Lee
I was kindly sent a copy of this book by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
J. Victoria Michael's debut novel is a light fantasy tale with a light romance and a lightly-developed magic system. It's light in many ways, right down to the limited displays of violence despite its pseudo-medieval setting, and sex scenes that don't linger too much on the fleshy details.
The story is about a young mother, Irenya, who lives in Melbourne Australia and suffers from panic attacks. She suddenly finds herself transported to another realm, one that was recently ravaged by war. She's an unwelcome visitor at first and treated with suspicion, but over time she earns the trust of the nobility among who she lives.
Despite the miracle of the magical world around her, Irenya's overriding desire is to return home to her husband and infant son, but it's a desire that remains unfulfilled as she struggles to find a way back. I found Irenya's persistent need to leave the realm of Dar Orien pretty distracting in the early parts of the book, especially given that we barely meet her family so it's hard to feel too concerned about her separation from them. As the story progressed I looked forward to learning more about the world outside the Imperial estate, but I never get a clear picture of it - partly, I think, because nearly everything is narrated from Irenya's viewpoint and she shows limited curiosity about things other than her own concerns and desires, especially in the early parts of the book.
Ultimately this is probably not the sort of thing that sustains my interest enough to persevere with the subsequent books in the series, but at the same time it's hard to dislike because it doesn't overreach. It doesn't do anything new, but for fans of light fantasy romance keen to support new voices in the genre, I suggest you give it a go.
Short, simple, and essential for those who manage (and those who are being managed)
A concise but useful book that helped me to conceptualise the struggles I was experiencing with my boss at work. I liked the simple structure, and the author's gift for condensing what must have been a lot of research into simple suggestions. There's nothing revolutionary here, but it's sensible and easy to follow.
This book is composed of brief biographies of six women who remain unknown today despite the significant contributions they made to women's rights, and as the title implies they were Welsh women (even they lived most of their lives outside the country). One of them was the first Welsh woman to become a Labour MP (Edith Picton-Turberville), another was the woman who held the most directorships in the UK in the 1920s and was the first female president of the Institute of Directors (Lady Rhondda), and another was the first female British doctor to gain in her MD in Europe (Frances Hoggan).
Angela John approaches each subject in different ways, sometimes adopting a familial focus (as in the case of the remarkable Rhys sisters), or in other cases narrowing the focus onto a moment or even a year in a life (Frances Hoggan and Lady Rhondda, respectively). This makes for an engaging approach to the subjects, although some personalities shine through more vividly than others: it's clear that Picton-Turberville was a force of nature, but the Rhys sisters remain as much of an enigma to the reader as they did to their friends.
Angela John is an academic, but this isn't a book merely for specialists: it is instead an accessible work that ought to be read by anyone with an interest in the history of Wales and/or the history of equality.
When you're writing a vampire tale it can be difficult to sustain a reader's interest in the human characters - after all, absent fathers and ageing alcoholics don't sound quite as exciting as a blood-sucking undead creature of the night with superhuman strength. But the thing is, John Ajvide Lindqvist has populated his contemporary vampire tale Let the Right One In with several ordinary people struggling with ordinary problems, and it succeeds because of these people and not in spite of them.Of course that's partly true of another famous contemporary adult vampire tale, [b:'Salem's Lot 11590 ‘Salem's Lot Stephen King https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327891565l/11590.SY75.jpg 3048937], but what makes Let the Right One In superior to Stephen King's sophomore novel is that the vampire in Lindqvist's book is both more unsettling and far more interesting than the more traditional vampire menacing ‘Salem's Lot.Like in [b:'Salem's Lot 11590 ‘Salem's Lot Stephen King https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327891565l/11590.SY75.jpg 3048937], the location of Let the Right One In is as important as the characters who inhabit it. In fact, the preface is titled “The Location: Blackberg”, and proceeds to describe a place without a past. Lindqvist writes: “You were beyond the grasp of the mysteries of the past; there wasn't even a church. Nine thousand inhabitants and no church.”Although the book is set in Norway in the early 1980s, its somewhat soulless suburban environment is one to which many readers can relate, and it's into this hollowed-out estate that Eli and Håkan move their few belongings and carry out what is at first an anonymous existence. Eli looks about the same age as 12 year-old neighbour, Oskar, and the two form a friendship of sorts as they get to know each other in the desolate spaces around their apartment block. Oskar is being bullied at school but finds an inner strength through Eli, and moves from play-acting violent revenge scenarios to fighting back for real.Eli, like Oskar, is different. Eli uses