The Iron Man by Ted Hughes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Strange, Lyrical, Anti-War Science Fiction Fairy Tale Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man (1968) is an odd, unpredictable, and charming hybrid sf fairy tale novella for children. It runs 53 pages, including dynamic and stark illustrations by Andrew Davidson. The book is comprised of five chapters. The first three introduce the giant Iron Man, who appears at the top of a cliff, observes the sea, and steps off the cliff to fall and disintegrate at the bottom, after which he manages to reassemble himself (starting with a hand finding an eye), and then walks off into the sea missing one unretrieved ear… only to exit the sea and descend on a British farming community, where he takes to eating every metal thing he finds, including farm machinery and barbed wire fences. This is untenable for the local farmers, who plan to trap the “monster” in a giant pit. A boy called Hogarth (the son of a farmer), who first saw the Iron Man and feels guilty over luring him into the trap, wants to find a win-win way to co-exist with the “monster.” The last two chapters take the story in a new direction, as the Iron Man, hitherto a giant among small humans, has to deal with a much larger giant “space-bat-angel-dragon” who comes from the constellation of Orion to land on Australia, covering the entire country and declaring that it’s going to eat every living thing in the world. Is the Iron Man a robot? He works by cogs and gears and is made of metal and has eyes that can see infrared, but Hughes is uninterested in imagining or explaining who made the Iron Man or why or how he was made and so on. The word robot never appears. Written by an outstanding poet, the book features a concise, rhythmic style that rises now and then to terse rhapsody or lyrical muscularity, as in the first appearance of the Iron Man: Taller than a house, the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, on the very brink, in the darkness. The wind sang through his iron fingers. His great iron head, shaped like a dustbin but as big as a bedroom, slowly turned to the right, slowly turned to the left. His iron ears turned, this way, that way. He was hearing the sea. His eyes, like headlamps, glowed white, then red, then infra-red, searching the sea. He swayed in the strong wind that pressed against his back. He swayed forward, on the brink of the high cliff. Or as in a passage describing the British spring: So the Spring came round the following year, leaves unfurled from the buds, daffodils speared up from the soil, and everywhere the grass shook new green points... The story must appeal to children, who like stories about small characters outsmarting big ones, as Hogarth deals with the Iron Man in the first part and as the Iron Man deals with the space-being in the second part. Also, children like eating, and there is a lot of eating in the story, as when the Iron Man samples some delectable scrap heap metal rubbish: He picked up a greasy black stove and chewed it like toffee. There were delicious crumbs of chrome on it. He followed that with a double-decker bedstead and the brass knobs made his eyes crackle with joy. However, some themes seemed aimed at adults. Themes about communication and co-existence between disparate beings, as well as some 1960s anti-war messaging. Really a “star spirit” given to singing the peaceful music of the spheres, the space-bat-angel-dragon came to earth because it was excited by all “the battling shouts and the war-cries” here. And the ending is a kind of deus ex machina fantasy of peace brought by the Iron Man and the dragon-angel from outer space. But the book is never sentimental or didactic. View all my reviews
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The Iliad: A New Translation by Caroline Alexander by Homer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “There is nothing so wretched as man” Caroline Alexander’s 2015 English translation of The Iliad reads well: direct, dignified, and natural. She wrote her unrhymed verse while following the original Greek line for line and trying to capture its rhythmic flow. Her translation compares well with others: Yet still the Trojans were not able to make a rout of the Achaeans, but they held on, as a woman careful in her poverty holds her scales, and holding a weight and her wool, one on each side, she raises them to balance equally, so as to gain for her children a meager pittance. (Alexander) Think of an honest cottage spinner balancing weight In one pan of the scales and wool yarn on the other, Trying to earn a pittance for her children. Even so poised as that were these great powers making war. (Fitzgerald) Alexander’s introduction sketches the plot of the poem, as well as its cultural and historical background. She says it depicts war as wretched woe rather than glory, as something everyone wants to end but can’t, blighting everything it touches. The poem demonstrates the fact that we’ll all die and shows the tragic cost of war. Alexander makes at least three other interesting points. First, that the Mycenean Bronze age (when the war of the poem perhaps took place) had writing, though the only surviving texts are lists of possessions (including a Trojan woman), and that perhaps due