Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness by Helen Young
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Necessary and Interesting Book Marred by Poor Editing Helen Young’s Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness (2016) has a lot of accurate, interesting, and necessary things to say. Young addresses a relevant theme (conscious and unconscious traditions of racism in popular fantasy), explores a wide range of texts (including novels and short stories, movies and TV shows, and paper-based games and video games), and writes from the perspective of both creators and audiences. Her book is readable and academic--its seven main chapters averaging about 110 footnotes each. Here is an outline of those chapters. Chapter 1: Founding Fantasy: J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard Anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings and Conan should be aware of the thesis of the chapter, that the foundational worlds of high/epic fantasy and sword and sorcery, Middle-earth and Hyborea, are dominated by Whiteness. Young also exposes the attempts by later writers and fans to explain race in Tolkien and Howard as being typical of an earlier less enlightened era. Chapter 2: Forming Habits: Derivation, Imitation, and Adaptation Explores the continuing habits of Whiteness by the successors to Tolkien and Howard in fiction like Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser), Michael Moorcock (Elric), and Robert Jordan (The Eye of the Wheel), comics like Dark Horse’s Conan the Barbarian, and games like Dungeons & Dragons and Age of Conan, with “counter-voices” from Ursula K. Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea), Samuel R. Delany (Neveryon), and Charles Saunders (Imaro) . Chapter 3: The Real Middle Ages: Gritty Fantasy Explains how writers like George R. R. Martin (GOT) and gamemakers like Bioware (Dragon Age) have tried to make their pseudo-medieval fantasy more “realistic” and less “escapist” than cleaner Tolkienesque “high” fantasy. Young points out that such gritty popular fantasy is still marked by “habits of Whiteness” and that typical defenses of such Whiteness like “The middle ages didn’t have black people” are inaccurate historically and inapplicable to fantasy worlds with dragons, giants, and white walkers. She argues that Whiteness fantasy fans say that gritty fantasy worlds are only fictional after all (so lighten up you pc fascists!) but also believe them to “represent the Middle Ages as they ‘really were’: full of violence, rape, mud, blood, and White people.” Young also connects the Whiteness of gritty fantasy to the white nationalism of some of its fans. Chapter 4: Orcs and Otherness: Monsters on Page and Screen Examines the depiction of Orcs in post-Tolkien fantasy, demonstrating that they’re usually coded as black and or Native American, even when writers like Mary Gentle (Grunts!) and Terry Pratchett (Unseen Academicals) try to do something new and sympathetic with them. Young explores paper and dice games like Dungeons & Dragons, miniature games like Warhammer, and computer games like World of Warcraft and summarizes a nuanced variation by R. A. Salvatore in his novel The Orc King. Chapter 5: Popular Culture Postcolonialism This chapter looks at popular fantasy and its treatment of (post)colonialism, with detailed examples from David Heath Justice (Way of Thorn and Thunder), Naomi Novik (Temeraire), and J. K. Jemison (Inheritance), explaining why there are so few indigenous writers of fantasy compared to the many White authors who write about indigenous peoples. The chapter argues that while future-oriented sf has often dealt with (post)colonialist themes, fantasy has tended to look back at the pre-colonial middle-ages, though 21st-century fantasy has begun critiquing colonialism and racism. Chapter 6: Relocating Roots: Urban Fantasy Anatomizes race in urban fantasy, which Young calls “sub-urban fantasy” because it often concerns fantastic beings and realms existing right beneath our everyday real world. She analyzes TV shows like Grimm (typical in being European-based and White) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (atypical in featuring three African American main characters) and fiction like Aaronovitch’s River of London books, and introduces the cultural appropriation topic developed in Chapter 7, asserting that the key point is how authors write about different cultures and colors, not the culture and color of the authors. Chapter 7: Breaking Habits and Digital Communication Focuses on the online RaceFail 09 debate between fans and authors like Jay Lake, John Scalzi, and Elizabeth Bear about white authors of SFF writing stereotypical characters of color and engaging in cultural appropriation. It began with a minor backlash against race in Bear’s novel Blood and Iron, which led to a backlash against the backlash, and so on. This chapter is disappointing, because it gives almost no detail about Bear’s depiction of race so that it’s difficult to appreciate the debate. I did like Young’s analysis of an unusual set of texts--online communications in a community of readers and writers. Young’s book should be read and discussed. Although she is balanced in her tone and understands how anti-pc people think, she favors more main characters of color in fantasy more accurately depicted. She points out important things concerning race in American culture, like that at the time her book was written, no writer of color had won a Hugo award for best novel, only two had won a Nebula for best novel, and only a few had won World Fantasy Awards, and that characters of color comprise only 10% of those appearing in television shows but 40% of those in the overall population. She also explains how “Fantasy’s habits of Whiteness” are gradually changing as more writers of color get into the genre. Unfortunately, pervasive typos and grammar errors mar Young’s book, so many that I started noting them down more than Young’s good ideas. There are missing possessive apostrophes (“Saunders world”) and missing articles (“Since early 1970s”), incorrect plural nouns (“as the first three chapters of this books demonstrate”) and incorrect verb forms (“The early editions of D&D show that they are tribal but giving very few details of their way of life”). Many wrong words spelled correctly (e.g., beings not begins, form not from, planned not played, identify not identity, tape not tap). And umpteen comma splices (“Belit thus becomes an emancipator from the evils of history and commerce simultaneously, her physical and symbolic Whiteness is literally a beacon of liberation which emblematizes her superiority over her followers”). Such errors are legion. They excruciated my experience with the book (published by Routledge). People interested in race in popular anglophone fantasy should read Young’s book, and I hope she'll be able to publish a revised edition in future. View all my reviews