idiosyncratic phrases, seems unaffected by the freezing conditions outside, and moves with an impossible agility. Oskar's realisation that his new friend is a vampire comes gradually, and this isn't the only hidden identity Eli reveals which challenges Oskar. This is one of the strengths of the book, because as Oskar struggles to accept Eli in light of new revelations he's also questioning his own identity in relation to his parents and his oppressors at school.Beyond these two central protagonists, Lindqvist has established a constellation of supporting characters. Håkan is arguably the closest thing the book has to an antagonist, first as Eli's ineffective provider in the earlier parts of the book whose lustful thoughts about boys paint him as equal parts pathetic and predatory, and later as something much more grotesque in form. The way that Eli is humanised means that the true horror of the book is to be found in Håkan, particularly in a sequence towards the end that takes place in the confines of a dark cellar that was unsurprisingly not used in the 2008 film adaptation - in fact, the film chooses to excise Håkan entirely before he degenerates into what the book has in store for him.And then there are the neighbourhood drunks, although to call them that is to do a disservice to a group of individuals Lindqvist neither dismisses nor glorifies. Lacke, Virginia, and their social circle represent a group of characters I rarely read about in works of popular fiction: older, limited financially, ostracised from mainstream society, and whose loyalties to each other are questionable at times. They're not strictly sympathetic because they're not entirely likeable, but we spend a lot of time with them in this book and we come to understand them via the shame and anger that paradoxically binds this group and alienates them from one another.This is a slight spoiler, but for those of you familiar with Bram Stoker's [b:Dracula 17245 Dracula Bram Stoker https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387151694l/17245.SY75.jpg 3165724], Virginia plays the role of Lucy Westerna here. Like Lucy, Virginia is forced to come to terms with an ailment that affects her body and her mind, and also like Lucy she's cared for by those who mean well but can do little to treat her condition, including her off-and-on lover. The comparisons end there: unlike Lucy, Virginia is an older, working-class woman and instead of enduring her new existence she reclaims a sense of agency.The story of Lacke, Virginia, and the others at first seems like a subplot which helps to contextualise the central narrative without meaningfully intersecting it, but Lindqvist cleverly pulls all the narrative threads together as the book climaxes and the true horror is unleashed. By that point we're fully immersed in the reasons why a penniless drunk feels compelled to murder a child, and that immersion in the complex psychology of these characters leaves us conflicted about who we're rooting for in the end - with the exception of Håkan, of course. Nobody's rooting for Håkan.Let the Right One In is a dark and dense work that is far more than your typical vampire novel. I'm quoting from its Wikipedia page here, but it usefully lists many of themes explored in this book: “existential anxiety, social isolation, fatherlessness, divorce, alcoholism, school bullying, pedophilia, genital mutilation, self-mutilation, and murder.” To that list I would add gender identity, trauma, and obsession, but there's so much going on beneath the surface that it's hard to list all of the themes.The danger in describing it that way is that the book sounds less of a page-turner than it actually is, but let me assure you that you can enjoy Let the Right One In purely as a Scandanavian horror with fleshed-out characters and gross-out moments. If you want something a bit more though then it has that too, and I wouldn't hesitate to describe it as the best vampire novel I've read and even the best horror novel I've read to date.If you've seen the film then don't think there's no value in reading the book because there is - the horror is darker, the characters are richer, and the experience is unforgettable. And if you haven't seen the film then go check it out too, but just don't pass on the opportunity to read the source material - trust me, you won't regret it.
The inner life of a primate with crippling social anxiety is at turns comical and mortifying. Meeting people is easy, except for those for whom it's the worst thing imaginable.
Rufus endures the everyday horrors of work life by avoiding all but the most essential social encounters, and self-medicates on alcohol when at home. Even attempting to take his own life is fraught with anxiety as he faces the judgemental glare of a seagull. It's ultimately through self-expression, and the external validation that comes through sharing his experiences, that gives some meaning to Rufus's existence.
For social anxiety sufferers, myself included, this is a rare example of a work that honestly conveys what it's like to live in fear of what should be one of life's great pleasures - getting to know other human beings. It was, in any case, a pleasure to get to know Rufus.
Martin Rodoreda's impressive debut novel is set in a dystopian future where the climate catastrophe has seemingly wiped out most of the human population, and where survivors huddle inside a protective dome built around the remains of Sydney. Beyond the Dome is an urban wasteland inhabited by so-called mutes, savage relics of humankind who prey on those brave enough (or desperate enough) to scavenge for profitable metals from the collapsed structures.
