Freddy and the Ignormus by Walter Rollin Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Hath not a Rat eyes? If you prick us do we not bleed?” OR “People who are scared are hardly ever very clear about what scared them.” In Freddy and the Ignormus (1941), the eighth of Walter R. Brooks’ 26(!) Freddy the Pig books, Freddy is writing an alphabet book in verse about animals to teach them to read, when Theodore, a handsome frog (who, though prone to stuttering, may be a better poet than the pig), shames Freddy into exploring the perilous Big Woods (“I may be only a pig, but I’ve got some pride”). This leads Freddy to investigate the Ignormus (a newly created rural-legend monster, after whose name Freddy likes to hopefully append, “if he exists”), which leads him to investigate a series of robberies on the Bean farm (even the small wild animals’ winter stores are robbed from the First Animal Bank of which Freddy is President). Freddy is stumped, his reputation as an ace detective and an honest pig in tatters. Even Mr. Bean believes that Freddy has stolen a bag of oats. The scoundrel rat Simon and his clan, recently returned from exile from the First Animal Republic (“For I think you will agree with me that there is no place in a republic of free animals, for rats”), must be behind everything, but how? And how to prove it, as the rats have been keeping out of sight? The novel features a swing for animals, a borrowed and then stolen and then sabotaged shotgun, a strange animal from Africa, the Ignormus (if he exists), a thrilling battle in the Big Woods, plenty of scares, and a surprising and heart-warming resolution. And many of Brooks’ straight-faced funny “facts” about animals: “For hens, as you perhaps know, can crow just as well as roosters if they want to. Usually they don’t want to.” “Mrs. Wiggins wasn’t brilliant—few cows are—but she had common sense, which Freddy had found by experience was a good deal more helpful.” “Spiders have very small voices, and they have to be almost in your ear before you can hear them, which is probably why so few people have ever heard a spider say anything.” “That’s a centipede for you. Generous as all get out, but pretty hard-boiled.” Freddy, of course, plays the central role, a reluctant detective who must discover the identity of the farm robbers in order to clear his own sullied name, while finding time to compose egregious poetry and dress up in disguise (as a small but wealthy hunter with a small hunting dog who looks and sounds suspiciously like a frog!). Jinx, the black cat is great (though his visiting sister Minx is a one-note joke who stays too long, always having had an experience better than yours), Charles the pompous rooster has a couple moments of genuine bravery (call him a chicken at your peril), Mrs. Wiggins the president of the FAR and their army’s general to boot exercises her down to earth wisdom and leadership, Theodore is insightful (and good at manipulating Freddy by appealing to his reputation for adventure), and the spiders Mr. and Mrs. Webb and a beetle called Randolph play key roles. Like the other Freddy novels, this one coheres around a set of themes: how our imaginations can scare us, how ignorance can be an enormous monster, how our reputations can make us reckless, how true bravery involves acting when you’re terrified, how kindness and forgiveness can heal much but not everything. The story is entertaining and funny, and although not up to the high standards of the better books like Freddy the Politician, Freddy the Detective, and Freddy and the Popinjoy, it has some neat moments, like when Simon goads Freddy, “I’ve been visiting my relatives out in Iowa. That’s a great place, Freddy. Lots of pigs in Iowa. But they don’t make poetry. No, no. Out in Iowa the pigs make pork. Pork, not poetry, Freddy. You ought to take a little trip out there.” Or like when Freddy muses, “‘It’s funny,” he thought. ‘Whether I believe in the Ignormus or not depends entirely on where I am. Out here I’m perfectly sure there isn’t any such creature. Am I sure?’ He thought a minute. ‘Yes, I am,’ he said. ‘But the minute I step in under those trees I’ll believe in him again.’” By the way, I bet E. B. White read this book, because in Charlotte’s Web Templeton says things to Wilbur reminiscent of Simon’s words to Freddy here and declaims on how unappreciated he is (as a rat) in ways not unlike those of Brooks’ earlier rat elsewhere in this novel. View all my reviews