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The Complete Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant by Ulysses S. Grant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “How little men control their own destiny” Finished by Grant just before he died of throat cancer, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (1885) is mostly his detailed account of the Civil War as he experienced it, written to earn money needed due to “the rascality of a business partner” and to answer those who thought his approach to the war cost more blood and treasure than necessary. Early on he says, “But my later experience has taught me two lessons. First, that things are seen plainer after the events have occurred. Second, that the most confident critics are generally those who know the least about the matter criticized.” Grant also says he wants “to avoid doing injustice to anyone,” and although some figures don’t come off well, like the careful General Halleck and the controlling Secretary of War Stanton, Grant writes with an evenhanded air. He compliments southern soldiers, generals, and people, for though he disagreed with their cause (a rebellion to protect a doomed and amoral slave system) he thought they were sincere, and he doesn’t blame the south alone for the blood spilled to atone for “the wickedness of our nation.” His book is heart-felt, and though I sense him protesting too much about things like Sherman’s “perfect” march to the sea, his account is convincing. The first chapter traces Grant’s family in America back to 1638, profiles his self-educated tanner father, and depicts Grant as a hard-working boy who liked horses and who became a laughingstock for once naively explaining his bargaining strategy to a man before bargaining to buy his horse. This instance of Grant’s modest honesty yields a pithy insight: “Boys enjoy the misery of their companions. . . and in later life I have found that not all adults are free from this peculiarity.” Chapter 2 concerns West Point, which Grant didn’t want to attend, because “A military life had no charms for me,” but his father pulled some strings and off he went. Once at West Point (where he mostly read novels), he decided to graduate and become a mathematics teacher, but “Circumstances always did shape my course differently from my plans.” Then follow chapters on the Mexican-American War, which he thought was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” During the war, he learned that “Nothing so popularizes a candidate for high civil position as military victories,” and that he was no fan of bullfighting: “I could not see how human beings could enjoy the suffering of beasts.” After a few chapters on his post-war life, including a vivid account of gold rush era SF, Grant embarks on his main topic, the Civil War, “The great tragedy of 1861 to 1865,” which runs from Chapter 17 to Chapter 70 (the last one). For Grant, the quartermaster who became a general, fighting is less important than strategy, topography, weather, supply, transport, orders, communications, and morale, etc. He devotes more time to dealing with swamps, rivers, levies, lakes, malaria, food, clothes, bridges, roads, trains, telegraphs, subordinates and superiors, etc. than to battles. And although he often praises the “dash” of southern soldiers and the “endurance” of northern ones, when he does recount the engagements with which he was involved, he never mentions individual feats of heroism or cowardice. He refers to regiments, brigades, and divisions etc. by commanding-officer synechdoche, as in, “Burnside was moved up between Warren and Smith.” He assesses generals like Sherman favorably and Rosecrans critically according to how quickly and effectively they could act to implement the overall strategy. Grant does not hide the carnage of battle: “One cannon ball passed through our ranks not far from me. It took off the head of an enlisted man and the underjaw of Captain Page of my regiment, while the splinters from the musket of the killed soldier and his brains and bones knocked down two or three others, including one officer, Lieutenant Wallon, hurting them more or less.” And he is aware of the suffering caused by war: “While a battle is raging, one can see his enemy mowed down by the thousands or the ten thousands with great composure, but after the battle these scenes are distressing, and one is naturally disposed to do as much to alleviate the suffering of an enemy as of a friend.” Indeed, as when he debunks the fanciful popular story about Lee surrendering his sword at Appomattox and Grant returning it to him, Grant is out to de-romanticize history and to de-glorify war. From bodies and bridges to roads and towns, the destruction was pervasive--and inventive, as in prying up enemy train tracks and using pyres of ties to soften the rails to wrap them around trees. Troops on Sherman’s march shot hounds they found to prevent them from hunting escaped slaves and went out empty-handed on foot in the morning and returned on horseback laden with supplies from local farms in the evening. Grant relates two anecdotes involving joke-cracking soldiers taking away one woman’s poodle and another woman’s last chickens. Once during a prolonged and ferocious battle Grant realized that wounded men were lying in no man’s land, so he wrote Lee to arrange two hours per day for both sides to retrieve them, and Lee wrote back that they’d need flags of truce, and soon 48 hours of back and forth had passed, and all but two of the wounded had died! Grant is a fine, dry writer, as when describing officers (“He was possessed of an irascible temper and was naturally disputatious”), giving advice (“The distant rear of an army engaged in battle is not the best place from which to judge correctly what is going on in front”), explaining orders (“Promiscuous pillaging, however, was discouraged and punished”), exposing human nature (“Bad habits, if not restrained by law or public opinion, spread more rapidly and universally than good ones”), or criticizing ambition (“It is men who wait to be selected and not those who seek from whom we may always expect the most efficient service”). The Appendix mainly reiterates many of the meticulous details already given in the Memoirs, down to the same verbatim excerpts of orders and reports. Robin Field reads the audiobook capably, but somewhat attenuatedly. For an author dying of throat cancer like Grant, Field’s voice and manner may be suitable, but his reading renders the Appendix (lasting nearly 3.5 hours of the audiobook) quite difficult to finish. When Grant says, “The President of the United States is in a large degree, or ought to be, a representative of the feeling, wishes, and judgment of those over whom he presides,” I wished he had written about his two terms as President. Grant was the kind of person (and general and president and author) who could write, “How little men control their own destiny,” but also “What I have done has been done conscientiously to the best of my ability and in the best interests of the entire country.” View all my reviews
