Book Review: The Brothers Karamazov

So, this last week and a half (starting basically when I no longer had to do a bunch of work for Junior Poet) I sat down and read The Brothers Karamazov.

Verdict: It’s amazing, but I just don’t get it.

That is all.

Book Review: Watership Down

I apologize for my lack of posting this last week; I’ve been busy securing an apartment to live in this coming semester and buying furniture to put in it. I’ll be doing that for another week, then I move in August 31st and the semester starts. Until then, though, I have a decent amount of free time.

Well. That said, even though I wasn’t posting, I found the time last week to read Watership Down, one of my favorite books from years gone by. The premise: a group of rabbits leave their warren on the basis of a vision of doom one of them had, and they set out trying to make a life for themselves on remote Watership Down. Once there, they realize their group is entirely bucks, no does, and so they try to find a warren that will give some females to them. Instead they find a warren led by the Nazi-esque General Woundwort. Meanwhile, a mythology is being built up of Elahrairah, the rabbit folk hero.

Anyway, I hadn’t touched it in over three years, and decided I needed to revisit it. Verdict: It is, as I remembered, awesome; it’s maybe even better than I remembered it being. (So, if you never have, if you get nothing else out of this post – go read it!)

But there’s an interesting caveat to this endorsement I want to explore. The book’s awesomeness is definitively not because of the characters. I like Hazel, and Fiver, and Blackberry, and Bigwig; General Woundwort is indeed a disturbing villain, for a rabbit; Elahrairah makes a cool folk hero, Lord Frith and Prince Rainbow are both well-done gods, and the Black Rabbit of Inle is awesome in its role as the Grim Reaper. But -

Those characters aren’t why the book is amazing. It’s rather how well the author, Richard Adams, paints the outlines of the rabbits’ world, making up his own “rabbit language” and convincing the reader that it is real (“silflay hraka, u embleer rah!” is left untranslated in the text of the book, but the reader already knows what it means by then, and using it doesn’t break suspension of disbelief at all), showing how differently they think about things (they don’t realize cars are machines; only the most intelligent among them understand floatation), in general presenting rabbitting society as alien and yet compelling.

And probably it’s that very achievement – the establishment of so alien a culture for all the characters to live in – that makes it so the characters are hard to relate to. In the end, Hazel’s a good guy, but he’s just a rabbit, and I could never have a conversation with him, even if we spoke the same language; we’d have nothing to talk about.

And because the lack of compelling characters is a direct result of the nature of the book as semi-anthropomorphic fiction, I doubt Adams could have done any better. It’s a problem with the medium he’s working in.

One Way of Avoiding the Issue

I  recently read The Anubis Gates, a sci-fi/fantasy/time-travel book by Tim Powers involving an English professor specializing in Romantic poets being brought as a tour guide to 1810 to listen to a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge who gets stuck there (err, then).

There’s a lot of stuff I could say about this book, but what I want to focus on is, the romantic (lower-case “r”) element of it. One thing I’ve noticed in the various Powers books I’ve read (Declare, Three Days to Never, The Stress of Her Regard) is that Powers isn’t particularly good at doing believable female characters or believable love stories. He gets around this in The Anubis Gates by… well, basically never having the two characters who are fated to get married (time travel, remember?) interact, or have any romantic tension, and end the book by bringing them together and implying that yes, they do fall in love and get married.

This all reminds me in some ways of Aragorn and Arwen in the Lord of the Rings – that romance is always in the background, not the foreground. It’s one way of avoiding having to portray romantic love convincingly: just say it happens off-stage.

I think it works in LotR, though, and not in The Anubis Gates. Why? I think it’s because in LotR, it’s in the background because it has to be – it’s not a particularly important part of the plot, they’re already in love when the story starts, and so it doesn’t feel like cheating when we see them get married without seeing their falling in love. (And we do see that, kinda, in the appendices.) Also, Arwen isn’t that major a character, so Aragorn is in love with someone who’s already off-stage; it’s OK to have the romance be off-stage as well.

