• Friday, 11 Oct 2024 11:34 pm

  The Bright Sword

  by Lev Grossman

  Published 2024 670 pages

  

  There’s a lot to like in this tale-telling from post-Roman Britain! Collum is an aspiring knight from the Hebrides who makes the long journey down to Camelot (maybe somewhere around Gloucester?) only to find that Arthur is already dead and the Knights of the Round Table are dead and scattered (mostly dead) in the wake of the Lancelot-Grail cycle. Undeterred, Collum rallies the benchwarmers for a last adventure across the porous boundaries dividing our world from the world of fairies and gods.

  This world has much to recommend it! The magical world feels at once erratic but internally consistent, with such a distinct British twang to it that I struggle to believe that Grossman hasn’t spent time here. In the book (as in reality), the past remains eternally present: not something that happened and then got written down—but something that you can walk up to and touch. Standing stones, Roman roads, ruined churches, ancient oaks: these are high fantasy tropes but they’re also common features of dog walks within 25 minutes of our front door. The Bright Sword whisks me away to a dream of Britain, but it also plants me back where I am and reminds me that the place I live has been around for a long, long time.

  A handful of nitpicks:

  • Much like the world of fairy in which much of this book takes place, things get a little disorganised around the middle. The adventure sort of sputters and reignites, knights are picked off individually, characters swoop in on wings of magic and then dematerialise.
  • There are frequent digressions to pad out backstories—at times, it feels, only to underscore someone’s death.
  • The role of the Christian God waffles: He shows favour only intermittently and at one point declares that He is forsaking Britain entirely (the consequences of which continue to be felt among its people to this very day).
  • Grossman also falls into the trap of belabouring the attractiveness of the main love interest, sometimes to the point of distraction. I’m personally not a fan of that, but maybe some people need to be reminded when a woman is attractive.
  • I don’t know. What else?
  • There are maybe one too many “twists”. Most of them don’t pay off, like Collum’s fairy heritage; I wish I’d have just been told up front.
  • Finally, there were a number of moments in the book where it felt like there was a narrative pause to allow the audience to applaud, which doesn’t make sense because this is a book. They usually do it in superhero movies when a cameo happens. The narrative will work it's way up to a badass manoeuvre and then we'll get a one-line paragraph with a bit of ensuing filler.

  The battles are hard-won, though, which I appreciated. Collum is good at fighting but he’s not Chosen One-good.

  Overall: a romp. On the strength of the world of this book I wandered into a bookshop made out of a converted Methodist chapel and purchased a 60-year-old copy of The Once and Future King.

• ---

  Thursday, 26 Sept 2024 9:14 am

  Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

  by Robin Sloan

  Published 2012 288 pages

  Not a ton to review here. I don't generally knock books for being derivative—smart writers can do a lot of exciting things with established forms or narratives—but unfortunately, Robin Sloan doesn't. Maybe I'm not the target audience? I'm not sure what readers are meant to get out of this: the common fantasy tropes are so thinly veiled that even the protagonist makes repeated reference to them as they happen.

  Clay Jannon gets fired from his cringe design job and takes up as the clerk of a bookstore in San Francisco. It turns out that the bookstore is a front for a shadowy Secret Society with sinister vibes but which, it turns out, doesn't actually do anything but own a typeface and write a lot of autobiographies that no one reads. There's some weak inciting action and Clay has to rely on all of his friends to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding an encrypted old book. He does so, eventually.

  Google, the multi-trillion dollar advertising company, makes continuous and gratuitous appearances that in no way holds them to account. Characters get extended descriptions of what clothes they're wearing in lieu of proper development. Clay's love interest exists exclusively as a reason to go into Google's offices. Her personality is that she wears a red shirt that makes her boobs look good. Oh and Clay's Ron Weasley is a tech founder for a company that models boob physics. He is Clay's closest friend and his work is portrayed as being a bit funny but fundamentally toothless and also very lucrative. He spends most of the novel spending money and chatting up girls about how great boobs are. Boobs take up an inordinate amount of space in this book, which is ostensibly about secret societies at the intersection of art and technology, or whatever it was that Steve Jobs said that time.

  Peak 2012 content.

  Further reading: this comment about how Harry Potter would read if written in the style of this book.