to a drought the culture lost literacy during a several hundred year-long dark age, after which The Iliad was made. Second, there are many near-east influences in the poem, including from Sanskrit and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Third, the many repeated elements (e.g., heroic epithets like swift-footed Achilles) had not only practical purposes in making an oral poem easier to recite but also dramatic ones in, for instance, making Achilles’ pursuit of Hector around Troy scarier. The audiobook has an accompanying pdf with Alexander’s notes on the mythological, historical, and cultural references in The Iliad, like what the heck is the aegis, who was Ganymede, how long was a cubit, and whether Book Ten is native to The Iliad. The audiobook reader Dominic Keating is fine but tends to read with a single rhythm, lacking much of Dan Stevens’ charisma, panache, and variety reading the excellent, concise translation by Robert Fitzgerald. The story takes place during a couple weeks near the end of the ten-year war in which the Greeks have been trying and failing to sack the great city of Troy. The epic action centers around an argument between Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks, and Achilles, their semi-divine hero, over spoils of war (women). Achilles, in a pique, removes himself and his myrmidons from the war to teach the Greeks his value. This in turn sets in motion the fates of heroes like Sarpedon (favorite son of Zeus), Patroclus (Achilles’ beloved companion), Hector (the Trojan leader), and Achilles himself (though his fate is forecast, not depicted). As Alexander points out, the anger of Achilles is an interesting choice of theme, as Homer ignores the Trojan Horse and fall of the city and other dramatic events that happened before and after the brief period of his poem. The epic begins with a quarrel and ends with a funeral, with LOTS of bloody fighting in between. Like this: And when Meriones, pursuing, caught him, he struck him down through the right buttock; straight through into the bladder under the bone the spear-point passed; he dropped to his knees screaming, and death embraced him. The Greeks and Trojans take turns gaining the upper hand, with spouting blood, gushing entrails, dropping eyeballs, severed tendons, cut throats, struck lungs, impaled chests, shattered skulls, spattered brains, unstrung knees, and more. “Strong-hearted indeed would that man be/ who could rejoice on looking at the battle toil, and not grieve.” Many of the fortunes of war derive from the Olympian gods: giving dreams or plans, inspiring or dampening spirits, deflecting or guiding weapons, assuming the guise of friends, etc. Most such cases of divine intervention may be read as human explanation for morale or its absence or for accidents or good or bad luck and so on. Gods also play a comedy relief role. While about the only humorous things mortals do is insult, rebuke, and vaunt over each other (“Loud-mouthed archer, splendid in your crown of curls, ogler of girls”), the gods do some genuinely funny things, as when Zeus tells Hera how sexy she is by listing in detail all the mortal women and goddesses he’s slept with whom she now surpasses! It’s easy to see why people would rather name a son after Hector (= steadfast) than Achilles (= pain). Hector is human: he loves his wife and prays for his son to be a better man than he is and hectors his feckless brother Paris and takes responsibility for causing many of his people’s deaths due to his recklessness. He runs from Achilles, but after being abandoned by the gods he finally stands before the terrifying hero and even charges him while armed only with a sword. Achilles by contrast becomes “something more than human” in his rageful slaughter, clotting a river with corpses and being, as Menelaus accuses the Trojans earlier, “insatiate for battle.” By becoming more than human Achilles becomes less than human. Although he finally lets his anger against Agamemnon go when Patroclus is killed, he then indulges new anger against Hector and the Trojans. He’d eat Hector’s flesh raw if he could, he says. He finally lets that anger go before Priam, but he is monstrous while it lasts. Despite or because of The Iliad being a war poem, it is also a paean to life, especially via its myriad wonderful similes. Similes comparing the combatants to natural things like wind, snow, fire, dust, waves, mountains, trees, flowers, lions, boar, wolves, horses, eagles, bees, flies, snakes, or fish. Similes comparing the fighting to human activities like reaping, fishing, hunting, woodcutting, shipbuilding, plowing, shepherding, weaving, lard boiling, irrigation ditch digging, discus throwing, sandcastle tumbling, childbirthing, or mothering. Similes comparing people to divine things like Hephaestus’ fire, Zeus’ thunder, or Aphrodite’s beauty. The similes encompass all of life. Another impressive thing about The Iliad is that from the start everyone (Greeks, Trojans, Gods, poet, and reader) knows what is going to happen (e.g., "Your strength will destroy you"), but everyone does their best despite that fated knowledge, and every time you read the poem it moves you. View all my reviews
Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Myriad Historical Sources, People, and Events, but-- Set long before A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin’s Fire & Blood (2018) is an Old Town maester’s history of the first 150 years of Targaryen rule in Westeros. He starts with Aegon I’s speedy conquest of the Seven Kingdoms and precarious unification of them into a single realm and then works through the reigns of Aegon the Conqueror’s immediate successors, climaxing with the ferocious Dance of the Dragons civil war between different branches of the Targaryen house, and then cooling down in its aftermath. As in A Song of Ice and Fire, here, too, “All men are sinners… we are as the gods made us… strong and weak, good and bad, cruel and kind, heroic and selfish. Know that, if you would rule over the kingdoms of men.” Good guys do bad things (especially if they get angry or cocky), and bad guys do good things or at least human things (especially if they love someone), etc. So you’ll be rooting for the Blacks and then for the Greens and then for no one at all. It is interesting to read Martin posing as an Old Town maester evaluating and synthesizing a variety of “historical” sources (e.g., Grand Maester Runciter’s chronicles, Septon Eustace’s writings, court fool Mushroom’s salacious accounts, official proclamations, and third-hand contradictory recollections of events), including his reasons for accepting or rejecting certain explanations or theories about certain fraught actions and events and historical figures. He’s up front about limitations on his knowledge: “Her letter has been lost,” “Such songs make poor history,” or “The truth of the matter we can never know.” And he tries to choose the most likely version of events: “Scholars have debated ever since why Jaehaerys didn’t announce his marriage. To this writer it seems clear Jaehaerys had not repented and was thinking how to make it known.” This all gives the illusion that we’re reading a real history book. At times it becomes too much. Do we need all the different rumors about Jaehaera’s death, different motives for her suicide, different possible murderers, etc., especially when it comes down to one obvious behind the scenes mover? Do we need to get three only slightly conflicting accounts of Prince Daeron’s death? Sometimes I’d like Martin to do a wee bit fewer postmodern historian antics. The fertility and conviction of Martin’s imagination are impressive--but the names! He reels off series of names that are often similar to each other, often for figures who quickly come and go. Names of castles and holdings, potential heirs and marriage partners, attendees at coronations and weddings, participants of tournaments and combats, opposing sides at battles and council members, maesters and septons, and foreign friends and enemies, etc. Once our maester says, “We do not know the names of her handmaids,” and I think, Thank the gods! The problem is, I rarely found myself really caring for any of the historical figures, unlike with the fictional characters in A Song of Ice and Fire, where I couldn’t stop reading to find out what would happen to Arya or Tyrion or Jon or Brienne etc. There are some vile people here to hate, to be sure, and I do root for women in leadership positions (like Rhaenyra until she starts losing sons) and for youngsters in key roles at key times (when they’re not sadistic proto-Joffrey Lannisters), like Addam and Alyn Hull and Aegon III. But this is a fantastic history, not a fantasy novel. I also found dragons strangely underused and overused. Underused because they never speak or evince much personality or motivation and overused because they can be flown out of the sky to reduce an entire castle to cinders and an entire army to ashes. We do glimpse interesting features of dragons, like the Targaryen practice of putting unhatched eggs into babies’ cradles in hopes they’ll hatch and bond and the practical info that dragon riders chained their belts to their saddles. But too often our Maester says lame things like, “Dragons are not horses.” Or “But who can presume to know the heart of a dragon?” Or “We shall not pretend to any understanding of the bond between dragons and dragon riders.” Please, Martin, presume! Pretend! Although the book lacks most of A Song of Ice and Fire’s character development and spicy dialogue and vivid descriptions, Martin writes some nice lines in the voice of his maester, like “Largess draws men to leaders as a corpse draws flies.” And he writes some fine descriptions, as when Aegon the Conqueror launches a solo dragon attack on the formidable Harrenhall at night, starting from HIGH up in the sky so his dragon was as small as a fly on the moon, and then plummeting down and torching the place and its inhabitants. I got a kick out of his introduction of a throwaway character called Racallio Ryndoon, a high-born Tyroshi adventurer-captain from the gutter, purple haired, ambitious, generous, anti-slavery, loving kittens but hating cats, loving pregnant women but hating children, wielding swords in both hands, dressing up now and then as a (bearded) woman, fickle in the extreme, and so on. A colorful character on stage too briefly. I liked the gender issues in the book. Jaehaerys made a law preventing the surviving family from kicking second wife widows out after their husbands die, and his wife succeeded in stopping