The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Satisfying Conclusion The fifth and last novel in Catherynne M. Valente’s Fairyland series books, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home (2016), begins right where the fourth left off, with September the girl from Nebraska having been crowned Queen of Fairyland and All Her Kingdoms. The situation is, however, complicated. Also at the end of the fourth novel September used a dodo’s egg to restore everything as it was before, partly to return her own age from forty to fifteen, after having been prematurely aged at the end of the third novel by the Yeti as he midwifed a new moon. An unexpected side effect of the dodo egg restoration is that now at the beginning of the fifth novel, every past ruler of Fairyland (“dead and alive and other”) is back in the capital Pandemonium eagerly wanting to resume their rule! To defuse the chaotic situation, the Stoat of Arms (a sentient seal comprised of a blue unicorn, a little girl in knight’s armor, a brace of golden stoats, three black roosters, three silver stars, and a tiny Fairy) declares that September will rule for three days, after which a race called the Cantankerous Derby will be held to determine the new ruler of Fairyland: “All hopefuls, thoroughbreds, long shots, cheaters, townies, speed demons, and dark horses shall commence a Wondrous Race, beginning in Pandemonium, and ending at Runnymede Square in the ancient city of Mummery! The winner shall receive the Crown. . . . All are eligible! Ravished, Stumbled, Changelings, Fairies, Gnomes, Rocks, and Trees!” The object of the race is to be the first to find by fair means or foul the hidden Heart of Fairyland. Unlike the boring races of our world, for which racers are limited to a circular track or modest course, racers in the Cantankerous Derby may go anywhere they want in the whole world of Fairyland. For the start of the race, each racer is put in a separate bubble of space time so they can all get started without bothering each other. Each racer must finish the race with a steed, and at the start all steeds are swapped randomly. If any two racers meet during the race, they must fight an eccentric duel, with the loser having to leave the race. And halfway through the race everyone’s relative positions will be randomly swapped. Like most of the earlier novels in the series, then, this one is an exciting episodic travel adventure, in which September and her best friends, A-Through-L the Wyverary (who believes he is half library, half wyvern) and Saturday the Marid (who lives backwards and forwards in time) visit various outree Fairyland locales and locals as they race against the past rulers of Fairyland, including Curdleblood, the Dastard of Darkness; Cutty Soames, the Coblynow Captain; the Headmistress; the Emperor of Everything; the Ice Cream Man; the First Stone; Queen Mab; Thrum the Rex Tyrannosaur; and the Marquess, September’s foe in the first Fairyland novel; and against some new pretenders, like Hawthorn the Troll, Tamburlaine the Fetch, and Blunderbuss the scrap yarn Combat Wombat introduced in book four. The prime minister of Fairyland, the scary Madame Tanaquill, who wears a dress made out of iron buckles, horseshoes, and blades, despite (or because of) fairies being allergic to the metal, is the 2-1 favorite to win. September has mixed feelings about the Race. On the one hand she just wants to go home to Omaha where she belongs with her mother and father and dog etc., but on the other hand she’s keen to continue being Queen because then she can stay in Fairyland with her friends, and, after all, one should to the job they’re given to the best of their ability. A minor sub-plot involves September’s aunt Margaret, who from when she was nine has been secretly visiting Fairyland and performing terrible and grand feats there under the name Pearl, escorting the girl’s parents to Fairyland to look for her. The book is full of the rich pleasures of Valente’s fantastic imagination, wit, wisdom, and style: lists (“Fairyland races ladies against chariots, centaurs against cheetahs, carriages against flying carpets, phoenixes against Dodos”), personification (“The heart of Meridian is a hut that wanted to be a library when it grew up”), humor (“I know some of us are very cranky, having only recently come back from the dead, but reanimation is no excuse”), playful narrator, e.g., “From a narrator’s picnic blanket, there’s nothing you can’t see”), wisdom (“No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings”), and fantasy (“The carriage-driver was a lady caught halfway between beautiful and terrifying—her face so gaunt, her hair so wild, and her eyes so huge that she looked like an electrified dragonfly who had once asked to be made into a human girl for Christmas and almost, almost gotten her wish. She snapped a whip made of cricket’s bone”). Sometimes Valente’s style and imagination can become too precious and profligate: “Because she was quite a large and opinionated country, and because she was as old as starlight and twice as stubborn, and because she had a mountain range on her left border that simply would not be bossed about, Fairyland decided to do something about it one day in March just after her morning tea.” But it’s better to read a book that’s too full of imagination than one that’s too empty of it. Anna Juan’s illustrations for each new chapter page are dark, grotesque, and beautiful, and the ending of the novel is unexpected and satisfying. Readers who like contemporary fairytale fantasy that revels in language, style, story, and imagination should like the Fairyland series. The first two books and the fourth are splendid, book three exhausting, and this fifth one satisfying. View all my reviews
