Reading Roundup - June 2017

2017 Reading Challenge
Back up to pace this month, as I finished off Wild Swans and moved on to Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. In the end, the problem with these two books was that, while the world of China during the Cultural Revolution is definitely a new one to me, the two had almost identical perspectives, being written by literate city children from Chengdou who went to the mountains. They were both excellent, and of course Wild Swans had a much broader scope, while Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress cared far more about character.

It's a sort of horror-western-fantasy mashup. Damn, you'd
have to have been King to get this published in 1982.

With the movie The Dark Tower coming out soon, I thought I'd have another crack at the original, with Stephen King's The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger(1). Full disclosure, I'm not a fan of King's writing in general, although the first two volumes of the series have been the exception so far, in that I got off the first page and, indeed, through the first two (or maybe three) books before the library failed me. Maybe it was the contemporary setting in the other books - I wasn't much into modern day until I was... well, ever really; even my crime reading tends to be old noir - but the western/post-apocalyptic/horror/fantasy mashup of The Gunslinger really hooked me. Or perhaps it was the opening.

“The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”(2)

The Gunslinger kicks off in media res, with the titular pistoleer-paladin in pursuit of the Man in Black, a wizard and corruptor seemingly set on bringing ruin to what is left of a blasted, dying world, having already overthrown the Gunslingers' kingdom of Gilead(3). Death follows in the Man in Black's wake, wrought by him and delivered by the Gunslinger, with a young boy from modern(ish; the book is old) day Manhattan the latest in the crosshairs. The Gunslinger is the hunter, but the Man in Black has all the power, at least at this point in their cat and mouse. It's an intriguing opener, much stronger on set-up than on payoff, but there it goes; it is the start of a seven book plus two novella series, so you wouldn't expect it to wrap everything up neatly.

Oddly, the Red Riding Hood persona is only
mooted in this volume.

Next on my list was The Rules of Supervillainy, a semi-parody set in one of those worlds where superpowers are fairly commonplace. Gary Karpowsky is a happily married white collar worker who receives the magical Reaper's Cloak after its previous 'partner', superhero the Nightwalker, dies. Gary sets out on a career of crime as Merciless, the Supervillain without Mercy(4), but his idea of supervillainy is more that of a kind of anti-establishment heroic outlaw than an actual villain (or as he puts it, he's a villain, not a jerk.) This outlook brings him into conflict with actual villains - most of whom have a serious hard-on for murder, rather than wanting to buck the system that keeps the little guy down - as well as superheroes and 'antiheroes'; that subset of vigilante murderers whose targeting of villains seems to excuse their monstrous, murderous behaviour, but whose methods are a large part of Gary's motivation for eschewing straightforward heroism.

Superhero parody is ten a penny, but The Rules of Supervillainy kicks off a series with a certain something. Gary is an appealing protagonist, combining well-meaning family man with his dedication to an almost non-existent code of noble supervillainy. The superpowered action is perhaps a little lacking, with Phipps seeming more assured with the comedic and dramatic aspects of the story, but those other aspects are deftly handled and Gary's tragedy - the loss of his ex-supervillain brother, and the collapse of his previous relationship with a superheroine - complements his comedy well.

Winter Tide is a Lovecraftian novel with a twist. Growing out of the short story 'The Litany of Earth', it takes as its premise the idea that the Deep Ones of Innsmouth were a persecuted minority, rounded up by the government thanks to lies like those in 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'. Aphra Marsh and her brother Caleb are the last surviving land-bound children of Innsmouth. Aphra lives with a Japanese family who were interned with them during WWII, works informally with an FBI agent seeking to foster greater ties with the Aeonist(5) community, and has begun teaching magic to the owner of the bookshop where she works. Caleb, meanwhile, has been trying to recover a vast wealth of books from Innsmouth that have been claimed by Miskatonic University. Agent Spector offers a means to access MU's 'Innsmouth Collection', if the Marshes can help him to track the possibility of a Russian spy using body-switching magic as a tool of espionage.