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Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Otto is no Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn! What would you do if you were the baby boy of the robber Baron Conrad, but lived your first twelve years lived among gentle monks in a monastery, until your father abruptly fetched you to live with him and his hard men in his castle? What would happen were your father to mend his ways and go swear fealty to the new Holy Roman Emperor, taking his men with him and leaving his castle and “little simple-witted boy” unprotected, “a sad mistake”? What would happen were Conrad’s feud-foe Baron Henry to get his hands on you, who know how to read but not to fight? Howard Pyle’s compact novel Otto of the Silver Hand (1888) is that kind of story. It’s full of authentic details of life in the “dark ages” (food, clothes, work, arms, castles, monasteries, illuminated books, morals, etc.), suspenseful action (raids, rescues, pursuits, combats, etc.), vivid painterly descriptions (like “‘Forward!’ cried Baron Henry, and out from the gateway they swept and across the drawbridge, leaving Drachenhausen behind them a flaming furnace blazing against the gray of the early dawning”), and Pyle’s beautiful, arresting monochrome illustrations (from first letter of chapter decorations to full-page pictures). Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884) were published about when Otto of the Silver Hand was, but Twain and Pyle couldn’t be more different in their approach to literature for children. Otto is sure no Tom or Huck! They speak slangy demotic English, Otto elevated medievalesque English (e.g., “Oh, father!” he cried, “oh, father! Is it true that thou hast killed a man with thy own hand?”). They are “bad boys,” active, spirited, clever, irreverent, independent, and hostile to book-learning and church-going. Otto is a “good boy,” passive, spiritual, religious, obedient, and gentle, and loves reading books, gazing at their illustrations, especially one of the nativity, and listening to stories. Unlike Tom and Huck, who constantly play, scheme, trick, and adventure, Otto never initiates anything: starting when he’s a baby (when his mother dies giving birth to him), without his input or outcry he’s picked up and carried from point A to B to C. The closest Otto comes to making a plan is when Pauline, the daughter of Baron Henry, lets him know his father Conrad is in the vicinity, and the boy asks the girl if she’ll let his father know he’s in Henry’s castle so his father can work out how to rescue him. Otto has no sense of humor, and his novel has but one funny sequence (when One-eyed Hans infiltrates the enemy castle), whereas Twain’s boys and novels are made of jokes, comedy, and humor. Tom and Huck laugh more than they cry; Otto cries more than he laughs. People who meet Otto find him “cracked.” In Otto’s defense, he’s a holy child in the violent world of an allegorical historical fiction set in the German “dark ages,” not a “real” boy in a realistic historical fiction set in 19th-century America. Actually, Pyle may be more realistic than Twain in depicting the lack of a child’s agency in the face of adult tyranny, because Tom and Huck always outsmart any strict or sadistic adults they meet. Too often in real life, kids can only be passive and victimized, like Otto. While Tom and Huck are eternally boys, Otto grows from a baby to a man, so in a sense Pyle packs more of a person's life into his shorter novel than Twain does into his longer ones. And although Otto wants something very different from Tom and Huck, like them he sticks to his own way of thinking, no matter what life brings him. Some people may not like their children reading a story in which a child is mutilated, but though we are in the room when it happens, Pyle finesses the act so we don’t “see” it happen or know it happened till later. The graphic violence he does show in real time occurs between men. Indeed, an interesting thing about the story, especially considering that Pyle also published The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903), is that it features no feats of derring-do, no knightly jousts or Arthurian quests. It depicts the violence of men as more horrible than glorious. Although at one point Conrad does heroically hold a bridge alone, the book should make children want to read, not to swordfight. There are two spots of bad writing in the novel. Otto’s mother is disturbingly self-centered, and at one point Otto is said to “lay for a while with his hands clasped” when that isn’t really possible. But mostly it’s really well