• ---

  Saturday, 7 Sept 2024 4:30 pm

  Demon Copperhead

  by Barbara Kingsolver

  Published 2022 560 pages

  

  In short

  What I liked

  • All the pieces up in the air, spectacularly choreographed—inherited perhaps from the source material
  • The language, colloquial but poetic
  • Villains were oily and despicable

  What could have been better

  • Relationships between people were believable but lacked emotional resonance
  • Demon (and maybe David before him) doesn’t evolve as a character

  In review

  I read a little bit of Charles Dickens in high school, and in university I purchased a really nice edition of A Tale of Two Cities which I enjoyed but which didn’t rock my world. Somehow I came by the opinion that Dickens wrote illuminating but fundamentally unexciting books about poverty and child labour and coal and grime, with matronly characters called Mrs. Flitterbottom caring for, and villains called Squenchton Crunchly conniving against, a child protagonist who, in spite of insurmountable adversity, triumphs through personal grit and principle.

  That’s basically what’s going on here: Demon Copperhead is an Appalachian retelling of Dickens’s classic semi-autobiography David Copperfield, a book that I haven’t read but which by now I think I get the broad strokes of.

  Our hero, Demon Copperhead (born Damon, a name that nearly no one uses with him), is born to an teenage mom in rural Lee County, Virginia in the late 1980s. His father is absent (dead, it turns out) and his mother has no business being a parent; Demon takes up the domestic slack. He spends his first ten years in crushing poverty but he meets hardship with equanimity and develops a frank, but never despairing, relationship with his position in life.

  Like a little blue prizefighter. Those are the words she’d use later on, being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom’s life. And if that’s how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I’ll take it. To me that says I had a fighting chance. Long odds, yes I know. If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed. Kid born to the junkie is a junkie. He’ll grow up to be everything you don’t want to know, the rotten teeth and dead-zone eyes, the nuisance of locking up your tools in the garage so they don’t walk off, the rent-by-the-week motel squatting well back from the scenic highway. This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things, should have got himself delivered to some rich or smart or Christian, nonusing type of mother. Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.

  He grows up close with his neighbours the Peggots, and particularly with young Matthew Peggot (“Maggot” to Damon—I mean Demon). The difficulties of growing up with a mom who can’t look after herself matures Demon before his time, but he doesn’t fail to appreciate his childhood where he can: a love of comics, superheroes, and an abiding urge to see the ocean.

  Me though, I was a born sucker for the superhero rescue. Did that line of work even exist, in our trailer-home universe? Had they all quit Smallville and gone looking for bigger action? Save or be saved, these are questions. You want to think it’s not over till the last page.

  Things take a turn when his mom takes up with an abusive trucker called Murrel “Stoner” Stone and relapses into drug use; when she dies of an overdose, Demon is turned over to the foster system at eleven years old. His case workers are by turns inexperienced, optimistic, wilfully ignorant, and worn thin that they can’t muster the effort to care. Demon is shunted between foster families—first to a farmer who uses (eleven-year-old) foster boys as free labour on his tobacco plantation, where he meets the charismatic but unscrupulous Sterling “Fast Forward” Ford and the totally incorruptible Tommy “Waddles” Waddell. When the tobacco harvest is over, the farm no longer has need for him and he’s turned over to a poor family who force Demon to take up a part-time job to help them make ends meet (again, the boy is eleven years old) sorting trash behind a meth lab (at eleven).

  When I was eleven years old, I went to Club Med with my family. When Demon is eleven, he learns hard lessons about chance, about relying on other people, and about his place in American society and among the people he grew up with—but never loses his conscientious streak. He also gets nicotine poisoning.

  The villains of these sections—first the tobacco plantation owner, then the operator of te meth lab, and, in an oblique sense, his foster family—are driven to oiliness in turns by desperation and sheer malice, and while the misery that they inflict on Demon’s life is inarguable, the fire inside of him never really seems at risk of going out. Maybe that’s just the nature of the character, both here and in Dickens’s original, but it serves almost to declaw the awful stuff that happens to him.

  When his foster family finally hits financial rock bottom and decides to alight for Ohio, Demon runs away to Tennessee, where he suspects he may have a living relative. His trip to Murder Valley, TN is the stuff of American nightmares: long empty roads, truck stops populated by the desperate and bored, nights spent in the sticky runoff of fast food dumpsters. At length he finds his grandmother on his father’s side, a knot of an old woman who helps raise young girls and who has low opinions of men in general. She doesn’t intend to raise Demon herself but puts him in touch with a family back in Lee County who can take care of him: Coach Winfield and his daughter Angus.