Silver is the name of the novel's likeable and determined protagonist, left to die in the wastelands by her crew at the story's outset. As she struggles to return to the Dome, she happens upon an old journal - one that, initially unbeknownst to her, holds the key to society's salvation. The contents of this journal are interspersed throughout the main plot, giving us a glimpse into a comfortingly mundane past before the inevitable environmental apocalypse swept all away before it. In the meantime though, Silver has to contend with dangerous foes in her former crew, as well as the military apparatus of the Dome's autocratic ruler, Silmac, the scion of a powerful family intent on maintaining his power at any cost.
Like any work of fiction that imagines what the world looks like if the current climate catastrophe is left unaddressed, Salvage presents a dystopia that is credible enough to discomfort the reader straight away. The plot is well-paced and the writing is solid, if sometimes a little heavy on detail, at one point describing a man as “standing only one hundred and sixty-five centimetres tall” in a weirdly specific turn of phrase. I came to care about the characters enough to worry about their fate during the bloody denouement though, and I thought their relationships and rivalries were effectively portrayed.
I was given this book for free by its publishers, Odyssey Books, and I approached the book with a degree of scepticism. I'm delighted to say, however, that my scepticism was unfounded, and even though Rodoreda isn't breaking any new ground with this work, he's still written a thrilling dystopian yarn populated with engaging characters and set in a world that, frighteningly, might one day turn out to be not so far removed from where chronic climate denialism leads us.
Ready Player One is an exercise in unrelenting fandom, penned by a man who knows Kobayashi Maru isn't the name of a sushi dish, and that the hedgehog's dilemma is as important to mecha anime as it is to early-nineteenth-century German philosophy. In short, Ernest Cline is a nerd's nerd, but his debut novel does more than prove his nerd credentials.
Set in 2044, Ready Player One concerns the adventures of Wade, an orphaned teenager living with a domineering aunt and her boyfriend in the “stacks” – modern-day travel trailers literally stacked on top of each other. Wade, like most people in a world ruined by hopeless economic conditions and scarce resources, spends most of his time in the OASIS, essentially an amalgamation of contemporary Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs, or MMOs) accessed through futuristic technology such as haptic gloves and immersive visors. The OASIS was created in part by James Halliday, upon whose death a video emerged inviting players in OASIS to search for three keys that would give them access to his vast fortune and total control over the OASIS. Those hunting for the keys become known as gunters, experts in the kind of 1980s pop culture Halliday adored in order to decipher his clues, and Wade is one of the best. He's so good, in fact, that he's the first gunter to obtain Halliday's first key, and so begins an adventure that pits him against sinister forces who covet Halliday's fortunes and resources for their own nefarious ends.
The plot, while uncomplicated (at least to anyone with a passing familiarity with gaming culture and/or cyberpunk), zips along and for the most part doesn't stumble. The weighty exposition at the start does feel somewhat like an overlong training simulation you see in shooter games, and the ending is less spectacular than it might have been, but overall Cline effectively switches between styles and situations that could overwhelm a reader if handled by an author less familiar with and less devoted to the material he borrows from.
Overall this is a readable book that will appeal more to those old enough now to remember the eighties, but even to a younger generation (me included) Ready Player One is a cool and concise yarn that pulls off a neat trick. I'm not so sure there's enough of interest here for a film though, but that hasn't stopped a major studio from buying the rights to it anyway. Oh well...
Alcoholism, hypochondria, autism, avarice, promiscuity, and a self-destructive fixation with the past: these are the last days of the Compsons, aristocrats of the Old South. Jason III and Caroline and their children, Quentin, Candace (Caddy), Jason IV, and Benjamin (Benjy).
It's hard to write about such a brilliant book that was, surely, such a hard book to write so brilliantly. William Faulkner chronicles a slow decline in a fractured language, where thoughts are curtailed and memories spill over. Benjy knows nothing of time, just as he knows nothing of right and wrong, of motivation and regret and anything that might constitute a kind of ideology; he knows fire and scent, the touch of flowers and the movements on the pasture, and that Caddy smelled like trees. Quentin's time has already expired, and he races back toward it with a kind of pathetic desperation, haunted by what he didn't do until he collapses under the knowledge that he can do no more. Jason's time has yet to come, or has come and gone, but anyway he prepares for his moment with malice and greed and an unscrupulous sense of privilege. Dilsey endured.