written, with everything from tense suspense, like-- Minute after minute passed, and Schwartz Carl, holding his arbelast in his hand, stood silently waiting and watching in the sharp-cut, black shadow of the doorway, motionless as a stone statue. Minute after minute passed. Suddenly there was a movement in the shadow of the arch of the great gateway across the court-yard, and the next moment a leathern-clad figure crept noiselessly out upon the moonlit pavement, and stood there listening, his head bent to one side. Schwartz Carl knew very well that it was no one belonging to the castle, and, from the nature of his action, that he was upon no good errand. To strange lyrical imagination, like-- But most of all they loved to lie up in the airy wooden belfry; the great gaping bell hanging darkly above them, the mouldering cross-beams glimmering far up under the dim shadows of the roof, where dwelt a great brown owl that, unfrightened at their familiar presence, stared down at them with his round, solemn eyes. Below them stretched the white walls of the garden, beyond them the vineyard, and beyond that again the far shining river, that seemed to Otto’s mind to lead into wonder-land. There the two would lie upon the belfry floor by the hour, talking together of the strangest things. “I saw the dear Angel Gabriel again yester morn,” said Brother John. “So!” says Otto, seriously; “and where was that?” Pyle’s illustrations, especially the twenty-six full-page ones, are exquisite: beautiful, austere, detailed, absorbing, unforgettable. My mother read the book to me when I was ten, and I just now after fifty years reread it, and though I’d mostly forgotten the story, I had mostly remembered the pictures, and looked at them again with mesmerized deja vu. Unlike with Twain’s works, the popularity of Otto of the Silver Hand has worn off by now, but it must have been popular in earlier times, for I detect its influence on artists like Maurice Sendak (e.g., cross-hatching) and Barry Windsor-Smith (e.g., trees) and writers like Lloyd Alexander (e.g., Taran and Eilonwy). Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), The Garden Behind the Moon (1895), and Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates (1921) are all much more entertaining, but Otto, the classic passive strange outsider children’s literature hero, really sticks with me and makes me think. View all my reviews
Flight by Sherman Alexie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “It's horrible, but it’s funny too at the same time” An anonymous, angry, alienated half-white, half-Native American fifteen-year-old boy nicknamed Zits (he counts 47 on his face alone) is telling us his life story (abandonment at birth by his Indian father, loss of his mother to breast cancer at age six, umpteen foster families and group homes and schools and arrests and experiences of abuse) when in a holding cell he meets a beautiful seventeen-year-old white boy who has named himself Justice. Justice turns Zits on to guns, and soon Zits is shooting people in a bank, getting fatally shot himself, and waking up in the body of a white FBI agent doing dirty work on an Indian reservation in 1975. This starts Zits, a self-proclaimed “blank sky, a human solar eclipse” and “a time-traveling mass killer,” on a vivid educational journey through time, place, and person (or through hell and or heaven). From inside a series of white or Native American hosts, he becomes a passive participant in various moments of crisis and violence, including the Battle of Little Bighorn (as a mute Indian boy) and the revenge massacre of a village (as an arthritic Indian killer). The ghost of 9/11/2001 is present, as Zits temporarily inhabits a flight instructor who taught a Somali immigrant how to fly, with unexpected consequences. Sherman Alexie’s Flight (2007) is an angry book, but much of the anger is directed not at white America’s treatment of Native Americans but at human beings’ propensity for violence, hatred, abuse, betrayal, and “the monster revenge.” The novel explores Zits’ quest for a way to survive psychologically intact in that world by empathizing with a variety of people from past and present, as well as his search for his father and a family. It is also a funny book! Zits (Sherman Alexie) has an irreverent, self-deprecating, and frank sense of humor, and I laughed at least as often while listening to the book as I winced. His riffs on foster families, policemen, TV, acne medication, and the smells of a huge, real old-time Indian camp, etc., cracked me up. At