  Winfield is the coach of the local high school football team and a minor local celebrity; Angus (born Agnes) is a toughie with principles that Demon really connects with. In the Winfield house, Demon’s fortunes turn around: Coach sticks with him and Agnes grows to be a close friend and confidante. He finds a mentor in his progressive guidance counselor Mr. Strong, and starts to develop an keen sense of the social injustice perpetrated against the people of Appalachia. As Demon moves into high school, Winfield trains him as a tight end for the Lee County Generals, thereby reaching the upper echelons of high school society.

  Fortunes turn again on a rough tackle and a broken leg; Demon is prescribed opioid painkillers in the aftermath and develops a dependence that erodes his comfortable life out from under him. At the same time, Coach Winfield’s latent alcoholism worsens and the assistant manager of the football team takes progressive financial advantage of the situation. Fast Forward, from back on the tobacco plantation, re-enters his life and Demon eagerly takes up with him again, even as it becomes clearer and clearer how Fast Forward uses and abuses everyone who puts their confidence in him—culminating in the all-but-abduction one of the Peggot relatives, Demon’s erstwhile crush Emmy.

  Around the same time, Demon enters his first proper relationship with Dori Spencer, the first new character in like 300 pages. Demon is smitten at first sight. Dori’s life revolves around her terminally-ill father, at once caring for him and stealing his prescriptions to consume recreationally. When her father dies, Demon and Dori move in together and Demon finds himself on the cusp of an adulthood he was truly not prepared for.

  The one light in his world is a burgeoning partnership with Tommy Waddell (also of the tobacco plantation), who’s now working at a local paper and with whom Demon starts publishing a comic about an Appalachia-themed superhero, to critical local acclaim.

  This doesn’t stave off the worst, when it comes:

  It was April, not quite a year after Vester, and it happened the way I knew it would. I came home and found her. [...]

  I almost didn’t feel anything at first, cleaning her up like I’d done so many times, getting her decent. And then the house, cleaning up her mess and her kit. Hiding stuff, before I made any calls. There were few to make. Thelma had run out of reasons to know her. Like everybody else. I had no wish to see the aunt again, but the EMTs said they had to get hold of next of kin, so I turned over Dori’s phone. Aunt Fred was in the contacts. I’d erased some other number first, but nobody cared to track down any mysteries. Another OD in Lee County. There’d been hundreds.

  And just like that, I was “the boy that went in there and found her.”

  Without much of a reason to keep living, Demon moves in to a drug house and spends his days only semiconscious. This meagre existence is interrupted by a scheme to bring him low before Fast Forward at the place where his father died, a local waterfall and swimming hole. However, a complex set of circumstances, including a raging storm and the presence of a Peggot relative with a big gun, lead to the (to be fair, blameless) death of the relative and of Fast Forward himself—which for Demon marks rock bottom.

  The choreography of rock bottom, over the last 120 pages or so, is something to behold from a technical perspective. Demon’s relationship with Dori, his partnership with Tommy Traddles, the abduction of Emmy Peggot, and the ongoing misery of unbreakable addiction—all are held aloft with Demon’s head just barely above the water. And while they’re resolved separately, it never feels like tying up narrative loose ends. Things eventuate mostly naturally.

  With nearly nothing left to lose, Demon enters a halfway house on the urging of his sort-of-aunt (it’s a long story) June Peggot to get clean to get his life back on track. Not another ordeal on the long list, his term at the halfway house comes to him almost as a vacation from the rough life he’s led to this point. Almost as a reward. Unburdened by addiction, he starts a webcomic and finds a measure of inner peace. He reconnects with Angus, who has, throughout it all, made herself available as a friend and confidante, the one steady presence in his life. Together they set out on a trip to finally see the ocean.

• ---

  Friday, 9 Aug 2024 9:00 pm

  Parable of the Sower

  by Octavia E. Butler

  Published 1993 345 pages

  

  In the near future of the year 2024, Lauren Olamina lives with her family in a gated suburb of Los Angeles. Climate change and economic collapse have transformed the United States into a semi-wasteland of poverty and barbarism. Society exists in name only; peace exists only insofar as it can be enforced with high walls and guns. Corporations have started taking over towns, and there’s talk of slave labour employed in factories near the Canadian border. Everywhere in between, the unhoused and the desperate scrounge and kill for another day.