Devoted, yet fully woke Lovecraft fan Ruthanna Emrys brings a sincere affection to the mythos, even as she deconstructs its underlying assumptions and horrors. Through Aphra's eyes, the time-travelling, body-snatching Great Race of Yith are the sole legacy of a world whose destruction is preordained, and the one certainty that someone takes note of human(6) affairs in this uncaring universe. Innsmouth was a town of pagan fish-people minding their own business, and Miskatonic University is a bastion of elitist, intellectual snobbery. Ancient religions respect the balance of natural and unnatural forces, while the federal forces I shall call Schmelta Green are a bunch of dangerously amateur hacks(7).

Winter Tide is a melancholic novel of the search for a world long lost, as well as a threat new established. It blends Cold War uncertainty with Lovecraft's Yog-sothery to almost(8) entirely reinterpret the latter. Most of its horror, such as it is, comes from the human world, and the unchecked power of the government in dealing with 'the other', and notably most of Aphra's allies are in some sense 'other', be they Deep Ones, cripples, Jews, gays, blacks, Japanese or descendants of other human strains.

Finally, and in a similar vein to The Gunslinger, The City of Shifting Waters is the source material for a forthcoming movie, specifically the first in the Valerian and Laureline series of scifi comics, which are the basis of the forthcoming Luc Besson extravaganza Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets(9). Spacio-temporal Agents Valerian and Laureline are sent to the 1980s, the start of an historical dark age from which no records remain until the formation of the great, world-spanning civilisation that will arise from its ashes. Valerian is in pursuit of an old nemesis, Xombul, across a flooded New York. Teaming up with smuggler Sun Rae and scientist Schroeder, Valerian and Laureline must prevent Xombul establishing control of history and forever altering the timeline in his own favour.

The City of Shifting Waters suffers somewhat from a slightly haphazard Kindle conversion, but in many ways the narrative itself is ahead of its time(10). Laureline is a slinky red-head, but seldom sexualised, and Valerian admits that his problem with allowing women in the service is that they outshine old hands like him. It might be nice to assume that in the 28th century the inclusion of women in a space-time agency wouldn't raise an eyebrow, but it was written almost fifty years ago. The story is reminiscent of some of Strontium Dog's time travel stories, and it's hard to keep in mind that in fact this predated those by decades. It's impossible to see any of this in the trailers for the movie, mind you, which looks to be all about the spacio and not the temporal.

(1) A book that, in its original short story form, is almost as old as I am.
(2) Frequently listed among the best opening lines ever.
(3) I couldn't help drawing comparisons between the macho Gunslinger kingdom and The Handmaid's Tale's fascist state, but I suspect they are just drawing on the same Biblical source.
(4) It's a work in progress.
(5) Anyone who ascribes to the religion or philosophy that the Earth will host a range of dominant species through Aeons catalogued by the Yith.
(6) A category that here includes Deep Ones, who are merely a branch of humanity that sought refuge in the waters during the great population crunch.
(7) Okay, nothing revolutionary there.
(8) Only almost. The events of 'The Thing on the Doorstep', for example, are pretty much as described in the short story, but with the added note that seeking immortality by switching bodies with first his daughter and then her husband made Ephraim Waite a criminal to the Deep Ones as much as to anyone. All in all, the impression is that much of the conventional mythos fiction represents the actions of bad elements in the Aeonist community.
(9) Laureline apparently doesn't rate a mention.
(10) 1970; this one is older than I am.

2017 Reading Challenge - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Book 8 (April, China)

 

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (read by B.D. Wong)

Reason for Reading: I picked this one for much the same reason as Wild Swans. It's a semi-autobiographical novella, rather than an actual biography, and also short, which is a mercy since I'm still on April's books at the moment. In some ways it's a bit of a cheat, as I've already seen the author's later film adaptation of the story.