times the short novel reads like a Native American teenage Bukowski (Chinaski). The novel demonstrates that there are both good and bad white people and Native Americans and that “We’re all the same” (betrayers and betrayed, lovers and loved, haters and hated, etc.), but Zits’ travels through time, place, and person never get him inside a female host, or for that matter in an African- or Asian- or Hispanic-American host, or a gay one. This limits the scope of his novel to Native American and white and male experience. Also, after the devastating first three-quarters, the ending, though heart-warming, is almost too good to be true. Adam Beach reads the book perfectly, with an appealing Native American lilt in his English. View all my reviews
The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Imagination, Thought, Culture, the Other, and Humor The Found and the Lost (2016) collects thirteen of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novellas, ranging from 1971 to 2002 and including eight science fictions, four fantasies, and one historical fiction. The novellas depict unconventional male and female “heroes” (damaged, other, young, old, powerless, brilliant, etc.) who become heroic not by martial or magical violent action, but by holding fast to what’s right despite deprivation, isolation, enslavement, imprisonment, torture etc. Often, they are outsiders, seeing beyond what is “normal” in their cultures or traveling to other worlds. Often, they transcend their cultures and experiences to communicate with and understand the alien other. She writes detailed accounts of different cultures (language, religion, history, families, love, work, etc.) and plenty of poignant romance, frank sex, worldview-enlarging education, and revolutionary change. And many wise insights into life and human nature and the world. And much vivid, sublime description (e.g., "There it lay, a dark, green jewel, like truth, at the bottom of a gravity well”). And lots of sly, dry humor, as in describing a girl who becomes an “Angel” in a religious cult as “soft, mild, and as flexible as a steel mainbeam.” The audiobook would be better if you could easily navigate among the different chapters of the novellas. As it is, you don't know how long any given novella is going to last until it's done. For a long audiobook (35+ hours), good readers are vital, and although Jefferson Mays is fine (despite almost sounding prissily sophisticated at times), Alyssa Bresnahan forces a clipped staccato rhythm onto the text (e.g., “You could teach the wizard [pause] a lesson”). Here is an annotated list of the novellas. "It was not a happy ship." In “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” (1971), an “extreme survey team” of neurotic misfits arrives beyond the pale at planet 4470, a jade world full of unknown plant life. Their greatest problem is the empath Osden, who looks like a flayed albino and reflects everyone’s antipathy in a toxic feedback loop. Can the team members open up to the alien other with love instead of fear? 4 stars (Mays) “Yes, you can keep your eye.” In “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” (1987), a Native American mythology-flavored, female-centered Jungle Book, “Gal” survives a plane crash and is mothered and mentored by the earthy, uber-female Coyote, living among the first people of America, like Chickadee, Jackrabbit, and Bluejay, while learning about her own people, “the new people,” European Americans, the “illegal immigrants,” who are taking over America. 3 stars (Bresnahan) “What can I say that you can hear?” “Hernes” (1991) relates key moments from the lives of four Herne women—Fanny, her daughter Jane, her daughter Lily, and her daughter Virginia—from 1898 till 1979 as they try to live free and fulfilled in Oregon despite feckless or entitled men, amid vivid descriptions of nature (like unceasing female sea foam and dwindling elk), finally tarnished by plastic trash and oil spills. 4 stars (Bresnahan) “’My life is wrong.’ But she did not know how to make it right.” Through reports, stories, interviews, etc. “The Matter of Seggri” (1994) tells the history of Seggri, a planet where women outnumber men 16-1 and where men live in “castles” and can only play violent sports and service women in “fuckeries,” while women live in “motherhouses” and do all the physical and intellectual work. Will the utopian Ekumen turn them on to “The body's unalterable dream of mutuality”? 