the awful practice of the Lord’s Right of the First Night, but she failed to make the maesters admit girls into the Tower for study, and the appalling Dance of the Dragons broke out because half the kingdom didn’t want a girl to inherit the Iron Throne. Simon Vance does his usual distinctive and professional reading of the audiobook. If you like his manner and voice, you’ll like his reading of this. But I was relieved when the 26-hour audiobook finally but abruptly ended after about 150 years with the regency of Aegon III. The book doesn’t have an overall dramatic movement or thematic closure. Who succeeded Aegon III? Do we need to know? Not really, but then we didn’t really need to know all the details about Aegon III’s regency either. Is it because Martin’s planning to publish a second volume? Where/when will his maester finally stop writing his history? View all my reviews
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Golden Age Optimistic Robot SF of Ideas Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) is a fix-up composite novel comprised of nine previously published short stories which, connected by italics passages, recount the development of robotics in the twenty-first century from rudimentary mute robots to communicative and reasoning machines and finally to super “Brains.” That development was made possible by the positronic brain-paths in a spongy globe of plantinumiridium (!?) about the size of a human brain, enabling robots to make (supposedly) predictable responses. All robots are built with the Three Laws of Robotics programmed into them: First, no robot shall harm any human, nor through inaction cause any human to come to harm; Second, all robots must obey any human command (as long as it doesn’t conflict with the first law); Third, all robots must seek to preserve their own existences (as long as doing so doesn’t conflict with the first or second laws). Human resentment at being replaced by intelligent machines has meant that robots are pretty much banned from earth or any other place of human habitation. This means that most of the stories in the book feature robots working on planets, space stations, asteroids and the like, places without substantial human populations. The conflicts in most of the stories involve working robots who appear to be malfunctioning, requiring United States Robots, Inc.’s troubleshooting field-engineers Powell and Donovan or the corporation’s “Robopsychologist” Dr. Susan Calvin to conduct interviews or experiments and the like to find the source of the problem, usually some kind of conflict among the Three Laws of Robotics. The italicized glue combining the stories into a “novel” consist of the aged Dr. Susan Calvin introducing or concluding the stories while being interviewed by a young reporter for Interplanetary Press on the eve of her retirement after a fifty-year career. Here is an annotated list of the stories: --“Robbie” (1940): A little girl loves her mute nursemaid robot Robbie (gendered male), while her mother is opposed to her daughter spending so much time with the machine. --“Runaround” (1942): Powell and Donovan are sent to Mercury, where they must quickly discover why the robot Speedy is running around a selenium pool in circles instead of collecting the vital resource. --“Reason” (1941): Powell and Donovan are on a space station where Cutie, a new model robot, uses his reason to figure out that there’s no way that “makeshift” humans could have made him and that his Maker is the Energy Converter of the station. --“Catch that Rabbit” (1944): Powell and Donovan are now on a mining asteroid, where they must figure out why a new type of robot called Davy and his six “fingers” (satellite robots) do bizarre marches and dances instead of working when humans are not nearby. --“Liar!” (1941): Dr. Susan Calvin painfully learns what happens when you mix a unique telepathic robot (with a fondness for human fiction) with the First Law of Robotics (no robot shall harm a human or through inaction cause a human harm). --“Little Lost Robot” (1947): Dr. Susan Calvin travels to a Hyper Drive Station among some asteroids so she can help locate the robot who’s been made with part of the First Law of Robotics missing (the clause saying no robot shall let a human come to harm by inaction). The robot is hiding among sixty-two other identical seeming ones. --“Escape” (1945): Can US Mechanical Men and Robots use their “Brain” to calculate how humans may safely achieve interstellar space travel without creating an insoluble dilemma that might destroy the childlike (and mischievous) super-calculating machine? --“Evidence” (1946): Attorney Stephen Byerley seems certain to win election as Mayor, but he seems too good to be true, and he’s never been seen to eat or drink in public. Could he be a robot in disguise? Might not robots make better political leaders than people do? --“The Evitable Conflict” (1950): the Machines (super robots) are running things for humanity, economically speaking, when the (probably) human World Coordinator is alarmed by recent mistakes or problems in the four Regions (Eastern, Tropic, European, Northern) into which the former countries of earth have been grouped. Not to worry, Dr. Susan Calvin tells him: the Machines are taking us to the destiny they deem best