  It’s miserable.

  For Lauren, whatever misery she avoids by living within tall walls in counterbalanced by her hyperempathy, a neurological disease that causes her to physically feel whatever those around her feel. She has inherited it from her drug-addicted mother, long out of the picture. She has a grip on it most of the time, but woe betides confrontation with a would-be attacker: anything she inflicts in self-defence is inflicted also in self-offence.

  Life changes from one day to the next. Lauren watches her once-secure neighbourhood come apart at the seams: first from within, as her brother gets involved with drug dealers on the outside—and then from without, when the neighbourhood is attacked by vagrants addicted to a drug that impels its users to burn anything they can get their hands on. Her home is destroyed and her family is slaughtered. She reconnects with a couple of survivors of the attack and with them casts off north, hoping to find a quiet spot to start anew, maybe where water isn’t so expensive, where life can be lived in a bit of peace. She also tentatively starts sharing with her travelling companions the foundations of a nascent religion—more of a personal philosophy—that Lauren calls Earthseed. It encourages self-reliance and self-determination and is oriented around the koan-like tenet of God is Change.

  On her northbound way, she forms an unlikely community with a dozen or so others, gently preaching Earthseed along the way. Though they’re a bit of a motley bunch, they share a common abiding sense of inner kindness (and a healthy dose of commonsense strength in numbers). Lauren emerges as their leader and shepherds them through a few moments of serious peril.

  And yet—for a world that we’re told hangs on the brink, and where the next peril seems always around the corner, Butler seldom puts her characters in the path of serious, imminent danger. The high points are never very high, but the lows are never particularly low, either. Lauren’s group is attacked—several times—but the action never seems serious, somehow; the baddies are talked down or chased off offscreen. At one point the group is nearly overtaken by a wildfire, and we wonder if one of the older or weaker members of the group is going to make it—but then the winds change and the wildfire moves off somewhere else. The world is full of peril and death comes nearly indiscriminately—just not for Lauren’s group ¹.

  Lauren’s hyperempathy also feels somewhat unplumbed as a concept. It’s a fascinating conceit that should open the door to all sorts of interesting scenarios—but it mostly just plays as a reason to pan away from conflict resolutions. When attacked, Lauren fires her gun until she’s completely incapacitated by pain, and then catches up on the action on her recovery. I wish we’d have gotten a scene where her sharing helps her connect with someone on a level that no one else can. A couple of other sharers join her group late in the story, but remain feebly truculent through the final pages of the book.

  Where the story shines, however, is in the details. Lauren’s observations of her travelling companions, the forethought into making it through the night, the offhand comments about toilet areas, or the price of water, or bathing—all of these make the world leap up and press on you. There’s a tense moment where the group is hiding from a firefight in the night, and a baby makes just enough noise to draw the attention of one of the survivors. The group watches the figure move around a burning truck, and look out into the darkness. The moment hangs with the distant figure and the fire and the whirling night all around. The texture of the world is grim but it’s very nearly tangible in its quality. It doesn’t feel like another world—it feels like ours. It feels like a few bad decisions could make it so.

  ---

  1. This is not strictly true—one of Lauren’s group does die, but they’re not part of Lauren’s Core Team, and they’re mostly mourned over the course of a single chapter.↩︎

• ---

  Friday, 26 Jul 2024 6:30 pm

  The Custom of the Country

  by Edith Wharton

  Published 1913 331 pages

  

  Undine Spragg wants only two things in the world,

  two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability

  Both, she's certain, are bestowed by inclusion in the glamorous old money New York social scene, which she's uprooted her upper-middle-class family from Kansas to join. She's been in New York for two years when The Custom of the Country starts, but she's had no luck: she's on the outs.

  That is—until she captures the attention of Ralph Marvell, a dazzling gentleman from an old money family, who takes her for a simple girl and snaps her up. Marital bliss quickly sours, however, as they realise that they have nearly nothing in common. They have a child, Paul, in spite of their mounting displeasure in each other's company; Undine pays him almost no mind at all but Ralph loves him dearly and raises him solo (well, inasmuch as a Gilded Age American aristocrat can raise anyone solo).

