumnavigation of the globe by sailboat in the 1970s; their 118 days at sea and subsequent rescue was the topic of much contemporary media frenzy. They even published a firsthand account!
What Elmhirst's Maurice and Maralyn contributes to the narrative is the context surrounding their trip: Maurice is curmudgeonly and kind of mean; Maralyn is engaged and vivacious and humble. It is mostly thanks to Maralyn that they make it out alive. They struggle with fame, and when the attention dies down they retreat to the banal life they were originally trying to escape.
They’re mostly unchanged by their harrowing experience at sea, which I think is testament to quite how sturdy British folks were in the aftermath of the war. While adrift, Maurice does vow to change his ways — but later, when they build a new boat and return to sea with a crew and an eye to complete the original voyage, he turns out to be such a drag that one of the crew bails before they've reached their destination.
Maralyn dies in 2002, and Maurice spends the last decade of his life alone and adrift again (do you see what I did there), unable to live without Maralyn but unable to die due to his stout Derbyshire constitution. He writes a memoir, more for himself than for anyone else. He gives a video interview to a shipwreck documentarian: he speaks movingly about the experience, about being alone with the wildlife in the middle of the sea. About the calls of the whales at night. And at one point he admits that if he knew he would be picked up, he’d do it again.
Maurice died in 2017 and had his ashes scattered with Maralyn's in the New Forest.
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Tinkers
by Paul Harding
Published 2009 191 pages
Tinkers is a character study of a father and son from the perspective of the son on his deathbed. The father, Howard Crosby, is a travelling salesman in the early years of the 20th century, an ineffective sort of a guy with epilepsy and a powerful curiosity about the world around him and a wife that barely tolerates him.
His son, George, is a horologist on his deathbed, looking back on his childhood, his father’s life, and his own experiences with his troubled siblings.
The book alternates modes throughout, from first to third person and from present to past tense. There are sections of seemingly incongruous extracts from books or pamphlets. There are long run-on sentences that I think are meant to sound profound. And there are images that are evocative but incongruous, like a description of a fat man as a “fleshy Olympian pear” or of roadside puddles as the colour of “iron cream”. What the heck is iron cream? Some of the descriptions run on like a fanfic writer who can’t decide on the best way to bring an image to life and so just keeps heaping new ones on.
I finished the book with the powerful sense that Paul Harding is a clever guy with a lot of novel ways to describe things. But I also finished the book with a powerful exhaustion with sentences like these:
Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas. Maybe you would not even feel that, as you struggled in clothes that felt like cooling tar, and as you slowed, calmed, even, and opened your eyes and looked for a pulse of silver, an imbrication of scales, and as you closed your eyes again and felt their lids turn to slippery, ichthyic skin, the blood behind them suddenly cold, and as you found yourself not caring, wanting, finally, to rest, finally wanting nothing more than the sudden, new, simple hum threading between your eyes. The ice is far too thick to chop through. You will never do it.
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