5 stars (Mays) “Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time.” In “Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea” (1994) Hideo tells of growing up on a farm on planet O, where the traditional marriage is a complex set of two male and two female members. At18, he leaves his home and family to go study physics on Hain, researching a new technology to permit instantaneous travel through space with unexpected consequences, all in the context of a poignant love story. 4 stars (Mays) “I feel like an oaf blundering into your soul.” In “Forgiveness Day” (1994), a cocky young Ekumen envoy on Werel, a slave-system world, chafes at being “protected” by a “cold and inhuman” bodyguard she scornfully nicknames “the Major.” And then we switch to his point of view. A collision of opposites: male/female, diplomat/soldier, traditional/international. What will a terrorist attack and a kidnapping do to the pair? 4 stars (Bresnahan) “All knowledge is local, all truth partial.” “A Man of the People” (1994) is about a man raised in a traditional, lineage- and gender-based community on Hain being sent as an Ekumen envoy to Yeowe, Werel’s former slave colony world, there to facilitate the fraught change from a male dominated slave society to an egalitarian one. Can you retain your identity and home while seeking the alien other? 4 stars (Mays) “The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.” “A Woman’s Liberation” (1994) consists of a woman telling her life story, being born a slave on a plantation on Werel, becoming a sex pet of the mistress, then a “use-woman” on another plantation, then immigrating to the “liberated” Yeowe and learning history and working for equality. “It may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women.” 4 stars (Bresnahan) “He is my great gift… You do hold my joy.” In “Old Music and the Slave Women” (1999), during a civil war between the Army of Liberation (led by white slaves) and the Legitimate Government (led by black owners), the 62-year-old “alien” Ekumen ambassador to Werel, Esdardon Aya, is captured by a faction, taken to a ruined plantation, tortured, and befriends some female slaves, one with a dying baby. He’s no John Carter! 4.5 stars (Mays) “I will not work in the service of evil.” “The Finder” is a moving story about love, power, education, community, and gender during a time of disunity, slavery, and tyranny in Earthsea. Otter’s boatwright father tries to beat the boy’s gift for magic out of him, until he is bound to work as a dowser for a mad wizard looking for cinnabar to refine into quicksilver. Couldn’t the world use a school for magic for men *and* women? 4 stars (Bresnahan) “The changes in a man's life may be beyond all the arts we know and all our wisdom.” In “On the High Marsh” (2001) a ruined man with a beautiful voice, shows up at the farm of the widow Gift, who thinks he’s a king or a beggar, senses that he is kind and true, and offers him hospitality, so he works as a curer, healing the area cattle afflicted by an awful murrain. Who is he running from? Is he dangerous? Enter a scarred stranger called Hawk... 5 stars (Mays) “She had no wisdom but her innocence, no armor but her anger.” In “Dragonfly” a large, beautiful, uneducated young woman of undefined power wants to find out who she is, so she tries to enter the male-only Roke School for wizards and catalyzes a change in the school. The relationship between her and an expelled student from Roke is neat. 4 stars (Bresnahan) “People are a risky business.” “Paradises Lost” (2002) interestingly extrapolates a 4000-person culture hermetically sealed in a generation spaceship traveling on a 200-year voyage of scientific discovery from earth to a destination planet. The funny and moving story explores nature, civilization, reality, religion, life, sex, family, education, freedom, poetry, love, and more. 4.5 stars (Mays) The novellas demonstrate the wonderful range, consistency, and quality of Le Guin’s writing. View all my reviews