Published in the months before the stock market imploded, The Sound and the Fury gained wider public attention following the success of Faulkner's sixth novel, Sanctuary. By that time, the world was in the midst of a global economic depression. But it is not, of course, a metaphor for economic hardship – it didn't predict the Great Depression, and anyway it comments very little on the Compson's declining economic fortunes. When Miss Quentin finally claims the money her uncle has been embezzling from her for so long and vanishes forever, it is by no means the act that seals the family's fate. Faulkner instead conveys with agonised precision the neglect and self-interests that tear the family apart, and arrives at the financial ruin with a kind of tired inevitability. Despite Jason's financial acumen, whatever has been lost cannot be restored with a few thousand dollars – the last generation of Compson men, damaged and impotent, were simply unwilling or unable to perpetuate whatever legacy was left to them.
There is no rage against the dying of the light here. The Shakespearean borrowing is horribly apt: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Benjy's idiocy, of course, allows for the purest observational passages, where the wreckage of Caddy's behaviour is noted with clinical detachment, and responded to with wordless noises. It signifies nothing because Benjy cannot signify anything, and the world signifies nothing to him: it is all sound and fury. On reading this work a second time, I'm left with the same impression as the first time, that this is the product of a literary genius fully entitled to adopt a line from another literary genius who lived three centuries before him. Both of them knew something of the pointing and the horror.
It's a line at the end of the penultimate part of this book that really says it all for me: “When I got better I realized what a rat he was.” That's Sal Paradise, the book's narrator (a pseudonym for the author, Jack Kerouac). He's referring in that line to Dean Moriarty (another pseudonym, for Neal Cassady), his untamed travelling companion who has just abandoned the dysentery-afflicted Sal in Mexico City. That act epitomises the values and attitudes of most of the men and women who inhabit this universe: sick friends are abandoned, goods and vehicles are casually stolen, and marriages are repeatedly broken. On the Road has an infectious energy, embodied most of all by Moriarty, but it's a not a book to fall in love with because it doesn't have room for love – unless that love is fast, fleeting, and makes no demands (which, of course, is everything that love isn't).
But it did help popularise a counter-cultural movement that had already blossomed by the time of the book's publication in 1957 – Kerouac was, in fact, chronicling experiences that had occurred a decade earlier. Kerouac and the Beat Generation, a group of young writers who met in New York City and later formed a community in San Francisco, resembled in some ways the loose affiliation of post-WWI writers of the Lost Generation, but unlike them Kerouac and his friends hadn't participated in the most recently-fought war themselves (William S. Burroughs had enlisted in the U.S. Army, but never saw any action). Some of them had grown up during the Depression and had friends and family who had fought and died in Europe, but for the most part they were still in education when the Nazis were being fought. The ineffable shell shock that creeps through in the works of Fitzgerald and Hemingway has no place in the novels of Kerouac and the poetry of Ginsberg because they weren't thrust into difficult circumstances – they created their own kind of suffering at home.
As a reader newly introduced to Kerouac's writing, it is a kind of suffering that strikes me most about this book. Paradise, Moriarty, Ed Dunkel, and others each find women devoted to them and work opportunities come along easily enough, but none of it satisfies them. Instead, they endure a cycle of suffering on the road – New York to Frisco, Frisco to New York, Denver to Mexico City and back – and splutter nonsense about time and experience along the way. It's hard to sympathise with them, let alone admire what they're doing. They are unfaithful, dangerous, and dishonest men (it's mostly men – the women are usually left holding babies somewhere else). That the men behind the two central characters here, Cassady and Kerouac himself, died, respectively, of drugs and drink, isn't poetic so much as pitiable.
But I digress, and whatever I think of these personalities as filtered through Kerouac's prose can only amount to an ill-informed judgement anyway. So what I'm left with is a compulsive read centred on voyages across a young continent, complete with sex, drugs, jazz, and crime. It's a book best read when you're on the move, and the movement and noise of Kerouac's tale of lost, roaming souls is what pulls the reader in despite the petulant sins of his compatriots. On the Road is ultimately a book about life, its speed and its sorrows and the yearning in all of us – realised or not – for new experiences in new places.
It's difficult to think of something to say about Lord of the Flies. Despite the somewhat nihilistic vision it presents, despite the horrendous violence which emerges in the second half of the book, it simply doesn't affect me in the way previous books read during the course of this undertaking have. It also doesn't help that I'm writing this a full two weeks after finishing the novel, but when I tried to compose my response then I had the same problem.
