The Iliad by Homer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars "There is no saving the sons of all mankind" It's the tenth year of the siege of Troy by the united Greek armies against the Trojans and their allies because the Trojan prince Paris spirited away the not unwilling Helen from her husband, the Spartan king Menelaus. Apollo has visited a plague upon the Greek army because its leader Agamemnon enslaved the daughter of the god's priest. And when the Greek uberhero Achilles tells Agamemnon to return the girl to placate Apollo, festering resentments burst open. Agamemnon declares that he'll take Achilles' prize-girl in compensation, provoking the hero to unsheathe his sword with murderous intent. Athena then pulls Achilles' hair and tells him just to threaten Agamemnon ("Sack of wine, you with your cur's eyes and your antelope heart!") and wait for payback. Thus Achilles withdraws himself and his Myrmidons from the Greek army to make the Greeks miss him when facing the Trojans and their hero Hector. The Iliad then depicts the consequences of Achilles' anger. There is much carnage: bodies gaffed, skulls skewered, brains burst, teeth shattered, tongues severed, livers pierced, bowels uncoiled, tendons split, knees buckled, etc. Much vaunting over fallen foes and stripping them of their armor. Much reversal in morale and momentum as the gods inspire or aid one side or the other. No mercy: suppliants clasping the knees of their captors get their heads cut off. But in addition to the horror, tragedy, and waste of war, Homer also evokes its appeal: "Take a fresh grip on courage! Fight like men!" The poem is surprisingly funny, as when old Nestor rambles on about his youthful feats (when men were great!), the gods bicker, scheme, and kibitz, or Achilles insults Agamemnon or Hector Paris. There are many memorable scenes, like Hector saying goodbye to Andromache and their baby boy; Greek Diomedes and Trojan ally Glaucus discovering that their grandfathers were friends; Hera seducing Zeus; Hephaestus crafting a shield for Achilles with all of human life animated on it; Achilles chasing Hector around Troy and Hector charging Achilles; Achilles trying to embrace the shade of Patroclus; Priam and Achilles weeping together over lost fathers, sons, and friends. . . Every time one reads The Iliad, it excites, shocks, moves, and pleases. Why? Despite telling the story as a Greek, Homer avoids jingoistic posturing and enters the minds and hearts of Greeks and Trojans. He names the many who die on both sides. (The myriad names of winners and losers and their parents and homes accumulate into a critical mass of human endeavor and loss). He spends at least as much time with Trojans mourning Hector as with Greeks mourning Patroclus. He depicts everyone--even his gods and especially his heroes--as flawed, believable human beings. Achilles does become monstrous in his near-divine, mad butchery, damming a river with Trojan corpses and saying to the dying Hector, "Would god my passion drove me to slaughter you and eat you raw." (Hector's reply is sublime: "I see you now for what you are.") Achilles has chosen martial fame over a long life, and his violence and anger are excessive and terrifying rather than meet and inspiring, while Hector is a whole man, a reluctant hero fighting for his city, people, and family. No wonder Hector is a much more popular given name in the world than Achilles! And despite being a war poem, The Iliad is a paean to life. Yes, the characters host guests, perform sacrifices, interpret omens, conduct funeral games, and so on, but what really evokes life in all its forms are Homer's wonderfully detailed, extended epic similes comparing the heroes and their deeds to shipwrights, fishermen, shepherds, farmers, tanners, potters, dancers, boys, and women in labor; horses, heifers, oxen, deer, dogs, wolves, and lions; cicadas, bees, and flies; fires, snowflakes, storms, and squalls. Like this: 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's 1974 blank verse translation read by Dan Stevens is beautiful, lean, and dynamic. Fitzgerald likes simple words and compound words and names with Greek rather than Latin spelling (e.g., Akhilleus not Achilles). I think his translation is tighter than Lattimore's and Fagles'. I like all three: And that was how that battle went--a din of ironhearted men through barren air rose to the sky, all brazen. (Fitzgerald) And so they fought and the iron din went rising up to the bronze sky through the barren breathless air. (Fagles) So they fought on, and the iron tumult went up into the brazen sky through the barren bright air. (Lattimore) As for the audiobooks of those translations, I much prefer Dan Stevens reading Fitzgerald to Charlton Griffon reading Lattimore and Derek Jacobi Fagles. Griffin's rolling delivery makes all his audiobooks sound alike, and his female voices are too high and nasal. He does read an interesting 90-minute introduction by Herbert J. Muller