for us. Asimov bases his vision of robots on a big assumption: that unscrupulous or careless people or corporations would never make robots without the Three Laws programmed properly into the machines. By showing some robots getting caught in contradictory loops when tasked with doing something that might contradict one of their three laws, Asimov plays with the possibility that problems might arise despite everyone adhering to the rules, but he sure doesn’t envision missile drones or military robots or Terminators or Murderbots or the like. Just robots being used for dangerous or difficult labor or for helping humans with economic problems, etc. The last story has a character say (speaking for Asimov, it would seem), “The Machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested.” By the way, although it might be the case that Donovan is more ill-tempered and prone to angry outbursts while Powell is more thoughtful and helpful, they seem to trade those roles here and there, and there’s almost nothing really distinguishing the field-engineers (who seem to have no love lives or families) in appearance or manner, except one guy (Powell?) has a mustache he touches or tugs on. The story “Liar!” does play with human motivations, but it displays Calvin in an unappealing light. Pretty rudimentary characterization of the characters, but then that’s not what Asimov is up to. His sf here is of the idea-type. And most of the stories are interesting, entertaining, and well-crafted (if not aesthetically pleasing) mysteries. Readers interested in one of the early giants of American sf and one of the early influences on future robot stories should take a look. View all my reviews
Mythology by Edith Hamilton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Straightforward, Informative Retelling of Myths When I was a kid, I was indelibly impressed by a child’s textbook version of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942). Orpheus looking back at Eurydice, Hercules donning a poisoned love shirt, Narcissus gazing at his reflection while ignoring Echo, and the like. I was impressed again reading the original text now. Robert Graves would be more thorough, but Hamilton (re)tells a good story and gives a full overview of the myths. She also introduces the Norse myths (much more briefly, in about twenty-five pages compared to about four hundred for the Greek ones). The parts of her book are as follows: PART ONE: The Gods, the Creation, and the Earliest Heroes (e.g., Titans and Olympians, Demeter and Dionysus, Prometheus and Narcissus) PART TWO: Stories of Love and Adventure (e.g., Cupid and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice, the Golden Fleece, Pegasus and Bellerophon, Daedalus) PART THREE: The Great Heroes before the Trojan War (e.g., Perseus, Theseus, Hercules, Atlanta) PART FOUR: The Heroes of the Trojan War (e.g., Hector, Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas) PART FIVE: The Great Families of Mythology (e.g., Atreus, Thebes, Athens) PART SIX: The Less Important Myths (e.g., Midas, Aesculapius, Glaucus and Scylla) PART SEVEN: The Mythology of the Norsemen (e.g., Loki and Balder, Brunhild and Sigurd) In her introduction, Hamilton explains the difficulty of making a collection of Greek myths: it’d be like telling the history of English literature from Chaucer to Kipling, but with even greater variety, as Chaucer is more like Galsworthy and the ballads more like Kipling than Homer is like Lucian or Aeschylus like Ovid. She introduces her sources (Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Alexandrians, Virgil, etc.) and warns that rather than make a unified whole, she’ll give an idea of what the myths are like. As she retells the myths, Hamilton explains her reasons for choosing or excluding certain ancient sources. I do like it when she gives her spicy opinions of the sources, as in, “A dull writer, but less dull than usual in this tale.” However, from the start, she reveals a bias against Ovid, because, she says, he doesn’t believe in the myths he’s recounting and is too ready to decorate stories that are stronger when simpler, and yet she often uses his versions of myths because they are often the completest we have. She says, for instance, that she’s using Ovid’s Philomela and Procne, but despite his being the best version of the story, he is “inconceivably bad” in taking fifteen lines to gratuitously describe Procne’s tongue being cut out and lying palpitating on the earth. She opines that the Greek poets were not given to such detail, but, I thought, what about Odysseus thrusting and twisting a red-hot stake in Polyphemus’ eye so that the juices sizzle and spurt? She doesn’t condemn Homer for being “bad” there (and excludes the gory detail when she retells the story). All this is to say that Hamilton sure doesn’t like Ovid, but others (like me) might like his Metamorphoses a lot! People well versed in the myths will not find so many new things here. But Hamilton sprinkles in neat information or insights here and there. Some of the things I learned for the first time (or had forgotten) are as follows: --There’s almost no magic in Greek myths. Circe and Medea are about the only witches. No magical priests, either, priests being rarely seen. --Zeus’ many lovers derive from the new