There's a simple message at its heart: given enough isolation and enough fear, a man will become irrational and violent. It's not a new thought now, just as it wasn't in the post-war England where William Golding mused upon it. The prose is not challenging either, although the more psychedelic passages from Simon's perspective are unusual (particularly in his encounter with the eponymous Lord of the Flies). There's a sense of inevitability about the whole thing, not merely because the arc of the story is so well-known, but because everything transpires precisely as we expect it to: the calm orator is challenged by a more physically aggressive Alpha male, which leads to a split in society and ends with the majority choosing easy savagery over organised society.
Does this inevitability make the book dull? Not at all – it's well-written and the transition from innocence to barbarity is subtle and gradual, where the implications of half-finished sentences or the symbolism of mundane objects fuel that transition. And the final scene, of an embarrassed adult turning away from wild children, is a remarkable moment where the totality of mankind's cruelty is unveiled in all its pettiness.
Still, Lord of the Flies left me feeling a strange kind of numbness. There's no ambiguity here, no mystery, no middle ground, just a clearly-expressed statement about the hopelessness of the human condition. It's that condition for which Ralph presumably weeps at the end, but for the rest of us there's only a weary acknowledgement of what we are at our worst when we're denied (or deny) what we could be at our very best. Golding tells us everything we need to know about that, and I genuinely feel like there's nothing more I can add, nor care to.
In the introduction to my edition of The Great Gatsby, it is remarked that Fitzgerald's masterpiece, like Ernest Hemingway's first significant work, The Sun Also Rises, published a year later in 1926, is a “quintessentially post-World War I novel in which the events of the 1920s are perceived as direct outgrowths of changes in the national sensibility following the Armistice in 1918.” Be that as it may, in my mind Gatsby shares a closer association with J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, another slim volume focused on a young man fighting to hold onto something irrecoverably lost. In Gatsby's case that something is the unrealisable hope embodied in Daisy, but where Holden recognises with furious disapproval the futility of his desire for a dream of childhood, Gatsby by contrast remains defiant even in defeat. Whose tragedy is the greatest then – Holden's anxious acceptance among the living, or Gatsby's stubborn determination even in the moments before his death?
Something Fitzgerald's work certainly shares with Hemingway's is the sense of a protagonist drifting in a state of shell shock, and his search for healing in a woman who cannot provide it either because of his physical impairment or a poor sense of timing. Gatsby is painfully out of time even before George Wilson pulls the trigger, but in failing or refusing to understand the passing of an impossible dream he preserves at least something of the pre-War innocence, even if his wealth is founded on the corruption of Prohibition.
Daisy, by contrast, signals her submission to the trappings of that corruption in her marriage to Tom, the Yale-educated, white supremacist “old money”of East Egg. In encountering Gatsby, she is faced with a terrible reminder of the kind of purer devotion he once offered, and when she chooses Tom a second time after the terrible events following the Plaza Hotel dénouement it is worryingly easy to condemn her. It's perhaps fairer to judge Daisy in light of what Fitzgerald – or rather Nick, the narrator who I've so far failed to mention – doesn't accentuate. Here is a woman asked to wait for a lover who never shows up (until it's too late), driven into wedlock by the pressures of a patriarchal society, and then bound to an unfaithful husband who nevertheless receives some undeserving love from her. Gatsby yearns to relive the past, but Daisy is trapped in her present circumstances, and that makes her not flattered but distraught by her old flame's devotion.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” So concludes Nick's tale. It is an interesting fact that in each of the three novels I have assessed so far, the damning hold of the past on the present is a recurring theme and one I fully expect to read about again. How do we reconcile what we've become with what we once hoped of becoming? Where did it falter, and how do we move on? Neither Atwood, Salinger, nor Fitzgerald provide solutions to this enduring crisis, but they do explore it with the enduring poetry only great writers can execute, and perhaps none more so than the paragon of the Jazz Age.
Every goddamn phoney in the world has had their say about Mr Salinger's book, which is funny when you think about it because it came out like a hundred years ago but everyone's still talking about it like they've got something new to say or something. I don't know, it depresses the hell out of me. I mean even the goddamn Onion wrote this funny piece after Mr Salinger died last year. What they did was, they phrased it so that it sounded like old Salinger would have written it, and it was certainly original and all, but it's too original, if you get my meaning, so everyone else is going to do the same goddamn thing.
Ahem.