and introduces the books of the epic with cool 'Greek' music. Jacobi is a great actor, but he tends to overact when reading The Iliad by, for instance, stretching long vowels, and his audiobook is an abridgement. Though Stevens speeds up in the heat of the moment, he reads with perfect clarity, intelligence, and passion. His audiobook has no introduction, but after the poem a professor reads a section of The Iliad in the exotic original Greek. The Iliad depicts a roughly 3000-year-old warrior culture based on men winning glory by fighting other men and stealing their possessions and enslaving their women, all while placating the touchy gods, though one can never avoid one's long ago decided fate. But the people in The Iliad are just like us--full of love, hate, joy, fear, and creative and destructive energy--and at times forget fate and gods: "Safety lies in our own hands!" View all my reviews
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We Leave Together by J.M. McDermott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars What Was a Broken-Hearted Demon Child to Do? The husband and wife Walkers of the Goddess Erin spent the first two books in J M McDermott's Dogsland trilogy, Never Knew Another (2011) and When We Were Executioners (2012), sifting the memories adhering to the skull of the dead demon child, Corporal Jona Lord Joni, in order to find and purify the places he contaminated and to locate and exterminate two other demon spawn, his lover Rachel Nolander (a mystic elemental sorceress) and his foil Salvatore Fidelio (an immortal, amoral, amnesiac thief). But by the start of the third book, We Leave Together (2014), the Walkers have changed their mission in Dogsland. Though they still seek Salvatore to kill him, they have put Rachel (who's benign and has fled the city) on the back burner and have decided to start a fiery revolution to cleanse the city of the Sabacthanis, a noble father and daughter team who have been using economic, political, and magical power to corrupt and dominate Dogsland and its king. Two main things shift the Walkers from apolitical holy executioners to engaged arsonist revolutionaries: Jona and Rachel's memories of loving each other (demon spawn together in a hostile world) and Jona's memories of the awful source of the demon weed eating the city from the inside out. Early in the novel the wife asks her husband, "Would you die for me, like Jona did for his beloved?" He replies, "No. You shouldn't die for me, either. Let me sleep." But she says, "Liar." Later, she notes, "Even now, his skull cries out her name into the dark." In the course of Jona's king's man (policeman) day job and assassin night work, he discovered who's been producing demon weed and inserting it into the city and how it's made but didn't believe he could do anything with the awful knowledge. The Walkers will put it to good effect. While trying to clean up Dogsland in the present, the Walker wife also narrates Jona and Rachel's poignant memories of their fraught childhoods and sad parting. Rachel recalls, for instance, how her big half-brother Djoss became her protector when they were kids by killing her demon "doppelganger" father, while Jona recollects learning to fear his demon child father's sleepwalking and to avoid sharing an orange with another human being. Other memories painfully detail the growing separation of Rachel from Jona, due to Djoss falling under the sway of demon weed, requiring her to become his protector: "He's my whole life. I won't let him go, Jona." When finishing a fantasy trilogy one may wonder, was it worth all the time and energy to read? Does the third volume satisfyingly end the first two? The first time I finished this concluding book of the Dogsland trilogy, I thought not. This was partly due to my having listened to Eileen Stevens give great readings of the first two novels as audiobooks, whereas the third novel was only available as a paperback or a kindle. I read the kindle version and missed Stevens and found too many typos (e.g., "He grabbed the reigns"). And I thought that McDermott should have finally explained things like Elishta's motives in making the demon spawn and how many there are and why they take different forms. And at first I felt that the climax, in which after nearly three novels the Walker wife finally "remembers" how Jona and Rachel parted and how he was killed by his sergeant, was disappointing. (**Those aren't spoilers! We've known that such things would happen from the start of the first book.