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “What have you done with my monkeys?” Or “Humanity is overrated” Or “What’s wrong with us?” Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (2015) fuses hard science fiction like Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (1953), in which human space explorers and the sentient centipedes of another planet find a way to communicate and collaborate, and soft science fiction like Ursula Le Guin’s “Paradises Lost” (2002), in which a multigenerational voyage from earth to a habitable planet leads to interesting psychological and cultural situations. Thereby Tchaikovsky’s novel complicates military science fiction like Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959), in which humanity must destroy or be destroyed by their “arachnid” or “bug” enemies. And his book does all that in an Iain M. Banksian literary space opera mode: believable characters, imaginative extrapolations, unpredictable events, serious themes, page-turning action, and the sublime, here relating especially to time. Children of Time opens in the far future with an experimental project for which scientists are to deposit 10,000 monkeys onto an Edenic terraformed world and then to enhance their evolution by releasing onto that world an “uplift” nanovirus (David Brin is a foundational presence here, as Doctor Kern’s spaceship is called the Brin 2). A man from an anti-uplift faction from earth, however, destroys both the Brin 2 and the “barrel of monkeys” before it can reach “Kern’s World,” with Doctor Kern (and her divinity-sized ego) escaping into a Sentry Pod to orbit “her” world so as to wait for someone from earth to come rescue her. Then she copies her consciousness into a computer simulacrum (just in case) and enters cryogenic sleep. Shift to the terraformed world and its Portia labiata jumping spiders, who, unbeknownst to the sleeping Doctor Kern, are being uplifted by the nanovirus. The chapters featuring the meter-long spiders, who have developed a female-centered peer-group civilization, are fascinating, as Tchaikovsky extrapolates from spider biology while employing humanizing empathy tricks. With their three-dimensional mapping and predator problem solving, palp waving and foot tapping language, use of domesticated aphids and ants, public courting and mating followed by the larger female typically killing and eating the smaller male, and lack of parent-child relationships, the spiders are alien to our species, but we care about them. Their gender imbalances satirize our own biases against girls and women: e.g., “It is well known that males cannot really feel as deeply as females or form the same bonds of attachments and respect.” And the “soft” spider technology is neat, based on biochemistry, symbiosis, and silk (versus our “hard” technology of metal, fire, and light). A third story strand concerns Professor Holsten Mason, a classicist academic from thousands of years in Doctor Kern’s future, a man chosen to join the Key Crew of the arc ship Gilgamesh and its “cargo” of 500,000 human beings as they follow the burnt out satellites, void-mummified bodies, and derelict colonies of Doctor Kern’s ancient Old Empire in their attempt to find an appropriate world to colonize to continue the human species. Two thousand years ago, the Gilgamesh left an earth rendered uninhabitable when the toxic mass weapons of Doctor Kern’s Old Empire finally thawed out from an ice age. The relationship between Holsten and the Chief Key Crew Engineer Isa Lain is interesting and increasingly poignant, especially concerning time and aging. Lain initially nicknames Holsten “Old Man” because he’s fifteen years older (as well as being 2000 + years old due to having been in cyrogenic sleep that long), only to have their age difference begin changing as Holsten spends more time in cryogenic sleep while Lain spends more time awake dealing with various arc ship emergencies. Tchaikovsky is good at presenting people, including human beings (from a distant future past or a distant future future) and uplifted spiders in terms of how they’d think and act and speak when coming into contact with very different others. And because he does such a fine job of developing his characters, the inevitable intersection of their cultures in the plot becomes suspenseful and exciting. He critiques our own civilization (and human nature) via his future human (and spider) civilizations. Halsten sees “Those ancients, with their weapons and their waste, who had brought the end upon themselves” as “antique psychopaths” living in an “intricate murderous” civilization, “A vanished age of wonder and plenty and an appalling capacity for destruction.” And although due partly to their biology and partly to the nanovirus the spiders are more oriented towards empathy and absorption rather than hatred and destruction, they also at times evidence traits and sub-cultures that reflect back on our own. Many chapters begin on the knife edge of some crisis for the characters and their civilizations. The ways in which the spiders react and change in the face of existential threats from things like an uplifted ant empire’s expansion, a horrific plague, and the inevitable visit from the Gilgamesh, make for compelling reading. As do the crises of identity Doctor Kern experiences in trying to figure out how much of her personality is hers and how much her computer’s, as well as the different crises faced by Halsten et al, ranging from mutinies to cults on the Gilgamesh as the centuries pass in its seemingly never-ending journey to find a home. As does the question the novel poses: whether sentient beings of such different species (i.e., people of such different cultures) can see one another as anything other than monsters. The audiobook reader Mel Hudson is fine. She does different English accents for different characters (seeming to use Australian ones for down to earth characters); she reads with intelligence and awareness and pacing and emphasis and enhances the novel. Fans of well-written, character-driven, fast-paced, thoughtfully-themed sf should like this book. View all my reviews