La Reine étranglée by Maurice Druon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars History with Teeth (Dirty Tricks, Executions, Betrayals, Corruption, and Courtship) Or How to Undo One Royal Marriage and Make Another (as the Cuckolded King of France) La Reine étranglée (1955), the second novel in Maurice Druon’s Les Rois Maudits series, begins in 1314, France. Philippe IV, the Iron King, AKA the Fair, has died, making his gormless, “shifty-eyed, narrow-shouldered, hollow-chested,” 25-year-old son King, Louis X, AKA the Quarrelsome. Humiliated by the scandal of his wife Marguerite’s adultery, Louis wants to remarry ASAP, but he’s still married to the Queen, so he needs her to write a annulling affidavit confessing that she committed adultery while never consummating their marriage, but she refuses, so he needs a sympathetic new Pope elected to free him from the marriage, but the Conclave of Cardinals is at an impasse. What’s a spoiled new king to do? Queen Marguerite is trying to remain sane in her cruel castle dungeon imprisonment with her cousin Blanche (they sure came down hard on adulteresses in that era!). Will she surrender and write the affidavit to annul her marriage and doom her daughter by Louis and herself? Philippe’s top minister (the most powerful man in France for sixteen years) Enguerrand de Marigny is clinging to power by sabotaging Louis’ attempts to annul his marriage and messaging King Edward of England. Honest in his financial dealings, will Marigny’s corrupt, ungrateful, and dough-like younger brother Jean, whom he made Archbishop, become his Achilles heel? Charles, Count of Valois, the Iron King’s megalomaniacal brother, is rabidly trying to destroy de Marigny, his hatred of him stemming from a land dispute and his desire to return the barons to their former independence and wealth (de Marigny spearheaded Philippe IV’s centralization of power in the state, ending the barons’ traditions of waging private war and coining their own money). Will he finally get the better of his archenemy? Spinello Tolomei, the chief Lombard banker, is scheming with Valois against de Marigny, because he’d like to return France to a more chaotic and fragmented state, because then bankers could wield more power via money and weapons. Tolomei’s capable young nephew, Guccio Baglioni, is still in love with Marie Cressay, the daughter of a penurious aristocratic family whose members appreciate his efforts to help them survive in their dilapidated family manor but would never accept him as a suitor for Marie. What hope for the young lovers? Clemence of Hungary is a beautiful if unfeminine French princess living in Naples; after seeing her portrait (painted by a student of Giotto!), Louis is eager for her to become his next Queen, but there’s still the small matter of Marguerite. Will Clemence’s formidable grandmother (who’s birthed umpteen kings and queens) let her marry the King of France? Robert d’Artois, who partly started the whole thing by exposing the adultery of Marguerite and Blanche (in the first book in the series), is trying to make himself useful to Valois and Louis so they’ll owe him. Can he use his larger-than-life masculine charisma to convince the canny Marguerite to write the affidavit? Complicating all of the above are a horrible famine, high prices, corrupt local officials, and a long cold winter. “Sometimes staggering hordes climbed from the fields to the villages in the vain dream of being given bread there; but they ran into other hordes of starving people who came from the city and seemed to be advancing towards the Last Judgment.” Will the common folk survive till spring? With dispassionate empathy, Druon rotates among the points of view of his characters as he tells the epic story of the fall of France from a superpower due to a series of cocky, stupid, venal, or brutal blunders. There are no heroes. And few likeable characters. Louis’ younger brother Philippe has integrity, young Guccio a romantic heart. And we sympathize with Marguerite (who’s too proud but over-punished for her adultery) and de Marigny (who’s been too powerful for too long but is comparatively clean). d’Artois and Valois are scoundrels, but they are capable of humor and frank self-reflection: “No man is absolutely bad.” Well, Louis is vile, lacking any moral or ethical core and getting his jollies from shooting doves released by a squire from a basket at point blank range. Druon relishes irony: palace washer woman Eudaline imagining Louis showering their natural “daughter with gold and titles,” de Marigny feeling he’s “the most powerful character in the kingdom” holding “all destinies in his hands, even that of the King,” Louis imagining his coming “Long reign of glory,” and so on. He enjoys lobbing foreshadowing grenades, like “By this word, he separated himself from the only man capable of governing in his place and directing his reign. France would pay for this change of mood for many years.” And although I don’t like the characters, Druon so excels at conveying character and historical texture and has so few illusions about human nature and is such a concise and incisive writer, that there is much suspense, surprise, and pleasure in the story, as