But in The Anubis Gates, it is a major part of the plot, is talked about over and over, and is the only reason at all for one of the main character’s presence (the girl really isn’t important except because she eventually marries the guy, but she’s present throughout the book). So the two characters involved are on-stage, but the romance itself is off-stage. And not that plausible. It’s like he set up the romance, then decided it would be too hard to write it actually happening, so he didn’t try.

Ah well. I guess the lesson is, be careful about when and how you portray romances in a story. If it’s not done carefully it can be an irritating distraction, not an addition to the story.

Book Review: Moby-Dick

I don’t mean for this blog to turn into just a bunch of book reviews, but I’ve been reading a lot lately, alright? I do hope to post soon about “copyright and the pirate bay trial”, and perhaps something philosophically oriented as well. But no promises.

In any case, even if I never posted book reviews, I would post one for Moby-Dick, because it has leaped to the front of my list of great books. That’s right – I think Moby-Dick is almost certainly the best novel ever written in the English language, and might even be the best thing ever written in the English language, period. But I’m not going to explore the question of whether it’s better than Shakespeare’s best.

I didn’t really expect this – I came into Lit Trad IV expecting to love Crime and Punishment, really like Go Down Moses, like Moby-Dick, and tolerate Mansfield Park. We haven’t read Go Down Moses yet, but so far all my predicts are right except for Moby-Dick. I don’t just like it; it’s simply amazing.

What makes it so great? A large part of it is simply its scope. It tries to be the modern epic, and succeeds admirably. Some people find the “encyclopedic” portions of the book boring; I thought they were really well done, and was surprised to find myself enjoying reading for ten pages of tiny text about “cetology” so I can learn about how nature can’t be fit in a box or “the whiteness of the whale” so I can learn about the terrifying sublime. And those parts are necessary to do what an epic is supposed to – explore all of human life, religion, politics, economics, social interactions, etc.

(Interlude: This business about the “modern epic” I actually find somewhat fascinating. As technology has progressed, the primary literary form has changed, and epics are normally done in the primary literary form – but there are only a few works in the history of mankind that deserve the term “epic”. In the days of oral traditions, we had oral epics, such as the Iliad and Odyssey, because verse is easier to remember. When writing came about but there wasn’t really any way to publish something, we got literary epics like the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy. When printing first came about but wasn’t that widespread, we got Shakespeare, none of whose plays are themselves an epic, but of whom I’m willing to say his entire corpus composes something “epic”. Milton’s Paradise Lost is an interesting abberation, but it still makes sense, since printing wasn’t that widespread at that point. When books become widespread, we get the novel, and Moby-Dick.)

But its scope is not all that makes Moby-Dick amazing, even if that’s the easiest thing to describe about it. There’s also the fact that its characters are so compelling – there’s only perhaps a dozen real characters, and by my count six major ones (Ishmael, Ahab, Quigqueg, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask) – but they all seem at the same time immensely real and perfect “psychic projections” of a single consciousness.

And then there’s just the quality of the prose. The entire book is worth reading just to get this monologue:

Ahab is forever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.

I’d also recommend the Demons & Wizards song “Beneath These Waves”, from their album Touched by the Crimson King. It’s actually about Moby-Dick. Don’t you love power metal bands singing about great literature? I’m just waiting for the first concept album about the Divine Comedy, or perhaps about the Bible itself (now that’s be interesting, if perhaps slightly blasphemous).

Book Review: No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men is one of my favorite movies. I recently read the book, by Cormac McCarthy, that the movie was based on. It was an interesting experience; normally one reads the book then watches the movie to compare the two, but more and more recently I’ve been watching the movie first then reading the book.

One result of this is I find it hard to look at the book as a book – I’m constantly comparing it to the movie, even though the book came first and stands on its own. Ah well.

Of course, there’s some things that a book can do that a movie can’t, and vice versa. The movie has cool fight scenes that don’t show up in the book; the book has a unique style of prose that works really well for what McCarthy is doing. It works for The Road, which I read a while ago, and it works for this. It would work horribly for, say, a romantic comedy. I’m not sure what to make of this.

But other than stuff like that, the book is really similar to the movie, which is another way of saying the movie does a good job of following the book. Every scene of the movie, pretty much, is from the book, and most scenes of the book show up in the movie. The only important exceptions that I can recall are a few of Sheriff Bell’s monologues and one of Anton Chigurh’s deterministic rants.