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Juggling with Achilles, or “the goddess and the mortal and the boy who was both” Because I love The Iliad, I embarked on Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) with high hopes. And I liked her novel a lot. Miller’s strategy is to have Patroclus, a minor character with few lines but a vital impact in Homer, narrate the events before, during, and after those depicted in The Iliad. Her novel is vividly realized, a convincing depiction of life in ancient Greece culturally and physically, and it’s very emotional, getting us to root for poor doomed Patroclus from his sad memories of his lonely childhood through his intense friendship, education, and sexual romance with Achilles all the way to the tragic end we expect from reading The Iliad and The Odyssey. Along the way Miller imagines the mother-in-law from hell (Thetis), ruthless, brutal, and manipulating kings (Agamemnon, Diomedes, and Odysseus), and appealing supporting characters like Chiron and Briseis. Miller’s Achilles is convincing: a demi-god with a soft spot for Patroclus (who keeps him human), full of unassuming beauty and unaffected grace and disarming honesty—and of terrifying martial ability. Apart from Thetis, the only gods to appear are Apollo and a Trojan river god in brief cameos, perhaps to focus the light of her novel on human folly, love, and violence, etc. and at the same time to highlight and enhance Thetis’ divinity and Achilles’ half divinity, as well as to explore motherhood. Although the sensual, spiritual, and tragic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus (reminiscent of the scenario typical of YA paranormal romance stories like Roswell and Twilight, wherein unpopular kids fall in love with supernatural beings) is foregrounded front and center, the fraught one between Thetis and Patroclus is finally at least as compelling. Miller departs from Homer in some ways: her Patroclus is slightly younger and much less martial than Achilles instead of substantially older and more experienced, Achilles doesn’t have an Achilles heel and is less monstrous than his son Pyrrhus, and Thetis is more of a force, frequently appearing and actively loathing the relationship between her son and Patroclus and doing her best to undermine it. Miller also presents Patroclus as a pacifist who prefers healing to fighting and music to war and who wishes that Achilles would be remembered for more than killing. Indeed, she is at such pains to present Patroclus as a gentle, non-violent soul that during the climax when the Trojans are starting to fire the Greek ships while Achilles is sulking to make the Greeks miss him so Patroclus dons the hero’s armor to pretend to be Achilles to save the Greeks from disaster, it feels funny when Patroclus gets carried away and starts channeling his inner Achilles and chasing after retreating Trojans and killing some and then trying to scale the walls of Troy itself (twice!). If Miller had hinted that some inimical god was riding Patroclus or influencing him in getting carried away by his Achilles impersonation, it would have been convincing, but as it was it doesn’t ring true and is left unanalyzed by the characters or implied author, so I don’t think it’s the case that Miller is saying that even a pacifist like Patroclus can become a killer like Achilles. Miller can write too much, as with “His presence was like a stone in my shoe, impossible to ignore,” when she should have stopped right after “shoe.” And she can write too cheaply, as with “His [Chalchis’] voice wheedled and ducked, like a weasel escaping the nest,” where the stereotypically negative image of the creature doesn’t fit the situation she’s describing, as Calchis is just telling the truth about why a god is down on the Greeks. But her writing is often very fine in her vivid descriptions and similes, when describing rocky islands or the chaos, din, and violence of ancient battle or Achilles’ physical beauty or his mother’s scary sublime aura: “Her black hair was loose down her back, and her skin shone luminous and impossibly pale, as if it drank light from the moon. She was so close I could smell her, sea water laced with dark brown honey. I did not breathe,” and “Her mouth was a gash of red, like the torn open stomach of a sacrifice, bloody and oracular. Behind it her teeth shone sharp and white as bone.” Although the audiobook reader Frazer Douglas is a bit monotonous with the base narration of Patroclus, he does a great “hoarse and rasping” Thetis, a fine wily Odysseus, and a spot on forthcoming and upright Achilles. Finally, Miller’s novel enriched me, but it mostly made me want to re-read The Iliad, which I will probably do a few more times before I die, whereas I bet I won’t re-read her book. But fans of Homer should read The Song of Achilles. Miller-Patroclus’ telling of a different kind of story about Achilles than that of his martial conquests is a potent and poignant achievement: “Will I feel his ashes as they fall against mine?” View all my reviews
Matilda by Roald Dahl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Five-Year-Old Bookworm as Fairy Godmother and Prince Charming “The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. . . She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.” Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988) is an over-the-top paean to reading and to the underdog; it’s a Cinderella story set in contemporary England, with a five-year-old girl as fairy godmother slash prince charming; it’s also an exaggerated takedown of the brutish giant adults in too many little kids’ lives. At first I thought Matilda seems too good and her parents too bad to be true. Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood are so cartoonishly awful, coarse, vain, ignorant, amoral, unfair, and unloving that Matilda seems like a divine alien placed in their home. (That must be the point, but still--) One of the least compelling points of the Harry Potter books (for me) is how unbelievably and uninterestingly unpleasant the Dursleys are, and reading this book makes me think that J. K. Rowling got her inspiration for Harry’s foster-parents from Dahl. I also didn’t at first care for Matilda’s prank revenges on her admittedly deserving father, involving superglue and hair dye, thinking, Matilda, you’re better than that. However, once Matilda starts going to school at age five, I warmed to the novel and ended up enjoying it a lot. Having read through the entire children’s section of the local library and through much of the adult, including most of Dickens, Austen, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hardy, and Hemingway, Matilda starts school, attending the (too) aptly named Crunchem Hall Primary School, presided over by the “formidable” (i.e., malevolent, masculine, muscular, and sadistic) Headmistress (too) aptly named Miss Trunchbull. Miss Trunchbull, aka THE Trunchbull, is “a gigantic holy terror, a fierce tyrannical monster who frightened the life out of the pupils and teachers alike.” The younger children are, the more she loathes them: “My idea of a perfect school . . . is one that has no children at all.” She’s given to sensational feats of cruelty like picking up students by their hair or ears and swinging them around and letting them go to crash to the floor or fly through the air. No one complains because she so intimidates everyone, including the children’s parents, who, anyway, like Matilda’s, would never believe their own kids’ version of events against the Trunchbull’s. The heart