First, an admission. I'm 26 years old and this is the first time I've read The Catcher in the Rye; it won't be the last. J. D. Salinger's mid-twentieth-century masterpiece communicates the exact thoughts of a disaffected teenager speaking directly from the heart at a time of spiritual and emotional disorientation. Time Magazine describes Holden's situation as “an agony of anhedonia that transcends the merely adolescent”, which Holden would have said is a pretty phoney way of putting it. Whichever way you put it though, the too-short time we spend with Salinger's riotous invention makes for irresistible reading, whose ultimate meaning lies somewhere between the asphyxiating hold of Holden's misanthropy and the poignancy of his familial bonds, particularly in relation to his little sister and dead brother.
We first encounter Holden Caulfeld watching a football game “way the hell up on top of Thomsen Hill”, or rather this is where we first encounter him in the story he's telling us. Because, in fact, Holden is speaking from elsewhere, from a place he was sent to following the events he's about to relate. He's been kicked out of school, so he visits his favourite teacher at home where he's told how life is a game and all that. This teacher, Mr Spencer, is unwell, and seeing him like that depresses the hell out of Holden. Then he goes back to his room and talks to Ackley, who cuts his toenails right over the carpet and that depresses the hell of Holden too. And then his friend Stradlater says he has a date with this girl who Holden has a soft spot for himself, but Stradlater asks him to write a composition for him while he's out. Holden writes it about his dead brother's baseball glove, which he's only ever told a couple of people about. Stradlater comes back and berates Holden's writing. They fight, and eventually Holden flees the school. “Sleep tight, ya morons!” he yells down the corridor, and then he's gone.
During the course of the following day or two, Holden drinks himself sick, has a close encounter with a prostitute in a cheap hotel, and gets beaten up, all the while describing these events with relentless profanity. Despite this, he's told more than once that's he very immature, something hurled at him in a distinctly pejorative sense. For Holden, immaturity is a gift: here's an adolescent looking forward to adulthood and seeing nothing but suffering and hypocrisy, whereas looking back to childhood he sees innocence and honesty. He gets kicked out of school after school not because he's rebelling against authority as such, but because he's disillusioned with the demands that boys should behave like men. Holden favours digression, but everyone else insists on getting to the point.
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one,” explains one adult. It's spoken like a revelation, but then only moments later the speaker is stroking Holden's hair while he sleeps and what was a revelation sounds just as phoney as everything else. Maturity, for Holden, is the acceptance of loss, but he won't accept anything until he's digressed a little first. Thank goodness he saw fit to relate that digression, even if, as he concludes, by telling anything to anybody you start missing everybody.
“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”
The Blind Assassin is a mystery and a tragedy. The tragedy lies in the very fact that it is a mystery at all – a mystery to Iris Chase, the narrator, and a mystery to we, the reader, complicit in Iris's crime by realising the tragedy too late. Swept along by rhetoric and reminiscence, we overlook human failings until the failure has exacted its bitter toll, so that in the end all that Iris is capable of is writing, and all that we can do is read.
So what is it like to read Atwood's tenth (and Booker-Prize-winning) novel? The first quarter of the book establishes the framework of the storytelling: one part that consists of news articles and chapters from a posthumously-published work of dubious authorship detailing the lives of a pair of doomed lovers, followed by a part in which Iris, now an old woman, reflects on the events leading up to the suicide of her sister Laura. As such, it jumps around a lot – through narrative devices and through time – and doesn't really settle down until close to the 200-page mark. It's a challenging opening segment, but once we're acquainted with the backdrop to the Chase family saga we begin to peer into the early lives of the Chase sisters – by far the most engaging parts of the book.
The dominant period covered by Iris's memoirs are the years following her arranged marriage to the wealthy industrialist Richard Griffen sometime in the mid-1930s. Griffen, together with his sister Winifred, plays the villain of the piece, but he's a figure never fully articulated by Iris – as she herself admits: “I've failed to convey Richard, in any rounded sense. He remains a cardboard cutout. I know that. I can't truly describe him, I can't get a precise focus: he's blurred, like the face in some wet, discarded newspaper.” Laura blames Richard for the death of her bankrupted father, whose body she finds whilst Iris is off honeymooning. Richard takes it upon himself to bring Laura under his care, and from there things only get worse.
What becomes clear at the end of the book – to us as much as it does to Iris – is that Richard has been raping Laura over a period of months since she came under his care. Meanwhile, his wife has been conducting an affair in secret with Alex Thomas, the man both she and Laura fell in love when they hid him from the authorities at an earlier time. Laura becomes pregnant with Richard's child, whilst Iris has Alex's – who she passes off as Richard's. Laura is declared unstable and sent off to the eerily-named BellaVista Clinic, where she forcibly undergoes an abortion followed by torture (presented as treatment) in an effort to convince her that she was never pregnant at all. With the help of the sisters' former housekeeper Reenie, Laura escapes the clinic, but a series of crushing revelations during a later meeting with her sister pushes her over the edge – literally, when she drives Iris's car off a bridge. Two years later a novel emerges – under the same name as Atwood's book itself – purportedly penned by Laura, detailing the love affair between a man on the run and a wealthy woman. The implications of it ruin Richard's political ambitions, and he soon turns up dead at the Chase family home.