Greek culture/religion taking over smaller weaker ones, combining their main gods with Zeus, so that their wives became his. --To Virgil, as to the Romans generally, war was the noblest and most heroic act. For the earlier Greeks, like Euripides, it was a ruined town, a dead baby, wretched women. --Amazons inspired painters more than poets. --Dionysus exemplifies the contradictory nature of the Greek gods, for he brings joy or savagery, as wine affects us variously. Also, Dionysus was connected to the theater, the performers and audience engaging in a sacred act, tragedy going hand in hand with the god because he was a sufferer, a vine pruned and left dead in winter, torn to pieces to be resurrected; he was the tragic god and the assurance that death doesn’t end all because of the immortality of the soul. -- Asgard was a place without joy or bliss, darkened by the doom hanging over the gods, all part of the Norse vision that the only good was heroism in lost causes ending in death. The ultimately mortal Norse gods could be heroic, unlike the immortal gods of Greece. Hamilton’s chapter on Hercules is prime, especially a sequence in which a king learns he’ll die if someone doesn’t die in his place, so he thinks to ask his aged feeble parents, but they say that even old people enjoy the sun and refuse. After his friends refuse as well, his queen agrees, and after she dies for him, the king feels sorry for himself for losing a wife who’d sacrifice herself for him! Hercules visits at that point and is blithely singing noisy songs and telling dirty jokes when he discovers that the queen has died. Ashamed, the hero decides to make it up to the king by out-wrestling death and bringing the queen back as a surprise. When Hercules says, “Guess who this is!” and produces the resurrected woman, the king is overcome by horror. Hamilton points out that it’s all very Hercules: his stupidity, cockiness, strength, and need to self-punish. Illustrated by the impressively named Steele Savage, the book has 22 full-page pictures plus smaller ones at the beginnings of chapters. His art is dramatic and stylized and effectively conveys Hamilton’s messages and stories. Audiobook reader Suzanne Toren does a workwomanlike job with the myths, getting a bit gruffer for macho or angry figures like Hercules, reading with an easy pace and a clear understanding of the text, etc. Throughout, Hamilton writes simply, while often taking flight in what must be her own translations of intense passages from her ancient sources, which elevate her accounts. Readers who want more lively retellings of myths may prefer Stephen Fry’s Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined, which “brim with humor and emotion,” but I find him too arch and winking and prefer Hamilton’s direct and dignified style. View all my reviews
Red Country by Joe Abercrombie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Cormac McCarthy and Jack Schaefer Do Epic Fantasy? Joe Abercrombie’s Red Country (2012) reads a little like Blood Meridian crossed with Shane in an epic fantasy setting. Or like a grimdark fantasy by Joe Cook and Stephen Erikson with a strong western angle. Settlers are moving west through the Far Country, the land of the Ghosts (Native American analogues), looking for gold, following dreams, bringing “civilization” with them. There are cattle herds, river crossings, stampedes, and attacks by painted and motley-clothed Indians, er, Ghosts, circling the wagons and trying to take scalps, er, ears. There is the destination, the town Crease, run by and fought over by two saloon owners, the Mayor (centered in the Church of Dice) and Papa Ring (centered in the Whitehouse). In Crease the gamblers, gangsters, drunkards, beggars, and prostitutes outnumber the prospectors, and drinking, swearing, thieving, and fighting are rife. Although Abercrombie offers a telling comment by Mark Twain as epigraph for one of the parts of the novel, “There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages,” and although one or two of Abercrombie’s main characters feel some sympathy for the Ghosts, realizing, for instance, that they are just people and that the settlers are engaged in “a brave but foolhardy effort to export the worst evils of city living into the middle of the unspoiled wilderness,” no main point of view character is a Ghost, they come off as rather pathetic (if colorful and dangerous), and at one point their leaders are treacherously and excrescently murdered by two of the men we’re supposed to be rooting for in our reading of the novel. In short, although Abercrombie pays lip service to the concept that all men are equally savage and that civilization is in many ways a plague, he gets the reader to want non-Ghost characters to come out on top of the carnage. Fortunately, Abercrombie is really writing epic fantasy, with mutually antagonistic cultures like the Old Empire, the Union, and the North, so he also has more formidable and villainous non-Ghost antagonists for our heroes, like Captain General Nicomo Cosca, leader of the mercenary Company of the Gracious Hand, and Inquisitor Lorsen, leader of eight or so sadistic “practicals” from the Union’s Inquisition. Cosca is a prime villain, a luminously smiling, gregarious, geriatric Captain Hook, given to philosophizing and seeking