**) But I re-read the third book and kept thinking about it and the trilogy, and started liking it all a lot more. About the lack of explanation for demon children, McDermott may be saying there are no answers for such things: "Jona looked up at the stars, and wondered what they were. Religions had answers, but there was never an answer that satisfied Jona when his own existence was an abomination to the religions. He didn't feel like an abomination. He just felt lonely." About the climax, although Jona is disappointing in his last absurd, passive, and reckless collaboration with Ela Sabacthani, we may somewhat excuse him because he's broken hearted, having lost Rachel, who’d made him a better man, a better demon spawn. And Jona's last memories reveal that Rachel became strong enough in her will and her magic to leave the city and to take care of Djoss. And that Jona could finally briefly dream (he was always unable to sleep) and even fly (his mother had cut off his wings when he was born). Finally, given the bleak parameters the trilogy sets up in the first two books, the third one ends, if not with a happy ending, at least with a sense of renewal, redemption, acceptance, and love. By experiencing Jona and Rachel's love, the Walkers may pursue their duty to seek and destroy all demon spawn a wee less rigidly and righteously. They prefer helping Nicola Calipari (Jona's sergeant who's still conflicted over having killed Jona) get his fledgling farm going and his "wife" Franka bearing their baby to hunting Rachel. They're happy to be outside the city: "I think the wilderness is where things happen and no one writes about them. It is the place where there are no maps, no memorials to heroes, no gravestones, no paper, and no ink." I enjoyed the vivid, laconic, poetic writing in the book: "Flying insects flew into the lamps and died with screams that only my husband and I could hear." And it's doomed romance: "When it is a good dream, I dream of your breath moving in and out of your chest and my ear pressed against your chest, and the breath flowing in and out of both of us, and it is the same breath." If you like literate, bleak, romantic urban fantasy where the main character is an "of-demon" dead before the story begins and there are few obvious answers to existential questions, you should give the trilogy a try. View all my reviews
When We Were Executioners by J.M. McDermott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "Hands are what make us human" When We Were Executioners (2012), the middle book in J M McDermott's Dogsland trilogy, takes up where the first one, Never Knew Another (2011), left off. The Walker husband and wife who can change into wolves and are dedicated to eradicating the demon spawn of Elishta are still hunting for the immortal demon child Salvatore Fidelio (a thief who, "addled by eternity," serially loves and forgets young women) and trying to purify places contaminated by the dead demon child Jona Lord Joni (a landless noble who was a king's man by day and a "blood monkey" assassin by night). The Walkers' mission in the city wolves call Dogsland has become more challenging, because at the end of of the first book they let ruthless Lady Ela Sabacthani know they know she's the Night King crime lord. We know from the start that Jona's lover Rachel (another demon child) has fled the city and that somehow as a result he has been killed ("In death he was a blight below a bluff where toxic mushrooms sprouted in his blood"). The Walker wife is haunted by the vivid memories of the lovers emanating from Jona's skull and pushing into hers "like a kept sea." She narrates chapters from their points of view while giving updates on the present progress of her and her husband's extermination and purification mission. The memories of Jona and Rachel make them sympathetic: "Her face and the way she looked at him make me happy, because Jona was loved by someone before he died." The Walkers are hunting Salvatore rather than Rachel, because they figure he's a greater and nearer threat to humanity. This book develops the conflicting relationships between Rachel and Jona and Rachel and her big human half-brother Djoss. Ever since as a boy Djoss killed Rachel's demon father he's protected her, but as he becomes enmeshed in selling and using demon weed in Dogsland, their roles reverse. While Rachel loves Jona and he her (demon children in a hostile world) and they’re sharing their bodies, hopes, and pasts, Jona hides his assassinry from Rachel while she signals that at a pinch she’d choose Djoss over Jona. In the passages depicting Jona and the king's men's attempts to track down the people pushing demon weed and Djoss and his friends' attempts to steal and sell and use it, the novel seems a gritty fantasy police story. The novel also depicts Jona's disturbing treatment of Aggie, the novitiate of Imam he's framed as a demon child to protect her lover Salvatore, the real demon spawn. The less interested in Aggie's fate Salvatore becomes, the more outraged Jona becomes, even as he continues feeding the poor imprisoned girl food laced with his own demon blood to keep her testing positive for demon taint. The novel also reveals Ela's lonliness and ambition, which drive her to start feeling Jona out as a potential husband and co-ruler of Dogsland, despite Jona wanting Rachel more than power. This book has many impressive set pieces: magical, like Jona leaning out Rachel's