Of course, one of the reasons I loved the movie was the character of Anton Chigurh, so I found the slightly different way he was portrayed in the book somewhat interesting. Essentially, while in the movie he is portrayed as a straight determinist, he actually has something a bit more complex going on.

As far as I can tell, and I might be wrong, he clearly doesn’t really believe in free will, but he’s more of a fatalist than a scientific determinist. He thinks that your choices are determined by your personal characteristics, and so in any particular situation you can’t “change your mind”, but that what you do is still the result of who you are, and so you are still somewhat responsible for it. If, as we did in my Lit Trad III course, we look at things in personhood in terms of moira, ethos, and persona, Chigurh believes in only moira – but he still believes in personhood. He’d more of an ancient Greek fatalist than anything else, really.

So, NCfOM is well written, interesting, does some things the movie doesn’t… is it better than the movie? I honestly have a hard time saying it is. Each can do different things, but I don’t want to say the novel is per se a better narrative medium than the film, and it’s a damn good movie. And I’m not sure that what McCarthy is doing with the novel-specific aspects of his work – the prose style, the narratorial asides, etc – are important enough, that they manage things the movie simply could not. A book like Moby Dick would not work at all as a movie. Something like NCfOM, however, works nicely. And there is a power movies have that books do not – though vice versa, as well. So I don’t know.

In any case, both are good. I actually do think it’s worth it to both read the book and watch the movie. If you can only do one… watch the movie, because there are better books out there, but there’s not that many better movies out there. But do try to read some Cormac McCarthy at some point. He’s quickly turning into one of my favorite modern authors.

Book Review: The Road

Again, over spring break I got a lot of reading done; another one of the books I read was The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It’s about a father and son trying to survive in post-apocalyptic America (it’s set about eight years after the apocalyptic event, which was presumably nuclear war but it’s never explicitly stated).

Now, this was a serious apocalypse – almost all species are extinct, there’s almost no food (they feed off of cans of food they find in abandoned grocery stores for the most part), and almost everyone is dead – they encounter very few people in the course of their several months of wandering. The world has no future. There is no hope. And that’s the main subject of the book – theological hope, and whether it’s justified in a time when there is absolutely no hope for the world.

One of the immediately noticeable things about any book by McCarthy (I’ve also read All the Pretty Horses, a quite good book with very different subject matter) is his style. It’s very minimalistic; no quotation marks, no long sentences, very matter of fact. It can get irritating at times, when it seems over-used or forced, but for most of The Road I thought it fit perfectly. It conveys amazingly well the feeling that what is happening is inevitable, that there’s no way the man or his son could somehow better their situation, that there is any escape; this is how the world is. It’s fruitless to hope for anything else.

There’s no hope for the world, anyway. And so the question becomes, what of theological hope? There are extended discussions in the book between the man and his son in which the son is talking about God as if he believed in him, while the man is thinking to himself about how God does not exist – but he tries to keep alive in his son this belief in God. It is as if he wished he could believe in God, but cannot bring himself to, because if something like this apocalypse were allowed to happen, God could not exist.

This is just an extreme version of the problem of evil, of course. So we’re back to theodicy. So, what is McCarthy’s theodicy? It’s hard to say. He does a really good job of setting up the world as hopeless – but then, at the end… well, spoilers are perhaps inevitable: the kid survives and is adopted by a family and the grandmother begins telling him about God. Is this cheating? Has McCarthy just avoided the problem, giving us a Deus ex Machina ending where he says “oh wait, there actually is hope, never mind about all this theodicy stuff, ignore what i said about the world being completely without hope”? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.

The last passage in the book, after all, is not of the child being catechized. It pans out, to a broader view.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing that could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Now, this is a weird passage, hard to understand…  but I think part of what it’s saying is that the world is fallen; it is fallen because of man; the evil in the world is because of man; but this evil does not drown out the beauty of nature, God’s creation; in the end, there is theological hope because creation is good, God is good, and even though man is fallen and brings himself to a place where there is no hope, it is possible for him to get out if it, if not in this life then in the next.