in the following examples: Barbed banter: “Ah! Cousin, did you think me so foolish as to allow myself to be taken in by your coaxing? You have just used it with me as whores usually do with men, irritating their senses the better to submit them to their will. But you forget that in this profession, women are stronger, and you are only an apprentice.” Great line: “‘Never… never have I seen a man in the world crawl with such height.’” Keen insight: “Power-loving men are above all driven by the desire to act on the universe, to make events happen, and to have been right. Wealth, honors, distinctions are in their eyes only tools for their action. Marigny and Valois belonged to that species.” Fascinating historical detail: “Louis saw the heart of his father, placed near the funerary bed in a casket of crystal and golden bronze. Everyone who saw this heart, the arteries cut flush, behind the pane, remained stupefied at its smallness: ‘a child’s heart… or a bird’s,’ murmured the visitors. And it was hard to believe that such a tiny viscus would have animated such a terrible monarch.” Vivid description: “His hair damp and hanging, his eyes vague, his shirt stuck to his thin sides, the Hutin looked like a drowned man who had just come out of the Seine.” Psychological autopsy: “Astonishing character that of this prince, at the same time impatient and tenacious, vehement and twisted, courageous with his body but weak before praise, and always animated by extreme ambitions, always launched in gigantic enterprises and always failing for lack of a correct appreciation of the facts.” Bittersweet triumph: “Man in truth is a strange creature… Do you know that suddenly I feel an emptiness of the soul? I had grown so used to hating this villain that now it seems to me that I will miss him.” Ennobling epiphany (the key to the entire series): “Any unjust act, even committed for a just cause, carries with it its curse.’ And when he discovered this, Enguerrand de Marigny stopped hating anyone and holding others responsible for his fate.” Now I’m (morbidly) on to the next novel in the series! View all my reviews
ジャングル大帝 1 by Osamu Tezuka
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Compact Manga Epic about Africa, Nature, Animals, Human Beings, Civilization, and Life and Death **This review is about all three volumes of the manga** When I was about ten, I enjoyed watching Kimba the White Lion anime on tv in California, mesmerized by scenes of the hero running over the African plains to adventures with quirky animals and inimical people, so I was curious to read Osamu Tezuka’s source manga Jungle Taitei (1950-54), or Jungle Emperor. I found that the two are very different, as, for example, the anime Kimba stays young, while the manga Leo grows up, and the anime has fewer disturbing moments. The manga is a 534-page mini epic about a family of white lions living in a jungle in east Africa in the Great Rift Valley and the interactions between the lions, other animals, and human beings. After introducing Leo’s legendary father Panja (called the Demon Beast by the local natives because he hinders their exploitation of animals), the story shifts to his son Leo, who’s born on an ocean liner bound for a London zoo, is raised for a while in Aden among people like the Japanese youth Kenichi and Hige Oyaji (Moustache Uncle), returns to his birthright in Africa, attempts to pacifically rule an obscure jungle, and finally leads a party of men on a Quixotic cold-war quest for the source of the Moon Jewel on a legendary inaccessible mountain. It ends with Leo’s son Rune, who finds the reality of NYC less magical and more nightmarish than he’d expected and tries to escape back to Africa. My favorite parts are about young Leo trying to fit into human life (including attacking a movie screen showing a film of Africa and visiting a zoo and trying to free its animals) and later trying to establish himself as Jungle Emperor in the face of a hostile local tribe, a rival lion, an uncooperative herd of elephants, and a horrifying plague. Also, the climactic scene of mountain blizzard chaos and terror is hair raising and the late large picture of Leo as a giant white cloud is magnificent. Throughout, Tezuka highlights and blurs the dichotomy between wild animals and human beings, as Leo wears human shorts till he finally casts them off to be more au naturel, learns human language, and seems much more humane—brave, generous, non-violent—than most of the humans in the story (like the awful ex-Nazi war-criminal Ham Egg, the delusional