window looking up at lambent clouds, watching rain drops appear, and catching them in his mouth; romantic, like Jona showing Rachel his wing scars; funny, like Djoss coming home when Jona and Rachel are in bed together; ironic, like Djoss searching for Rachel and finding Aggie; horrifying, like Rachel witnessing Aggie's public burning and Djoss its aftermath; disturbing, like when Djoss accepts a pipe of demon weed and "A universe opened in his skull"; suspenseful, like when the king's men raid a dive where Djoss and his partner in crime have gone to divvy up some pelf. This book has much imaginative, fantastic, and vivid writing: "Rachel pressed into him. Her warm scales funneled Jona's sweat into her mattress like tile roofs guiding rain to eaves. The scales nipped at his damp skin when she moved. If she pressed hard enough she might scrape him." It's not for the squeamish. At one point Jona's fellow king's man (sick from sharing a bottle with Jona) literally craps out his intestines; at another Jona uses his demon blood to murder a man, boiling his eyes and melting his head. Yet the demon children aren't exactly the "abominations" the Walkers seek to extirpate. Jona is disappointing (his obedient murdering for the Night King) and disturbing (his twisted treatment of Aggie) and appealing (his desperate love of Rachel) and never feels evil. Sweet Rachel says, "I don't feel evil." Demon weed is more pernicious than demon spawn, owning the city and destroying its people. Dogsland appears to be a living city via slang (pinkers, mudskippers, bliss, tight, roll, etc.) and denizens (sailors, gangers, bouncers, ragpickers, stevedores, vendors, porters, butchers, king's men, whores, maids, mothers, ladies and lords, etc.). The separation of the nobles on their artificial island from the riffraff of the city is increasingly wrong, with plans in the works to isolate the abattoir district on a new artificial island. The Walkers believe Dogsland is rotting from the inside and will be reclaimed by woods--and they're planning to speed the process via cleansing fire: "We will no longer be executioners chasing after a prize. We will be the fire that purifies this city for 1000 years." And the couple invokes "merciful Erin." The book has many themes: the difficulty of happiness in a city; the devastating nature of drugs; the pain of love; the nature of humanity; the importance of empathy; the harm of political power abused; etc. As with the first book, Eileen Stevens gives a great reading of this one. I regret that there is no audiobook of the last novel in the trilogy. And that this book, like the first one, ends with neither resolution nor rest. (I'll read the kindle version of the third!) Readers who liked the first book would like this one too. View all my reviews
Check out this cool cover!
Never Knew Another by J.M. McDermott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "These things happened in cities" The narrator of J. M. McDermott's Never Knew Another (2011) and her husband are Walkers of the goddess Erin, healer-hunter-exorcist-executioner priests who don wolf skins to become super wolves to search out and purify the demon taint of Elishta. At the start of the novel the wife recounts finding the toxic corpse of a demon child dressed in the uniform of a king's man, removing the head to access the mind adhering to the skull. The first thing she heard was the demon spawn (Jona) screaming, "Where is my body?" And "Where is Rachel?" Then the Walkers used ants and flowers to cleanse the skeleton of its tainted flesh and dragged the skull to Jona's city, Dogsland (wolves call all cities that because dogs stink them up) The wife and husband are at home in forests and mountains. According to their faith, all creatures eat, sleep and love, which tasks are difficult for human beings because Erin cursed them with intelligence, and the people who build cities are those who find the curse a blessing. Nonetheless, the Walkers are staying among the "bellicose monkeys" of Jona's city, because they must purify the places Jona frequented and the people he contaminated. Their task is complicated by the fact that in Dogsland Jona got to know two other demon children, Salvatore Fidelio (an immortal, amoral, amnesiac thief) and Rachel Nolander (a Senta, or nomadic philosopher, fortune teller, and elemental sorceress). Although Jona is dead, Rachel and Salvatore still require extermination and purification, but Rachel has fled the city, while Salvatore is untraceable, thanks to powerful friends in high places. The Walker wife frames the memories of Jona and his lover Rachel provided by his skull with brief updates on the progress of her and her husband's mission in the present. (She can't access the memories of Salvatore because he forgets everything.). The memories subject the Walker wife to a double consciousness: "his days and sleepless nights, and his great love all floated over the surface of my world." The more memories she writes