Obviously I’m reading a lot into this. I’m not sure it’s all actually there to be read into it. I’m not sure if McCarthy’s a Christian or even a theist. But… I do think something at least somewhat like the above can be found in the book. Which in the end is why I don’t think the ending is a deus ex machina, and why I think the book is certainly worth reading, rather than just being a somewhat interesting exercise in depressing speculative fiction.

In the end, then: it’s worth reading, and it’s certainly a quick read. It’s a very good book, and the only reason it’s not a great book or a classic is there’s just not enough there; it doesn’t attempt enough to be great. But what it does do, it does very well. And it’s a very good exploration of theodicy, which we don’t get enough, I think (except from people who think that the problem of evil proves God doesn’t exist, which I’d vehemently argue it does not).

Book/Movie Review: Watchmen

(I don’t mean to turn this into just a bunch of reviews of everything I see and read, but I’ve done a lot of seeing and reading over Spring Break so far and so that’s what’s on my mind. Bear with me.)

So, I knew very little about Watchmen before last Saturday. I’d picked up the graphic novel about a year ago and read the first chapter, but gotten no further (I have a bad habit of starting books that I don’t own and can’t borrow). Thus I saw the movie before I read the book. I really liked the movie, though, and so decided to read the book. I started it yesterday around 2PM and finished it yesterday around… well, more like today, around 2AM.

Strangely, I actually preferred the movie in a lot of ways. I think part of this is related to the effect I described in my Earthsea book review about order-of-reading/order-of-viewing: if you read the derivative before the original, the original will seem derivative when you do read it. But there are actually several things I think the movie did better:

(SPOILER WARNING – SKIP TO THE END OF THE BLOCK QUOTE TO AVOID)

Firstly, the change of Ozymandias’ scheme from exploding a giant squid-creature to just blowing up NY with a Dr. Manhattan-imitation bomb was a good move, aesthetically. It simplified things where previously they were unnecessarily complicated. Also, I somehow doubt Ozy’s original plot would work – if it’s just a single alien accidentally teleporting into NY and dying on arrival, would that really unite mankind and stop the Cold War? But if it’s Dr. Manhattan doing it and he clearly did it on purpose, it would, because it poses an ongoing threat.

Secondly, a lot of the most memorable lines from the movie don’t actually appear in the graphic novel. Dr. Manhattan’s response to the question about the doomsday clock, for example – “It’s as nourishing to the intellect as a picture of oxygen is to a drowning man”.

Finally and in a sense least importantly, I wasn’t a huge fan of the art of the graphic novel. I got used to it after a while, but I didn’t like how everything was so ugly… all the women, especially, were really unattractive. Maybe that was part of the point (though I can’t see what “point” that could have – if the Silk Spectre is supposedly a model by day and a superhero by night, shouldn’t she be attractive rather than weird-looking?), but I didn’t really like it. And it wasn’t just them, it was a lot of the stuff – the blood and tears, for example. They looked stupid. I think I just don’t like a lot of the conventions of the comic book art style.

This isn’t to say the book was in all ways worse than the movie… firstly, I agree that a lot of the greatness of the graphic novel couldn’t be re-enacted on-screen, and I can recognize that greatness. There’s a lot you can do with the graphic novel form you just can’t do with a movie. There were also many things better about the book:

Firstly, things like the chapter “Fearful Symmetry” you just can’t do in a movie. That was really cool. Or the way you can have the dialogue or narration about one event but have the panel itself be a picture of something else, drawing a contrast between the two; it’s hard to do that in a movie. Or all the different storylines, and having more detailed backstories for the characters… there’s just more you can do in a graphic novel, in a lot of ways.

Secondly, though I prefer the movie ending in a lot of ways, I think the final scene between Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan in the book was interesting and should have been kept. It makes you realize that Ozy’s plot to “save humanity” was, well… idealistic, and didn’t work, in the end. It might have good results in the short term, or even the long term, but it was not mankind’s salvation. And it did not justify what Ozymandias did.

Finally, the sex scenes were much more bearable in the book. They were just pointless, gratuitous sex in the movie, and way too long. This is something the director could have avoided easily but didn’t.