of the story concerns the relationship between the extraordinarily precocious, charmingly unaffected, potential-packed, pint-sized polymath Matilda and her sweet, understanding, and impoverished homeroom teacher the (too) aptly named Miss Honey. Miss Honey is one of the few adults who can appreciate Matilda’s brilliance and charm. Her parents sure can’t, trying to force her to watch TV instead of wasting her time on books and insulting her for being stupid etc. As the story develops there are humorous outrageous scenes, involving newts, chocolate cake, mathematics tests, telekenisis (I loved watching Matilda exerting her will to make miracles happen), and the like, as well as some moving ones involving Matilda trying to help her beloved teacher. The ending is splendidly satisfying. The many monochrome illustrations by Quentin Blake are perfect, emphasizing the contrast between the tiny kids and the gargantuan adults looming over them, and in their graceful and grotesque, evocative, free, and easy lines they recall the work of Jules Feiffer for The Phantom Tollbooth. I can see why kids would love Roald Dahl’s stories: they imaginatively depict tiny underdogs who are smarter, braver, and better than the cruel adults trying to lord it over them and who employ prank and plot against the clueless giants to assert their own dignity and agency. View all my reviews
A Bond Undone by Jin Yong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “black hair in the morning, white in the evening” A Bond Undone (2019), the second volume of Jin Yong’s four-volume historical fantasy kung fu bildungsroman epic Legends of the Condor Heroes (1957-59), takes up in mid-cliffhanger where the first one, A Hero Born (2018), left off. Lotus Huang is still trapped in the palace of the Sixth Prince of the Jin Empire, having to use her quick wits, feminine wiles, martial skills, and hedgehog chainmail to fight through challenges from six traitor Song masters. Guo Jing is in a charnel pit with the blind and now crippled Iron Corpse Cyclone Mei, who, after whipping Liang the Jinseng Immortal, clamps a Nine Yin Skeleton Claw grip on Guo Jing’s windpipe to make him carry her on his back and enters a poignant memory-fugue monologue. And the Jin princeling Wanyan Kang continues to take poorly the news that a wandering Song farmer is his real father, not the Sixth Jin Prince. The second volume is at least as exciting, funny, moving, and entertaining as the first. There are many colorful characters and impressive scenes, among them Iron Corpse recalling her intense relationships with her dead husband and her betrayed shifu (teacher); Lotus Huang cooking delectable dishes for the gourmand Northern Beggar Count Seven Hong; students, teachers, and foes reuniting at Roaming Cloud Manor; Guo Jing disastrously meeting his lover’s father (who “refused to plant a sprig of blossoms in a pile of cow dung”); Apothecary Huang and the Western Venom Viper Ouyang dueling with flute and zither; the childlike Hoary Urchin playing a trick on Guo Jing; and Guo Jing and Gallant Ouyang competing in three rigged trials for Lotus Huang. The novel continues the education of the simple and slow but good and persistent Guo Jing in the context of the Jin Empire trying to finish subsuming the Song Empire via skullduggery and Mongols. Separated from his primary teachers (the Seven Freaks of the South), Guo Jing goes on to learn the Dragon Subduing Palm repertoire from the Northern Beggar and the Competing Hands technique from the Hoary Urchin. And he continues learning about life from Lotus, as when she puzzles him by comparing a colorful lake, mountain, and sunset cloud landscape to a monochrome ink painting. Part of Guo Jing’s education concerns an artifact reminiscent of Tolkien’s One Ring: The Nine Yin Manual. This old, unique hand-written manuscript reputedly describes and explains every known inner and outer kung fu move and countermove and thus for years has been sought, stolen, and fought over by martial artists, and even the most moral possessors can never quite bring themselves to burn it. “Flummoxed by how a book could cause so much havoc and ruin so many lives,” Guo Jing views it as an evil work, while the Hoary Urchin believes it to be a force for good. “It was worn and weathered from years of use and rough handling. The once white paper had yellowed. Its corners and edges were dogeared and creased. The words were obscured by smudges from hands and spots of water damage. Was it tears or tea? And the blots of purplish black. Were they blood?” The Manual plays a richly ironic and thematic role in the A Bond Undone. Like the first volume, the second features umpteen wuxia action scenes, with weapons ranging from hands, feet, swords, and spears to chopsticks, needles, coins, and tunes. On display are Jin Yong’s fanciful names for techniques (e.g., Dragon Subduing Palm, Exploding Toad, and Luminous Hollow Fist) and moves (e.g., Swirling Leaf, Black Tiger Steals the Harp, Hands Stretched for Charity, Haughty Dragon Repents, Wayfaring Fist, and Nodding Phoenix). Much action like this: “Mei swung her arm in a horizontal swipe known as Torrent and Tempest from the Cascading Peach Blossom Palm repertoire. The air parted with a whoosh.” The Northern Beggar even parodies such nomenclature by referring to the Ginseng Immortal’s Gibbon Climbs the Tree move as a Bare-Assed Monkey Climbs the Tree. The appendix explains that Chinese philosophies like Taoism and the I Ching inspire different kinds of kung fu, which, although often superhuman in effect, is an art with application to life, as reflected in lines like, “Absence trumps excess,” “The firm cannot endure the supple,” and “It is only through the simplest dish that a chef’s true skill is revealed. The same goes for the martial arts.” Indeed, cooking and kung fu are closely related in the novel, which serves some delicious and enticing dishes like bok choy stir fried in chicken fat, eight treasures duck, and Made for Each Other Broth. Martial and graphic arts are also related, as when Lotus Huang and Guo Jing observe an ink painting: “The powerful brushwork slashed like a sword and quivered with pent up force, as if each stroke could pierce through the paper and take flight.” The relationship between Guo Jing and Lotus Huang continues to charm, for they love each other so purely and complement each other’s strong and weak points so well. When she’s not saving him from nefarious enemies or leading him into dangerous situations, she teaches him to appreciate food, ink painting, and nature. The lovers were made for each other. Jin Yong writes great lines, whether evoking humor (“Brother, perhaps you’re a little obsessed with the