personal gain without any ethics or morals. His company indulges in rapine and pillage and massacre, burning whatever will burn, taking whatever can be carried, arriving like a plague of psychopathic locusts and leaving devastation in their wake. They are under contract to the Union to cross the border into the Near and Far Countries to find rebel remnants so Inquisitor Lorsen may torture them for a brighter future. One of the most interesting characters is the Gracious Hand’s lawyer Temple, who’s spent most of his life taking the easy way and leaving all his many jobs and careers half-completed, a man with the moral compass to be appalled by the Company’s atrocities but without the courage to try to stop them. But the novel is driven by Shy “My knife is always handy” South, a one-quarter Ghost, red haired, gap toothed, sharp-tongued, hard-bargaining, ex-wanted thief and murderer, and her stepfather Lamb, a hulking, taciturn, middleaged northerner who avoids conflict and can’t bargain. After their farm is burned, their hired worker hanged, and Shy’s ten-year-old sister and six-year-old brother taken, Shy and Lamb set out from the ruins to track the culprits across the Near Country and into the Far Country. Once Shy starts a task she won’t stop till it’s done, but this one seems nigh on impossible. Fortunately for her, Lamb (not his real name) turns out to be more dangerous and infamous than Shy took him to be. Abercrombie likes to set potent characters in motion until they collide in impressive set pieces with ever higher stakes as the story progresses. Here we have the Company of the Gracious Hand (and Temple), the Fellowship (of settlers), the Inquisitors, the Ghosts, the Dragon People (a strain of Ghost hiding away on or in a sacred volcanic mountain), a small group of scoundrels led by Grega Cantliss, and our “heroes” Shy and Lamb. Especially memorable are the terse, teasing interactions between Shy (who sticks at everything she attempts) and Temple (who sticks at nothing), Nicomo Cosca’s self-aggrandizing BS delivered to his hack biographer Spillion Sworbreck, a tour de force wagon chase scene, and a hilarious treaty signing attended by the dread Imperial Legate Sarmis. Plenty of dry, witty, cynical dialogue: “Some day you can build a boat from ‘meaning well’ and see how it floats. Tried that. It sank with me on it.” “A man with a missing eye after a man with a missing finger. There’s a song somewhere in there, I reckon.” “What can you expect when you fish men out of rivers? Heroes?” “Severed heads never go out of fashion.” “Here is the perennial trouble with burying your past. Others are forever trying to dig it up.” Plenty of vivid, evocative descriptions: “She burst out at the edge of a dizzy cliff and stared far over high and barren country, sharp black forest and bare black rock, slashed and stabbed with white snow, fading into long gray rumor, without a touch of people or color. No hint of the world she knew.” Audiobook reader Stephen Pacey relishes the novel, giving different characters from different cultures different accents, doing fine voices for the main characters, and doing a splendid Nicomo Cosca, such that at one point when Cosca shows up unexpectedly and Abercrombie is withholding his identity for a few paragraphs, Pacey reveals the villain’s presence more quickly than were we reading the physical book. Pacey enhances the story. Readers of Abercrombie novels will recognize here their trademark features: painterly descriptions, unpredictable and visceral violence (that may become numbing), murky moral waters, and flawed narrative point of view characters who can’t escape their troubled pasts or who have difficulty making the right choice in moments of crisis, such that we find them oddly appealing as we wonder if they’ll ever be able to find a place of peace or do the right thing. View all my reviews
The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai by Ha Jin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars An Absorbing Biography of a Great Poet I’ve loved Ezra Pound’s translation of “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” ever since first reading it in university, but I’d never known much more about the writer of the original poem than that his Japanese name was Rihaku, his American name Li Po, and his Chinese name Li Bai. So I eagerly listened to and learned a lot from Ha Jin’s The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (2019). It is hard to overestimate the importance of Li Bai (701-762) to Chinese culture. Liquor shops, temples, and factories, Ha Jin tells us, bear his name, and his poems are regularly quoted in Chinese TV dramas, children learn them by heart in school, and they appear carved in stone at tourist sites. Ha Jin acknowldges the difficulty of writing a biography of the most famous poet in Chinese history: a dearth of primary records and sources and a wealth of legends. He identifies three Li Bais: the actual man (revealed by a few records), the self-created man (projected through his poems), and the legendary man (imagined in centuries of popular episodes). Most biographers have focused on the second Li Bai, the image he created, as scholars have searched his roughly one thousand surviving poems (less than a tenth of his prodigious output) looking