(END SPOILERS)

Now, all these complaints about book and movie aside – both were fascinating, and well worth reading/watching. The most interesting part, I think, is the fascinating dichotomy they present between Rorschach’s moral absolutism and the “bad guy”’s (name withheld because we’re out of the spoiler zone) pragmatism. And they don’t really side with either one.

Personally, I have to side with Rorschach. What does Rorschach’s view entail? Well, it means a certain way of interpreting the message of the movie and graphic novel, and so I’ll just present that interpretation.

Are they nihilistic? Yes, somewhat, but it is a kind of nihilism I can accept, because (when tempered with Christianity – not that they’re pro-God – interestingly, the movie is actually less atheistic than the graphic novel) it is basically what I believe. Do they conclude the world itself is meaningless? Only, I think, insofar as we have to come to the conclusion that (without God) the world is meaningless.

And do they say the world is hopeless? I think they come to the conclusion a lot of fiction comes to, and which I partially agree with – generally speaking, this world is hopeless (until God comes again and brings the New Heaven and New Earth), but that doesn’t mean we give up hope.

Nor does it mean we give up our principles, even if those principles do not bring us anywhere (in this world); as Rorschach says when told “We have to compromise” -

No. Not even in the face of Armageddon.

Never compromise.

Book Review: A Wizard of Earthsea

So I just finished A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula LeGuin. This is a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while that I finally borrowed from someone last week. I’m glad I read it; it’s well-done; but, well, it’s not all I was led to believe it would be.

As a work of mythopoeia, it is extremely well executed. The archipelago-rather-than-giant-continent aspect is well done and interesting. I really like how she does magic with Words, which represent Forms; very Aristotelian. This was probably my favorite part of the book. Also, there were never really any parts where I said, “wait, whaaa…?” and immersion was broken. All of these are good.

As a story, it’s interesting, but not inspired. The twist at the end – that the name of Ged’s shadow is “Ged”, and they are really the same – was somewhat predictable. After all, it couldn’t just be something random – it had to be something that appeared earlier in the story, or it doesn’t feel real (it’s like Chekhov’s gun rule, but reversed – you have to show the gun in act one before you can have it go off in act three), and having it named “Ged” makes more sense than any other possibility. It does have some interesting philosophical implications about life and death and accepting mortality. But other than that the story was basically “let’s wander around Earthsea and see as many islands as we can in a string of vaguely connected adventuers”, each of which was interesting but not extremely so.

The biggest problem, I think, is that Ged isn’t that interesting a character; he’s your standard intelligent, proud, teenager who is going on a quest to learn about himself and the nature of the world. I felt I could predict exactly what he could do in every situation he was in. Of course he would decide to go to Roke rather than remain with Ogion, of course he would accept Jasper’s challenge and bad things would come of it, of course he would almost be seduced by lady on Osskil but not be (and the fact that that Lady was the same as the little girl was predictable too), etc etc… being able to predict to a certain extent a character will do is necessary, of course, otherwise he’s just acting randomly and isn’t believable as a person. But if he always does what you expect he and any other intelligent, proud teenager would do in his situation then he becomes too generic. He becomes just a vehicle for exploring the physics and metaphysics of the world of Earthsea. I’m not opposed to that, per se, but it makes for what is only a good story, not a great story.

Finally, the prose is competent, but not inspired the way, say, Gene Wolfe’s is, and there were very few parts where I stopped and said “that’s a really cool of describing that”. LeGuin isn’t really a wizard with words.

Of course, in saying that A Wizard of Earthsea is only decent, not great, fantasy, I’m ignoring the fact that it came out in 1968. I think it’s comparable in quality with something like Sabriel, but Sabriel was written in the 90’s, nearly thirty years later. Clearly Garth Nix owes a lot to LeGuin’s work. And perhaps part of the reason I wasn’t hugely impressed with the book was that so much more recent fantasy was directly inspired by it – I could understand people who read the Lord of the Rings after reading more recent works of high fantasy having the same reaction. Not seeing how trailblazing these books were because we’re already at the end of the trail, and all that.