  Too soon, Undine spends Ralph's meagre old-money stipend, and after a downturn in Business her father's allowance dries up. Ralph gives up an—admittedly limp—interest in an artistic career for a job in real estate to try and cover the mounting bills that Undine racks up on dresses, jewels, and parties. The debts accumulate, and by and by the game wears thin. When Ralph can (or will) no longer provide the life that Undine believes she deserves, she wangles a fake illness and sweeps herself off for Paris to woo someone who can (or will).

  This doesn't quite work out for Undine, and she suffers from a bit of a low period—one of a few throughout the novel—where boredom overtakes her and she finds her social station somewhat reduced. She manages to land on her feet by catching the eye of Raymond, Comte (and later Marquis) de Chelles, a French aristocrat who, as a Catholic, insists she annul her marriage to Ralph before he can marry her.

  Here, Undine is guided by an old acquaintance from her Kansas days, Elmer Moffatt. He's been a sporadic presence throughout the novel, waltzing serendipitously into offices and tearooms with an American swagger to compromise someone's ethics with a shady-seeming deal as a remedy to a key moment of strife. He's the template of the modern capitalist: confident, business-savvy, adept at landing on his feet even when the money doesn't go his way. In a novel full of flawed characters just trying to get their way, he's probably the most enjoyable to watch.

  To Undine's limbo woes of being stuck Catholically attached to someone she never sees, and Catholically unable to marry a man who might re-elevate her station, Moffatt innocently suggests leaning on Ralph's attachment to Paul—Undine, after all, technically has custody—to get him (that is, Ralph) to pony up the money for the annulment. Undine does get her way in the end, in a series of scenes that metamorphose Undine from a cunning and spoilt but fundamentally uncomplicated protagonist into a truly awful person, and see her wind up with the annulment she wanted, the money she needed, and the son she never cared for in the first place.

  Suitably equipped, she contrives to marry Raymond but quickly comes to realise that a life as the Marquise de Chelles isn't all it's cracked up to be. Raymond is freer with his money than Ralph was—but not by much. Family troubles eat up the family's finances, sequestering Undine in the de Chelles country home, far from Paris society where she longs to be. Raymond quickly loses interest in Undine as well, and where her previous beaux were ever-eager to please, Raymond is quick to dismiss her as a foreigner. Here again Undine is struck low, before Moffatt reappears with a final deal to grant her everything she ever wanted.

  * * *

  Much of the book is presented almost lightheartedly, the whims and trials of the fabulously wealthy and spoilt. I think that this is what makes the book fun, instead of tiresome and upsetting. But Wharton puts moments of deep pathos at key points throughout the story, as if to remind us that these are people, after all.

  There's a scene near the end of the book from the perspective of young Paul, now nine years old, wandering around the rooms of his palatial home, bored and confused and lonely. He wonders what happened to his father and why he never sees him anymore. He laments his missing stepfather, Raymond, no longer in the picture. He gets told off by a servant for trying to read one of the thousands of books on the shelves—they're rare editions and too precious to touch. He longs for the days when he was surrounded by family who loved him. His mother comes home but she can't be bothered with his evident interest:

  Paul, seeing his mother's softened face, stole his hand in hers and began: 'Mother, I took a prize in composition—'

  'Did you? You must tell me about it tomorrow. No, I really must rush off now and dress—I haven't even placed the dinner-cards.'

  Throughout the book, we're meant to sympathise only halfheartedly for the men that Undine leaves wrecked in her wake, but in this moment of pathos for Paul, the impact of her awfulness is made real.

  'Why, hullo, old chap—why, what's up?' [Paul's step-father] was on his knees beside the boy, and the arms embracing him were firm and friendly. But Paul, for the life of him, couldn't answer: he could only sob and sob as the great surges of loneliness broke over him.

  * * *

  Inconsolable children notwithstanding, The Custom of the Country is a very fun book. Undine is despicable, and it's hard not to relish her low moments. It tends a little bit towards the hamfisted on European/American relations late in the book—one character even delivers a monologue/tirade against Americanism—but the commentary on capitalism and business and money is good and sharp and only a little upsetting. The book is well-paced and quick, skipping over years at a time and catching us up on the interim over the course of a quick chapter—though we're sometimes told more than shown, which feels a little clunky. Familiar characters also have a tendency to wander unprompted in to wherever Undine happens to be, and this sort of contrivance repeatedly drives a not-insignificant amount of the plot, but I guess this kind of thing is expected in a book of this era and at any rate it's not distracting. A well-constructed and fun, if at times a bit heartbreaking, romp through some terrible people's lives.

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