martial arts”), love (“He decided not to interrupt this perfect image of sleep and turned his attention to counting her eyelashes”), loss (“Like my heart, he turned to ice”), or human nature (“There are some exceptionally clever people in this world. But . . . nothing good—no indeed, only the very rotten—comes of running into one of their kind”). With his superb reading of the audiobooks, Daniel York Loh enhances the consistency of the fine English translations by Anna Holmwood for the first volume and by Gigi Chang for the second. Never over-dramatizing, he always uses the right touch for the different characters and situations. His reading of Iron Corpse’s monologue is splendid, alternating between her malevolent kung fu hag rasp in the present and her pure teenage voice in the past. His reading makes up for the audiobook lacking the notes of the physical book. At one point the Hoary Urchin asks Guo Jing, “As long as they’re amusing, what’s the difference between real events and good stories?” A Bond Undone is amusing. I can’t wait to read the third volume of Legends of the Condor Heroes. After all, this one ends on another cliffhanger, and as a poem quoted in the novel implies, I’m not getting younger: Sitting by the blossoms, wine in hand, I wish to ask my gentle friend, Is there a way to hold on to spring? If only spring could be persuaded to stay. View all my reviews
A Hero Born by Jin Yong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Better than a Chinese Lord of the Rings Jin Yong’s Legends of the Condor Heroes (1957-59) has been called "the Chinese Lord of the Rings," but it features no Elves or Hobbits or Orcs or Dark Lords--just human beings. It’s a Historical Epic Fantasy Romance Adventure Kung Fu Bildungsroman featuring male and female martial arts experts (wuxia) of different traditions, abilities, and personalities in the early 13th-century historical context of the rising Jin Empire trying to complete its takeover of the declining Song Empire while both empires are trying to enlist the aid of the Mongols being unified by Genghis Kahn. One of the most popular books in the world, with 100s of millions of Chinese-speaking readers, Yong’s four-volume magnum opus is finally being translated into English. A Hero Born (2018), translated by Anna Holmwood, is the first of the four volumes to be translated. Not being able to read Chinese, I have no idea how accurate the translation is. All I can say is that listening to the audiobook was one of the most unstoppably entertaining reading experiences in my life. The sprawling story centers on Guo Jing, a good-natured, naïve, slow, and persistent peasant youth, and his relationship with the love of his life, Lotus Huang, a clever, quick, bold, and independent rich girl. Though Guo Jing grows up among the Mongols as martial brother to Temujin’s youngest son, he and Lotus Huang are patriotic children of the Song who hate the Jin. The story relates the fate of Guo Jing’s parents and their friends, the Mongolian childhood of Guo Jing, his training in kung fu by the Seven Freaks of the South, his encounter with formidable foes like the renegade kung fu husband and wife duo Copper Corpse and Iron Corpse (aka Twice Foul Dark Wind), his departure on a mission to try to kill the scheming Jin prince Wanyan Honglie, his falling in love with Lotus, and his further educational adventures in kung fu and life. If you like heroic fantasy and are interested in Chinese history and culture or liked the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), you would like A Hero Born. It’s a cinematic page turner by turns humorous, scary, thrilling, or moving because Jin Yong is so good at creating colorful characters and then putting them in unexpected situations in a rich world with a history that matters. His heroes and villains are flawed, distinctive, vivid, and human. The novel is full of humor (e.g., “He wasn’t known as the Butcher of a Thousand Hands for nothing”), pathos (e.g., “For eighteen years she had thought he was dead, and here he was, her husband, standing before her, like a spirit reincarnated”), and terror (e.g., “Some time passed and then a cracking sound started echoing all around them, first slow, then faster, like beans popping in hot oil. The noise was coming from her joints, but she was sitting perfectly still”). There are moments of devastating psychological truth, as when a needy princeling orders his servants to catch a rabbit so he can break its legs and then bring it to his tender-hearted mother and say, "I found a wounded rabbit for you to tend," so she can say, "Oh, you are a good boy," never realizing his cruelty or duplicity. Indeed, Jin Yong has a rich sense of irony: an act of mercy sets in motion a chain of tragic events; the reader knows someone’s identity the characters are clueless about; the best laid plans involving painstaking years of preparation often go awry. The irony leads to pithy and wise remarks on life like, “But it as they say: the swimmer is the one to drown, the cart always breaks on flat ground.” Jin Yong writes imaginative, exciting, and unpredictable action scenes ranging from personal duels to big battles. In addition to different kung fu disciplines and techniques (e.g., Nine Yin Skeleton Claw, Neigong Inner Strength, Water Kung Fu, etc.), he assigns countless fanciful or descriptive names for the kung fu moves “performed” by his characters: Mandarin Duck Kick, Enter the Tiger’s Lair, Branch Beats the White Chimpanzee, Black Dragon Gathers Water, Cat Chases Mouse, Pick the Fruit, Open the Window to Gaze at the Moon, Embracing the Gentleman’s Cape, Jumping Carp, Eight Steps to Catch the Toad, Falling Star, Laugh the Jaw Out of Joint, and many more. (I loved reading action like, “He reached for the spear and traced a Rising Phoenix Soaring Dragon through the air, the red tassel dancing behind him, until the point thrust forward straight at the cupboard.”) At times the kung fu verges on the superhuman, but it obeys a set of rules that are gradually revealed, confirmed, and played with: all kung fu masters have a single weak spot on their bodies, are limited by their ability to control their chi (inner life force), are supposed to be honorable (poison is permissible if you keep the antidote handy), and are never always the best: “Every peak sits under the shadow of another.” There are more appealing things in the work. It contains many savory Chinese cultural references, from quoted poems, Taoist monks, and exotic dishes, to the ubiquitous kowtow, elaborate names like The Garden of the Eight Drunken Immortals, and similes comparing things like black hair to the clouds in an ink painting, rain drops to soy beans, and a waist-sash to “the color of spring onions.” And its treatment of gender is impressive, as characters like Lotus Huang and Iron Corpse are believable, sympathetic, strong, and at least as formidable martially and intellectually as the men. Daniel York Loh reads the audiobook with great empathy, understanding, and restraint. He does a splendid malevolent and damaged Iron Corpse voice, a perfect civilized spoiled princeling voice, and nice Guo Jing and Lily Huang voices. I had a wonderful time with A Hero Born, often on the edge of my seat or chuckling with pleasure, often surprised, never bored. As it ends with simultaneous cliffhangers, the moment I finished it, I had to start the second volume, and I’m sure you will, too. View all my reviews