Book Review: Frankenstein

So, I recently read Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Because, you know, it’s a classic of speculative fiction, was instrumental in development of the archetypal “mad scientist” character, was one of the first books to bring up the issue of science creating life and whether that’s morally acceptable or not… might be worth reading, right?

Wrong.

Frankenstein was one of the most disappointing “classics” of speculative fiction I have ever read.

I mean, it really has nothing going for it except the basic premise. Granted, that premise (which everyone knows) is well worth contemplating, but honestly you get a better sense of it from any horror movie with a Dr. Frankenstein-like character and a Frankenstein’s Monster than from this book.

The basic problem is that Mary Shelley evaluates the entire situation in terms of emotion, not morality, and has absolutely no grasp of how emotions actually work. I mean, really – none of the characters are believable. They’re all extremely stylized over-emoting self-absorbed idiots. Which is somewhat of a problem in a book mainly about human emotion (she devotes almost no attention to the actual scientific or moral issues at hand). It’s a nightmare, but not in a good way; it’s like a parody of English Romanticism.

Just do yourself a favor and watch a Frankenstein movie instead…

Three Days to Never

First of all; I leave for Rome in three days (Wednesday morning, to be precise). But that’s not what this post is about.

No, I’m talking about the book Three Days to Never, by Tim Powers.

In my recent post about Doctor Who, I talked about how that show, while lacking somewhat in plot, manages to have interesting characters, and, for all its inconsistencies, and interesting secondary world. The works of Tim Powers seem to me to have the opposite strengths and weaknesses; he has interesting plots, and does a quite good job with the world-building, but his characters are poorly done.

So far I have read Declare, about spies during WWII and the Cold War who are trying to find a second Ark built by Djinn who are trying to escape, and Three Days to Never, about how Einstein actually discovered time travel and his grandson/great-grand-daughter need the help of the Mossad to stop that technology from falling into the wrong hands.

In both of these, Powers takes actual historical facts – none of his books, supposedly, directly contradict established history – and weaves them into an alternate universe that is a mix of sci-fi and fantasy. For example, the 1973 Israeli strike against Iraqi military facilities was not intended to destroy WMDs, but rather to destroy this time travel machine. And there are demons who live in 5-dimensional space who are guiding the progress of the evil forces trying to get their hands on this time travel technology. And so on. And he has just the right amount of scientific explanation and correspondence with reality to make this stuff at least somewhat believable. It’s quite impressive, really. (It’s also interesting how Powers is a practicing Catholic and the worlds he creates are always pretty much consistent with the Catholic worldview.)

But, well, Powers can’t portray characters effectively. There are romances in both of these books, and neither of them are really believable. They both follow the formula of “flawed heroine who has enough good in her to redeem and be redeemed by the hero”. They even both have the female character start out working for the bad guys but switch over to the good guys. And neither of them are really sympathetic. He has problems with the other characters too – they seem cliche, for the most part – though his main problems are with the females.

Still, they’re enjoyable books. If nothing else, read them for his theories about the truth behind Djinn, ankhs, swastikas, the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Mossad.

—-

And a small digression about Harry Potter. As I mentioned above, it seems possible to look at fantasy fiction writing as having three main categories – the characters, the plot, and the mythopoeia (this is obviously ignoring the quality of the prose, but I’m OK with that). Now, Harry Potter has good plot, and decently laid out characters (though I dislike most of them) – but horrible mythopoeia. Truly horrible. It’s not just that J.K. Rowling is bad at it  – it’s that she doesn’t care about having it make sense, at all. She prefers throwaway gags (like all of the silly character names and titles of the magical textbooks) to building a world that is actually somewhat convincing. This is my main complaint with her, and it is a huge one. She ends up with a fantasy world that no one would ever believe existed or could exist.

Now, Doctor Who isn’t coherent either, but this is less of a problem because Doctor Who is intentionally absurd – one of the main messages of the show is that the universe is much more complicated than we know, and we will never understand all of it, so it makes sense for the world to be somewhat chaotic and incoherent – while Harry Potter has a serious, straightforward plot. There’s no excuse for an absurd fantasy world. It’s as if Rawling just said “well, it’s magical, so it doesn’t have to make sense!” and went from there.