It's no easy plot to summarise in a few lines, and the split-narrative device complicates things further. But that device is rewarding in the end, even if it's sometimes too clever for its own good, and certainly too clever to render the sorrow of Laura's brief existence as anything other than an observed phenomenon, not an experiential one. That's the problem here - Atwood's work has always seemed like a beautiful puzzle to me, ornamented with the detritus of the genre or period from which she draws, but which conveys its emotion through a prism of clever wording. It's something to admire, to learn from, but my enjoyment as a reader stems from my appreciation of her craft, not from the impact of her storytelling.
Despite this, The Blind Assassin tells a convincing story with the poetic and often witty language you'd expect from Atwood. It also offers a damning verdict on its narrator's complicity in her sister's death. When given the opportunity to assist in her father's business she is disinterested and incompetent, but unwilling to consider other forms of employment; when presented with an arranged marriage she is meekly compliant; whilst engaged in an affair she is self-pitying but savours the risks and pleasures; and when a grotesque crime is being committed right before her eyes she is oblivious to the point of guilt. Iris is married off to Richard as part of her father's last-ditch attempt to save his business, but it's an act that needn't have had occurred at all if she'd shown the same willingness to make her own way in life as Laura had. She claims to despise her marriage to her father's former business rival but delights in the sartorial benefits granted by his wealth, just as her repeated claims about fear of exposure to Alex are suspect when, in fact, she's receiving gifts of one kind from her husband and of another kind from her lover. Meanwhile, Richard subdues Laura by claiming to know Alex's whereabouts – a lie, apparently, but one that works and convinces Laura that her suffering is for a purpose.
Is any of what ultimately transpires Iris's fault for not reading the situation more clearly? If so, then we're also complicit in the crime by not reading the signs she missed before it was too late, and it is a credit to Atwood that she keeps them so well-hidden. Perhaps the question isn't even worth asking when the victim is beyond saving, but does that mean Iris is beyond saving too? She writes it all down before it's too late for her – her heart is failing - to get at a truth that came too late for Laura, but what for? When she admits the book attributed to Laura was in fact written by her it's explained as an act of revenge disguised as a memorial, so where does that leave the subsequent material now that everyone is either dead or absent? Iris's newspaper obituary hints that perhaps what we ultimately hold in our hands is a tome compiled by her granddaughter, and that act of compiling suggests some sort of reconciliation after the fact.
Stories, remembrance, redemption, betrayal – all told against a backdrop of early-twentieth-century history. Atwood has a penchant for profound one-liners too, passed off like afterthoughts: “We need the mammalian huddle: too much solitude is bad for the eyesight”, or: “They'd learned a genial contempt for their father, who couldn't read Latin, not even badly, as they did” are typical of her wordplay and humour, and they sustain interest in what is sometimes a laborious read. As the first entry in my great reading project, The Blind Assassin is a compelling if overly-crafted work, but I'm definitely looking forward to the vitality of The Catcher in the Rye, my next choice, as an antidote to Atwood's somewhat cold-blooded offering.
I suppose it's easier to criticise a work than it is to praise it, which is probably why the reaction to this instalment in George R R Martin's dark epic fantasy series was so much more vocal than to the previous three. Nevertheless, the backlash against the author is understandable (if unnecessary) once you've read A Feast for Crows - not merely for Martin's frustrating decision to split the perspectives in two (with the second half finally being released in July 2011), but also because, after the grandiose tragic brilliance of A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows ambles along, expanding the scope of the world whilst offering little in the way of action or resolution. In short, it's a well-written, if unsatisfying entry into a saga that previously moved with unfaltering confidence.
In A Feast for Crows, a land broken by war is populated by its broken survivors, but not much happens. Jaime broods over his brother's parting words to him, bickers with his sister, and then marches off to Riverrun - which, after a pointless detour, he takes without bloodshed. Martin has pulled off a remarkable achievement by transforming Jaime, who appeared to be the series's main antagonist in the first volume, into a sympathetic, even pitiful character by the end of this one, but his role in this book is marginal, even if his decision at the end marks a significant turning point in the saga's power relations.