and selfish Pierre, and the amoral gangster-spy Adam Dandy). There are, to be sure, some good people, like the early hero Kenichi and the late hero Hige Oyaji. The anti-heroine of the middle part of the epic, Mary, is great: feisty, violent, and, she thinks, unbeatable. When tribesmen capture her in the first volume, Mary sure doesn’t swoon and wait for rescue! Instead, not unlike H. Rider Haggard’s She or Robert E. Howard’s Belit (and as offensive to people of color), she takes over the tribe, names herself Konga of the Upper River, and starts carving out an empire in the jungle, demanding total obedience from her human and animal subjects. She tries to extinguish her persona as white civilization representative, dressing native (leopard skin bikini top and feathered headdress) and wielding a sharp spear and a cutting whip. She is insane and brutal, but read with Tezuka’s Ribbon no Kishi, in which the girl Sapphire dresses and passes for a fairy tale prince, Mary is an interesting female character for the 1950s manga world. But—alas—Tezuka domesticates her by making Kenichi take her to Japan, where she becomes a typical quiet young Japanese mother! Although the manga makes plenty of fun of the large number of venal and or stupid white characters, it is egregiously offensive to people of African descent, as every dark-skinned native is an absurd, repulsive caricature, naturally serving white (or Japanese) people. The callous, “comical” depiction of them, the use of them as porters and props, and the lack of interest in their cultures and needs let alone in their exploitation at the hands of white imperialist countries, is disappointing. That’s especially so because Tezuka shows a breadth of vision vis-à-vis animals, wanting to take human arrogance down a peg and to demonstrate the characters, needs, lives, and fascinations of animals and the frailty of human life in the face of the awesome power of nature. The manga features some sad, painful scenes involving abuse, disease, and death (like when young Leo dons his deceased father’s skin), and as there are no small syllabary to help young readers who don’t know many Chinese characters read Japanese, it almost seems like the manga, unlike the anime, is more for adults than for kids. This feels especially the case as Jungle Taitei becomes an anti-war cold-war story, with Countries A and B rivals in spies and exploration etc. finally (almost) transcending their rivalry via hardship and adventure on Moon Mountain. The compact, three-volume edition that I read had such small font that I often had to use a magnifying glass to read the text (I have old man eyes), and at times Tezuka draws at least a dozen small panels on a single small page, so it’s hard to read and appreciate in this format. A larger size would be more impressive and pleasurable for sure. Throughout, Tezuka uses all his manga techniques and tricks: zooming in and out, silhouettes, broken frames, shaky lines, establishing shots, strategic point of view and camera angle shifts, and dynamic, beautiful, impressive, creative art and layout, as in the following example. There are more that I couldn’t find pictures online of to link to, like these: A great sequence: Leo freshly returned to Africa shocked by vultures feeding on a zebra carcass, with closeups of his appalled face interspersed with different angle shots of the carcass and birds, the vultures beautiful in their stark black silhouettes on the white pages. An impressive frame: pitch black frame but for the malevolent large eyes of a black panther at night. A majestic picture: a full page showing the jungle river landscape with mountains in the distance, the human party like tiny ants dwarfed by the land. A surreal sequence: Rune fantasizes a Hollywood movie musical scenario where he goes to the big, tall-skyscraper NYC and goes to the zoo and sets free all the animals and is a celebrity and then imagines he’s flying around with butterflies and then comes to a mountain top where he sees all of Africa spread out in the sunset below him. Finally, Jungle Taitei is a weird, unpredictable story. It has powerful and wonderful and strange moments, but it also has silly ones, repetitive ones, and head-scratching ones, perhaps down to the impromptu plotting. I think too much time/space is spent on the exploration of the mountain (nearly the entire third volume). Finally, I’m glad to have read it, but I prefer Tezuka’s Ribbon no Kishi. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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