down, the more sympathetic Jona and Rachel become. Their memories are so vivid that it's easy to forget that they've already met, fallen in love, and separated, resulting in Jona's death. This is a poignant love story, a doomed romance between outsiders in an inimical world. Supposedly demon spawn have been banished underground for 1000 years, and though Rachel always had her protective big human half-brother and Jona his self-sacrificing, protective human mother, they always feared discovery and were lonely and "never knew another" like themselves. The Walkers believe that the children of Elishta are born evil and cannot escape their demonic natures. Indeed, Salvatore is a self-centered thief and serial lover, destroyer, and forgettor of women, while Jona is both a somewhat dirty king's man (policeman) and a brutal if reluctant "blood monkey" (assassin) for the Night King (crime lord). Yet neither Salvatore nor Jona are as bad as the people they work for. To be sure, demon child blood, sweat, tears, and urine are toxic, acidic, and flammable. To share an apple or a bottle or a bath or a kiss with a human would make the person quite ill. (Given the nature of demonic bodily fluids, I wonder how violent Jona and lothario Salvatore could escape detection for so long and how male demon spawn and human women could make babies!) But it's hard not to sympathize with Jona when he says things like, "I want to know what dreams are like" (because he has never slept). And Rachel! She may have serpentine scales, taloned feet, and a forked tongue and may smell of brimstone and may not cast a shadow or a mirror reflection, but she is a sweetie who says things like, "The seed of my life's flower has landed here. It is my responsibility to bloom," and "I'm just me. I'm not a destroyer of life." One of the best things about the book is that McDermott writes rounded, real characters. In addition to the complex demon spawn, there are plenty of flawed and sympathetic human characters: Aggie, the stir-crazy convent girl in love with Salvatore; Djoss, Rachel's beloved champion brother who is weak on drugs; Lady Ela Sabacthani, the magician-lord's daughter who is aging and needs to hear she's beautiful; Sergeant Nicola Calipari, Jona's commanding officer, who is wise and compassionate but had to kill Jona. Dogsland is a vivid city: "The wind smelled of the slaughterhouses of the district, but the stench of death also carried layers of turnips and cabbages and onions and the cloth diapers boiling clean." Whorehouses, temples, bars, cafes, vendors, sewers; night soil, fetid mud, potent stenches; and highly addictive demon weed that makes users sweat blood and turns their brains into "cheese." The nobility live in fine estates on an artificial island separated from the rest of the city, while most of the action occurs in the abattoir slums. McDermott writes bleak, vivid prose with a dry wit and a lean poetry: "Everything living had died where the tainted blood pooled. Tiny red mushrooms--all deadly--sprouted like warts. This noxious corpse wore the uniform of a king's man." "She creased her eyebrows like little hammers." "Fear becomes normal, like walking with a limp." "Your blood is eating my sleeve." Like McDermott's The Last Dragon, this book is a grim, poignant, weird read. He writes compact novels packed with more substance, thought, and emotion than most bloated works of heroic fantasy. He uses genre tropes in merciless, imaginative, and (mostly) convincing ways. People who like bleak, fresh fantasy should try Never Knew Another. However, be advised that the novel needs the next two volumes of the Doglsland trilogy to give closure (and the third book isn't available as an audiobook). Eileen Stevens reads the audiobook fine. View all my reviews
CryoBurn by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Hunting for a Gold Ring in a Cryogenics Privy Cryoburn (2010), the 16th (?) entry in Louise McMaster Bujold's entertaining Vorkosigan space opera series, begins with Miles on Kibou-daini, a planet far from his Barrayaran Empire, drugged, hallucinating, and lost in hundreds of kilometers of cryogenic catacombs ("Cryocombs") packed with frozen "cryo-corpses." Luckily 11-year-old Jin Sato, who's living in a community squatting in an abandoned cryo-facility, takes Miles under his wing. Where are Jin's parents? And what happened to Roic, Miles' armsman (bodyguard/butler)? And why did Miles really come to Kibou-daini? It can't have just been to attend the conference on cryogenics which ended in his near-kidnapping. . . Bujold answers those questions in page-turning, pointed, and poignant ways, organized around her science fictional exploration of the technology, economics, ethics, and politics of cryogenics. On Kibou-daini giant cryo-corps (corporations) compete with one another to get the most clients, wielding the frozen people's "democratic" votes so as to favor their business interests. The competing cryo-corps employ different strategies