for clues about his life and personality. Ha Jin does that as well, but also relies on comments by Li Bai’s friends and on his own interpretations. The result is a fascinating look at the life of the Tang Dynasty super poet, nicknamed the Banished Immortal because people thought he’d begun as a star in heaven but gotten exiled to our mundane earth for some transgression. The manner and exact date of Li Bai’s death remain mysteries. A popular legend has him drowning while drunkenly embracing the reflection of the moon in a lake. Ha Jin says that the likeliest possibility is that he died of an alcohol-related disease. The first movement of Bai’s life ran from his youth to middle age as he tried and failed to get a government position while traveling and drinking and making friends and enemies and writing poems about his travels and many other topics. His original genius at poetry, healthy ego, and impatience with fools repeatedly sabotaged his chances to get an official’s career, although he did make many friends who admired his abilities and bold personality, poetry, and calligraphy. His fame as an original and brilliant poet finally won him what he’d thought was his life dream: a position at court. But he immediately learned that the Tang court was a den of corruption, that he could only earn money by accepting bribes for favors and access, and that he was not there to advise the emperor but to play the celebrity poet in the Imperial Academy, a menagerie of idiosyncratic entertainers, quacks, and conmen (like a self-proclaimed 3000-year-old man). Quickly making enemies of his fellow Imperial Academicians (by mocking them in a poem) and then of a powerful eunuch in charge of multiple armies and Emperor Shuenshong’s favorite consort, Bai soon had to resign and distance himself from court. Bai spent the next phase of his life studying to become a certified Taoist monk, partly to put himself beyond the reach of his court enemies. The grueling qualification-initiation ritual permanently ruined his health. His last years were ignominious, as he joined the losing side in a civil war of succession, resulting in his being exiled and reviled as a traitor. He was pardoned, but his final summons to return to court came after he’d already died in obscurity hoping for such a summons. Bai was complex: he wrote wanderlust poems at home and homesick poems away from home, loved his first and second wives and kids and wrote poems for and about them but left them for long periods, and wanted to transcend the world to a heavenly plane but wrote poems about worldly concerns and cares. The biography is not a hagiography, Ha Jin calling Bai foolish and self-deluded for joining a rebel prince’s cause against his wife’s good advice. The irony of Bai’s life is that he wanted wealth, fame, and power on the one hand and transcendence on the other, failing at both and drinking too much to soothe his disappointment. As he recounts Bai’s life, Ha Jin relates many interesting Chinese culture points, like the (still current) belief of poets, painters, and calligraphers that the best way to free up the creative powers is to get tipsy. Also interesting was China’s long history and familiarity with classics and famous figures from every period of it, such that in the eighth century Bai and his contemporaries studied and learned poetry from centuries before. Still more. During the Tang Dynasty people thought you could dramatically extend your life span by taking Taoist immortality pills (full of mercury and other poisons), the government was constantly worrying about barbarians on the borders, you could only get into the government by passing a test that only elites could sit for or by getting a connection to recommend you, and commoners couldn’t get within 100 feet of officials’ carriages. One of the most interesting discoveries (for me) in the book is the great amount of occasional verse Bai wrote for family, friends, or officials about greeting, parting, missing, traveling, drinking, eating, thanking, apologizing, loving, requesting, as well as poems inspired by current events (like a failed war or corrupt officials), sublime views (of mountains, rivers, towers, etc.), pitiable scenes (of hardworking laborers etc.), or homesickness. Poems in the voices of women (courtesans, dancers, wives) and of soldiers on the frontier. Poems apologizing to his wife for being a bad husband or rhapsodizing about how sublime he is (a roc flying to heaven or a dragon dragged down to earth). Poems as letters, diary entries, essays, political critiques, or self-explorations. Chinese poetry must be very flexible to contain such a stunningly wide scope in content, style, and mood. Ha Jin quotes excerpts from many famous (to the Chinese) poems by Bai, like one about his friend Haoran departing after a fine visit: My friend is sailing west away from Yellow Crane Tower. Through the March blossoms he is going down to Yan Cho. His sail casts a single shadow in the distance, then disappears. Nothing but the Yangtze flowing on the edge of the sky. The audiobook reader David Shih is fine. Anyone interested in Chinese history or world art and literature should find much nourishment in this book. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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