Makoons by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Readable, Funny, and Moving, but the Least Satisfying Birchbark House Book So Far The fifth entry in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House series about the mid-19th-century Ojibwa girl/woman Omakayas and her family, Makoons (2016), begins not long after the ending of the fourth, Chickadee (2012), with one of Omakayas’ eight-year-old twin sons, Makoons (Little Bear), still recovering from his illness caused by missing his beloved twin Chickadee when that boy was kidnapped and taken to the prairie far away from their Minnesota woods, lakes, and islands home. Though now the twins have been reunited on the prairie where the family relocated to recover Chickadee, Erdrich inserts ominous foreshadowing early on, as Makoons has a vision revealing that their family will never return to Minnesota and that the twins won’t be able to save everyone from some trouble. Most of the boys’ loving family is still present: mother Omakayas, father Animikiins, grandmother Yellow Kettle, grandfather Deydey, beautiful aunt Angeline and her husband Fishtail, happy go lucky uncle Quill, wise great-grandmother Nokomis, and tomboy with a vengeance second-cousin Two Strike. Bizheens, Omakayas’ beloved adopted baby brother from the second and third books in the series who should now be the teenage uncle of the twins, is still absent without any mention by the characters or explanation from the author. The novel depicts the boys learning to ride horses for buffalo hunting, which is how the family must support themselves on the prairie. For Makoons horseback riding is easy and natural, guiding his pony Whirlwind with his legs and teaching it to run at a buffalo skin without shying, while Chickadee repeatedly falls off his horse, until Uncle Quill gives him a better pony, which turns out to be vicious and willful, so the twins name it Sweetheart. Makoons and Chickadee observe the adults in their big family and small community hunting and rendering the buffalo (“the Generous Ones”) into useful meat and hides and other commodities. (One wonders how the adults could so quickly become such accomplished buffalo hunters and processors after having lived all their lives in the forests and islands back east.) The boys also watch the absurd antics of a muscular, handsome, and vain young man called Gichi Noodin, who likes to preen, pose, show off, brag, assume that every girl and woman admires him, and—to his cost—ignore buffalo hunting protocol. Erdrich must have decided that her children’s series should have child protagonists, and because the end of the third novel ended Omakayas’ girlhood, the series moved forward twelve years to focus on her twin sons. OK. But in the process of outgrowing her protagonist’s role, Omakayas lost her appealing and vivid personality as well as her gifts (affinity for bears, spirits, dreams, and visions). Now only her sons have such gifts, and her only distinctive personality trait is to ensure that her husband and twins are presentable by braiding their hair every morning. Erdrich, then, valorizes childhood as a special, more imaginative, sensitive, and interesting time in a person’s life. At the same time, Erdrich contrived to move Omakayas and her family from the forests and lakes of Wisconsin and Minnesota onto the great plains, gaining thereby a new field of historical Native American life oriented around buffalo to write about (paralleling the move west of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family in The Little House on the Prairie books). She thrillingly depicts a Native American buffalo hunt and vividly describes what comes after, not hiding the butchery, blood, rendering, and flies. The fourth novel compellingly focuses on Chickadee being separated from his family and having to survive apart from them as he comes to appreciate his name, but here in the fifth book Makoons does not have such an interesting experience on which to center a story. Makoons, like Chickadee, feels like a real boy, desiring to participate in a buffalo hunt before he’s old enough and playing funny tricks on the clueless Gichi Noodin, but his role as protagonist is a strangely minor one, without much development or even a substantial portion of the point of view scenes relative to other characters like Chickadee and even an adopted buffalo calf. And Gichi Noodin’s story arc is much more compelling than Makoons’, as the egotistical buffoon learns to see other people instead of only himself. “Before, he’d seen only his own reflection in his mind, or the eyes of other people. Now he was truly looking at people.” Erdrich is great at writing scenes kids would enjoy, like one in which Gichi Noodin loses his pants during a buffalo hunt, and at poignant scenes, like one featuring the twins’ great-grandmother Nokomis. She writes a neat story within her story, when Omakayas tells one about a man who marries a bear woman and joins her people. But the novel feels less substantial, realized, and finished than the earlier books in the series, and I even started noticing some of Erdrich’s neat illustrations from earlier books being recycled into this one, like the drawing ostensibly showing a buffalo hide being scraped that originally illustrated little Omakayas scraping a moose hide, and even the central picture on the cover is not a new one showing Makoons as a boy but an old interior illustration from the first book in the series showing Omakayas as a girl greeting two bear cubs. Finally, Makoons ends on something of a cliffhanger involving the twins, a vision, and darkness, but I am running out of steam for reading the series and am not anxiously waiting for Erdrich to finish the sixth entry. I do highly recommend the first three books about Omakayas as a girl, starting with the wonderful The Birchbark House (1999). View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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