to appeal to clients (whom they’d rather keep frozen than revive). New Egypt, for instance, offers a faux Egyptian look, complete with genetically modified "sphinxes" and monumental temple-like cryo-facilities. The plot, then, involves cryogenics, a bribery, a powerful corporation, a resistance ("Burn the Dead!"), an orphan boy, a crusading woman, and Miles doing his improvisational best to fulfill his Emperor's mission as Imperial Auditor (detective/representative/troubleshooter), "jumping into the privy and pulling out a gold ring." Bujold tells her story by rotating among a few point of view of characters. Miles is still brilliant, charismatic, and resourceful, and although at 39 he's perhaps less desperate to over-achieve while over-compensating for his dwarfish physique than in his younger days, he's still an unstoppable force once put in motion (a "hyperactive lunatic"). Jin is bright, generous, and sensitive. He avidly cares for a menagerie of creatures and doesn't like recalling that his father is dead-dead and his mother cryogenically preserved. Then there is Roic, Mile's armsman, a good-natured straight-man who worries that Miles' cavalier treatment of laws and rules is rubbing off on him. There are neat supporting characters: Jin's cute little sister Mina; the divorced Barrayaran Consul to Kibou-daini, Vorlinkin; and Miles' clone-brother Mark. Mark, who helpfully shows up for the denoument, is still dedicated to ending the Jackson's Whole practice of rich old people transplanting their brains into the bodies of young clones and has his company working on a more humane means of extending human life. Much of the novel is funny. Bujold writes plenty of witty lines, as when Raven mentions making a family "the old fashioned way: a sperm, an egg, and a test tube." And Jin's innocent and ignorant point of view leads to much ironic humor, for he often doesn't understand what we do, as when Miles makes a joke referring to sex change on Beta Colony. However, there are also some moving scenes featuring Jin and Mina, like the uncomfortable moment when Miles rather callously shows them pics of his parents, wife, and four kids and their ponies and extensive lands and big houses, all of which make the orphaned siblings feel badly. The "Aftermath" of the novel makes all the preceding stuff on cryogenics and longevity treatments stab home. After all, amid all our fancy medical technology, we remain very mortal. (Miles has heard that the longest anyone could live--assuming no death from old age--would be about 800 before the law of averages would kill them with some accident or mistake). Apart from assuming an unlikely Aussie or cockney accent for one local character, Grover Gardner gives yet another excellent reading of the audiobook, and continues to be the ideal reader for Miles and Bujold's Vorkosigan series. Kibou-daini means "Wish Number 2" in Japanese, and the planet must have been settled largely by Japanese from old Earth, but the people's race and names and cultural traces (like green tea and the "-san" suffix) are almost window dressing, having little to do with Bujold's cryogenics theme. About the only thing I didn't care for in the novel occurs when, after Jin has been traumatized by seeing Roic's familiar eyes change into those of a deadly stranger during some dangerous action, Roic makes everything OK by showing the boy and his little sister how to shoot a stun gun and telling them, "It's only a tool." Is Bujold promoting the old NRA canard that "guns don't kill people, people do"? Anyway, I can't believe that Roic teaching Jin to shoot a stun gun would heal the boy's shock so easily. Fans of Bujold's Vorkosigan series should enjoy this book, though, as ever, I recommend the first several books in the series (those dealing with Miles' parents and with his younger days) over the later books. View all my reviews
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book will make a traveler of thee The narrator of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come (1678) dreams of a man named Christian whose reading in his Book has made him realize that fire from Heaven is coming soon to his aptly-named city, Destruction, and that he'd better get out on pilgrimage to the Celestial City ASAP. Christian tries to get his wife and sons and neighbors to join him, but everyone thinks he's cracked or troublesome. Everyone but Pliable, who's attracted by the promise of donning garments of immortality and crowns of glory in an eternal kingdom, but before the pair even get to the Wicket Gate giving access to the Way, they fall into the Slough of Despond, and Pliable gives up discouraged and goes home, leaving Christian to journey on alone. Thus begins the first part of John Bunyan's uber-Allegory, which recounts the trials and tribulations and triumphs of Christian's pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Everyone Christian meets and everywhere he goes and everything he does is ripe with moral meaning