On Saturday (Sometimes) I'm a Litblogger

I've been reading The Children of Men, by P. D. James, a dystopian fantasy about a world in which no children have been born for 25 years, due to an inexplicable plague of infertility that has infected the entire human race. James imagines a civilization in decline, a world without a future. This is my first book by James, and I've got to say she's an author you learn very quickly to respect. Like a modern-day Orwell, her writing seems to be underpinned by a great but unobtrusive intelligence.

The book is full of fine perceptions. Here's a brief passage describing an officer of the SSP (the State Security Police):

Rawlings didn't permit himself the indulgence of personal antipathy any more than he would have allowed himself to feel sympathy, liking, or the stirrings of pity for the victims he visited and interrogated. I thought I understood his kind: the petty bureaucrats of tyranny, men who relish the carefully measured meed of power permitted to them, who need to walk in the aura of manufactured fear, to know that the fear precedes them as they enter a room and will linger like a smell after they have left, but who have neither the sadism nor the courage for the ultimate cruelty. But they need their part in the action. It isn't sufficient for them, as it is for most of us, to stand a little way off to watch the crosses on the hill.

Me & the Mrs., on the couch, reading

Last night was just a typical night at the Spencer residence. Me and the Mrs. on the couch, reading. I raced through to the end of the Axis, by Robert Charles Wilson. A fascinating scifi thriller and the second in a trilogy, of which judgment will have to be withheld until the the third book comes out. That will either confirm the genius of the entire structure, or reveal it as a flimsy house of cards. We'll just have to wait and see.



Meanwhile, the Mrs., who had rummaged through an old box of children's books, had found Susan Cooper's Arthurian legend spin-ff, Over Sea, Under Stone. This is the first in a series (apparently, imaginative fiction that is not part of a "series" does not exist). I read it long ago, but don't remember it well, except that I enjoyed it.



But the fun part of the evening was seeing the look in Laurie's eyes as she read. They were as wide as saucers, as fixed and intent as a chess champion's, and seemingly "filled" with the images and emotions of Cooper's writing.

Ah, books.

Little, Big

OK, lets get back to books, shall we?

I've begun reading John Crowley's Little, Big. I'm always searching for superb fantasy literature, something to set beside the great fantasy classics (George Macdonald, J. R. R. Tolkien, etc.). And maybe this is one of them. Too early to tell (I'm only on page 70), but it's beautiful. I used Google Blogsearch to find out what others have had to say:

Unlikely Words says "Magical, melancholy, wistful, and beautiful."

Cat Politics says, "Little, Big is a sublime, almost perfect novel...."

Not Free SF Reader says, "absolutely not my thing."

And Dreamwreck said, "the worst possible thing you could do is write Little, Big. unfortunately, that’s what Mr. Crowley did."

Hmmm, I guess I'm going to have to keep reading.

Thoughts on Reading Fantasy

I returned to the fantasy genre (as a reader, mind you) a year or two ago, after many years away. It had been an enthusiasm of my youth, something I had put aside, it seems, along with other childish things (ha!). Anyway, last year I re-read C. S. Lewis' space trilogy (magnificent) and Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle (really good). From there I ventured out from the cozy realms of "Christian" fantasy and tried to read George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. It had come highly recommended (the series has a huge and loyal following, and even its own online encyclopedia), but I only made it through half of the second book before I'd had enough of the sheer depravity on display. Too dark, too vicious, too unrelentingly gross for my tastes, thank you. Sometimes, when you go for a walk, you just have to face the fact that you've taken a wrong turn and go back. And so with books. Maybe the very next chapter would have redeemed the story from its own muck, but I had simply lost hope.

And this brings me to Memory, Sorrow, Thorn, my current fantasy indulgence. It's a trilogy, of course (fantasy authors hardly ever limit their stories to the strict confines of a single thousand-page tome). The story is somewhat Tolkien-esque, but I don't mean that as a criticism. Tolkien towers over this story-telling medium and his influence would be difficult to elude, even if one wanted to. As I've read these tales, it has occurred to me that the good stories have an obvious moral center. To put it more precisely, the reader is aware of the moral center of the author, and it is this, above and beyond all of Tolkien's powers of invention, that gives his story true heft.

This is not to say it is clumsily moralistic, only that the worldview of the author is trustworthy. You see this with some of the great novelists of the past, like Dickens and Hugo. And this too is a matter of the reader's own "taste" or predilection, of course. I suggest that we are more influenced by these things in our reading choices than we perhaps realize.

All that aside, I wanted to mention a few things about Memory, Sorrow, Thorn. I'm into the second book now, called The Stone of Farewell. The people of this imaginary world are very religious. Every culture has its gods or God. Most of the human culture, which is roughly equivalent to, oh, maybe 10th century Britain, practice something very like what we moderns imagine Middle Ages Christianity to have been like. They worship a God who seems to have come to earth (or to Osten Ard, the name of this fantasy world) and gotten himself nailed to a tree. People are constantly swearing rather sacrilegiously, and their beliefs seem mostly shallow, superstitious, or hypocritical. At the very least, their religion seems distinctly unhelpful. I'll be curious to see whether all this is just an accessory to the story, window-dressing of sorts, or if there is significant development of this theme.

Anyway, it's a good read. Osten Ard is beautiful and strange, and like Middle Earth it is a world from which magic has not yet fled (of course). In fact, Williams sees his work as a kind of dialogue with Tolkien's masterpiece. You can read more about this series at Fantasy Finder, Unsought Input, or in the author's own website.

The Dragonbone Chair

I've been reading a little fantasy lately. It began with Stephen Lawhead's Arthurian cycle, which I liked quite a lot, although it didn't achieve Tolkienesque status, mind you. Then my son and I decided to read a series by George R. R. Martin, but by the second book I had grown quite tired of what seemed to me the rather vile content at times. So I dropped that finally, deciding that life is too short to read thing that make you feel, well, dirty.

Not giving up, though, I picked up the first of another cycle (why can't fantasy writers write single novels?) by Tad Williams. The book is called The Dragonbone Chair (Book 1 of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn) and after a rather slow start it has now achieved verified page-turner status for me. A young boy of no apparent quality, scullery lad in a medieval-style king's stronghold, finds himself mixed up in a war of good vs. evil that has a, well, ummm, Tolkienesque comprehensiveness. That is, the fate of whole civilizations hang in the balance, but the reader sees it all from the point of view of this rather unimpressive lad, who finds himself needing to mature quickly in order to survive.

It's the first of a 4-part cycle, and I fully intend to read this one to the very end.