Meanwhile, Cersei's scheming and unspoken hatreds in King's Landing are almost on the level of pantomime. She's as odious as her eldest son to be sure, and one can't help but revel in her humiliation at the end, but her villainy lacks the mystery of Melisandre, or the terror of Gregor Clegane and his men, yet in the absence of them she's all we have for a central antagonist in this book. I'm still uncertain about the root of Cersei's evil, and I don't think the prophecy she agonises over explains it well enough. If anything, her treatment as Robert's wife and the sudden removal of her father's dominant presence is the real trigger for what she undertakes here - but then, there's never any real suggestion that she was a better person before her wedding. More broadly, Cersei's chapters are simply exhausting to read - peppered with malice and spite, it's a perfect vision of inner hell which I hope we only experience from outside in future volumes.
Arya and Sansa don't get much space here, and again little happens to either. After the startling climax to Sansa's tale in A Storm of Swords, she now eases into a new identity in the Eyrie as Littlefinger's bastard daughter, learning how to play the game of thrones under the tutorship of its most cunning player. Similarly, Arya adopts a new identity across the Narrow Sea, training to be an assassin under the Faceless Men. Arya's story has probably been the most compelling one of the series, but like so many others in A Feast for Crows she doesn't see a lot of action here. Her chance encounter with Samwell does perhaps play some part in her final predicament, but adds little else to her tale, and whilst it's interesting to see Braavos from her perspective (and, briefly, Sam's), her encounters with its citizenry tend to go nowhere. As for the aforementioned Sam, he spends his time agonising over Gilly's misery, then agonising over his love for her, whilst journeying on one boat and the next. Sam does develop as a character, but like so much of this book it's a development that stretches across twice as many pages as I'd care for for such a minor character in the series.
Brienne's quest to find Sansa is simultaneously gripping and frustrating. I was surprised to find it the most enjoyable of all the perspectives, despite the rather (probably deliberate) one-dimensional portrayal of the character in previous volumes. Brienne pairs up with Podrick Payne, Tyrion's former squire, and meanders across the Riverlands in search of a maid of three and ten with auburn hair, as she keeps reminding us. In the process, we come to understand a bit more about what made the Maid of Tarth what she is here, and witness her extraordinary skill as a swords(wo)man when she dispatches the surviving Brave Companions. It's those swordfights that make Brienne's story the best of the lot, because this volume lacks them severely. The final showdown with Rorge and Biter reminded me of the best fights in A Storm of Swords, but Brienne's concluding chapter was frustrating after such an aimless journey up to that point. If indeed she has been hanged, then it renders her entire story in A Feast for Crows irrelevant, so somehow I don't think that's the case. But if she's spared only to set out for Jaime's head, it still makes me question the purpose behind Brienne's prominence in this volume.
Finally, there are an assortment of other perspectives here that come and go. The men (and woman) of the Iron Islands squabble among themselves until a predictable leader emerges, and the ruling family in Dorne struggle to maintain (or disrupt) peace in the south. Given that most of these characters come to us as strangers, it's hard to empathise with their difficulties or celebrate their victories. I found the incidents leading up the kingsmoot tedious and unnecessary, whilst Arianne's failed attempt to crown Myrcella contributes nothing to the thrust of the story, even if it establishes new areas of conflict for future volumes. In truth, I would rather see Loras Tyrell storm Dragonstone than the Princess of Dorne plot fruitlessly with one of the Kinsguard.
Despite all of what I've said, I still consider this an enjoyable read. Taken on its own merits, A Feast for Crows is a deliciously dark and complex piece of writing, but as an entry in an otherwise outstanding series it's disappointing. When Martin abandoned his idea of jumping five years ahead due to the number of incidents relegated to flashbacks, he seemed to have done the opposite and focused on an uneventful period in uneventful locations. After the extraordinarily kinetic storytelling of A Storm of Swords, the deceleration here is jarring and frustrating. I felt like I deserved a grand payoff at the end, or at least some teasing glimpse of the fireworks going off elsewhere (those, I hope, we'll see in A Dance of Dragons). I suppose the former came in Cersei's dramatic (if inevitable) disgrace, and the latter in the snowfall at Riverrun, but neither matches the tragic brilliance of something like the Red Wedding. Maybe, in the end, this is why Martin took even longer working on the next entry - because repeating a performance like A Feast for Crows will surely turn a masterpiece of fantasy writing into the genre's bitterest fall from grace.