forcefully signaled by their names. Christian should beware of men like Mister Legality (a cheat) and his son Civility (a hypocrite), Worldly Wiseman (hailing from the town called Carnality), and Timorous and Mistrust (counseling turning back). He should seek advice from Evangelist, inspiration in the Interpreter's House, and rest in the palace called Beautiful, and sure better watch his step in the Valley of Humiliation. In "The Author's Apology for His Work," Bunyan defends allegory from his critics who said, "metaphors make us blind," for "similitudes" may effectively embody truth and make it more memorable and educational. Indeed, despite being an atheist (and smarting a bit when Christian encounters a man called Atheist categorized among the Flatterers), Bunyan's dream is entertaining and full of pith. It is neat to follow Christian through his allegorical world, and Bunyan has a sense of humor. One example occurs when Talkative joins the pilgrimage, brightly saying he'll be happy to talk about anything, heavenly or earthly, sacred or profane, so Christian, who knows him from Destruction, warns Faithful about him, saying that "His house is as empty of religion as the white of an egg is of savor." Bunyan is telling an adventure story with enough trappings of the physical (if not the sensual) to maintain interest. There are moments of suspense wherein I don't know how (or if) Christian will get out of certain traps, like when he is arrested in Vanity Fair, or when he is imprisoned (and tortured) by the Giant Despair in Doubting Castle. Though I am much more sympathetic to writers like Le Guin and Pullman who praise the transitory wonders and pleasures of this world rather than looking toward an eternal Christian hereafter (e.g., "the better things of the next world are eternal"), I do appreciate much of Bunyan's teaching and believe that if more people followed it, the world would be a better place. The Pilgrim's Progress is composed of two parts, the first relating Christian's pilgrimage, the second that of his wife Christiana, their four young sons, and her friend Mercy. I did find the second part lacking in suspense (after an early attempted rape scene) because, being "weak" (as women and children), Bunyan dreams Christina and sons as being guided, advised and protected by Mr. Great-Heart, who lectures persuasively on the double nature of Jesus (god and man in one!) and is rather infallible. However, it is neat to see how Bunyan "dreams" a female and child pilgrimage, he speaks forcefully on behalf of women as being valued equally as pilgrims to men, he introduces new characters like Mr. Despondency and Old Honest from the town of Stupidity, he imagines neat things like Mr. Valiant's magic sword that cuts flesh, bone, soul, and spirit, and he writes a sublime ending: "Welcome life." The Pilgrim's Progress is said to be the first novel in English, and it surely has been one of the most popular and read books in English for centuries. It mostly merits its classic status. Apart from some klunky parts, like occasional summaries in the second part of things that happened in the first (or even of things that have happened earlier in the second part), Bunyan is an imaginative and witty writer. It's rather compelling when characters say things like, "The things that are seen are temporal, those unseen eternal." Or "What you get last, you get lastingly; what you get first, you get briefly." Touches like the Giant of Despair falling into fits when the sun shines are fine. A note on the audiobook versions I listened to. The Naxos version read by David Shaw-Parker is great. He is an engaging reader who does (almost) everything just right. I do wonder if he didn't try too hard to distinguish between characters sometimes, as when for some reason he gives Faithful (who comes from the same city as Christian) an accent with a kind of rolled r, but doesn't do that for Christian's second companion Hopeful. Unlike with the Naxos audiobook, the free LibraVox audiobook, read by Joy Chan, includes all the Biblical book titles and chapter numbers for each quotation from or reference to the Bible in Bunyan's novel, and there are many, often several for a single allusion. This tells interested readers where in the Good Book they may find quotations and references etc., and of lets any reader know just how often Bunyan weaves his favorite book's wisdom into his allegory. It also somewhat interrupts the flow of Bunyan's narrative and prose. Chan reads well and has a pleasing voice (though I think she mispronounces a word or two, like sepulcher and Gaius). Anyone interested in the history of English literature or of the novel should read Bunyan's book, and the Naxos version would be a fine way to listen to it. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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Jefferson's books
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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