If I have a regret about choosing Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, it's that it is so similar in setting to Wild Swans, or at least to the section about Jung Chang's re-education. Following the experience of two boys sent into the mountains of Sichuan from Chengdu, the tales of carrying wicker baskets of shit up treacherous mountain paths were very familiar. Where they diverge, however, is in the characters and the focus. Jung Chang was giving a factual account, as best she could, while Dai Sijie is writing a story of doomed romance and the loss of innocence.

The unnamed narrator and his friend Luo are sent to the mountains to learn from the peasants. Luo is quickly established as a silver-tongued devil when he convinces the village headman to let his friend keep his violin - a 'bourgeois toy' - in order to play the Mozart sonata 'Mozart is thinking of Chairman Mao'(1). The children of disgraced medical 'experts', they fall in with a writers' son named Four-Eyes(2), whom they realise has somehow managed to smuggle a suitcase full of books up the mountain. When his mother gets him a job in the city(3), they steal the case and its wealth of translated French classics, reading them to the Little Seamstress, a beautiful young woman of whom they are both enamoured. It is Luo's affections that are reciprocated, but ultimately his desire to 'civilise' the mountain girl backfire, and she leaves her village to start a new life in the city.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a short novel, in which nothing much happens. There is only one point where the boys almost fall foul of the Cultural Revolution, and a number of instances which in a more melodramatic work would lead to danger or conflict are gently subverted, as when the narrator and Luo inscribe and sign favourite books as gifts to one another without this ever being used as evidence against them. BD Wong reads with a perfect intonation, shifting from the strident tones of the headman to the warm, plausible voice of Luo.

I'm not sorry to have chosen this novel, but it does fail in expanding my horizons beyond anything in Wild Swans.

(1) Sadly, as the book ends more abruptly than the film, we don't get the delightful scene where Ma (as the narrator character is named) meets the headman after the revolution and learns that he knew exactly what they were up to; he just liked the music.

(2) Luo is practically the only character with a real name.

(3) It is interesting that the semi-antagonist Four-Eyes is the character most like Jung Chang's description of herself.

2017 Challenge - The Bell Jar

Book 5 (March, Mad People)

The Bell Jar, by Silvia Plath (read by Maggie Gyllenhaal)

Reason for Reading: The Bell Jar was one of the first entries on the original list, recommended by Sara, and the month's overarching theme of Mad People was suggested by Abi to link it with Trainspotting. This was a book that I went into pretty much blind. I knew that it was a novel by the poet Sylvia Plath and that it was called The Bell Jar, and that was about it.

Esther Greenwood is an academically successful girl, whose life seems to have peaked. Having earned the chance to spend a month in New York as one of twelve guest editors on a magazine she finds herself at a loss in the big city, and then unable to find herself once she returns to her home in the suburbs of Boston. She suffers a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide, before slowly returning to health in a private asylum. The book's first person narrative follows Esther's skewed and unreliable perspective as she attributes sinister and selfish objectives to the people around her, as viewed through the distorting glass and suffocating air of the bell jar which separates her from normality.

The book depicts a world and a mental health system far removed from our own, despite the relatively short gap between Plath's time and ours. With her country tan fading Esther calls herself 'yellow as a chinaman,' and her first psychiatrist assigns her crude ECT after two sessions. While I am approaching this challenge as a means of exploring other viewpoints, however, I was surprised how much I recognised in Plath's semi-autobiographical narrative from the time of my own lowest ebb. I was never so bad that I could not read, but the sense of that distorting glass is one I once knew well.

The Audible release of The Bell Jar is read by Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose cool, almost detached delivery renders the mesmerising language of the novel all the more affecting. And it is the language that is perhaps the most remarkable thing in this novel. Like the superb translated text of 100 Years of Solitude, The Bell Jar contains not a sentence that is purely functional, not a word that is present simply to convey a single, dry piece of information. The prose itself is art, beyond its value as a medium for the story.