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.

2017 Challenge - White is for Witching

Book 4 (February, Gothic)

White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi

Reason for Reading: This was in many ways the impetus to break from 'classic' novels, based on a very strong recommendation from The Anxious Gamer. It replaced... something older and altogether more conventional to accompany We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and although I have a number of clear commonalities with Oyeyemi as an English-born Cambridge graduate - in the same field as Ore Lind, indeed - it seems unlikely that our experiences as a black woman and a white man would have been similar even there.

White is for Witching weaves the tale of the twins, Eliot and especially Miranda, in a disjointed and experimental fashion, beginning with four decontextualised responses to an unknown questioner before proceeding with four more or less conventional narrative voices: a third person narrative following Miranda, and the first person voices of Eliot, Miranda's university friend Ore, and that of the Silver House (which may actually also be the narrator of Miranda's sections, now I think of it,) a rambling manor which the twins' father runs as a guest house. His wife, a photographer, was killed in Haiti and Miranda wears her watch, set always to Haitian time. Eliot is perhaps a little eccentric, but grounded and part of the wider world. Miranda is lost and distracted, suffering from pica, an eating disorder which compels her to consume whatever will do her no good. Ore is an anchor to Miranda at university, but at the cost of her own self, which is physically whittled away by the relationship. And the house waits, knowing that like all Silvers, Miranda belongs only with, only to it.

I'm going to start off by saying that my reading habits - I mostly get a chance to read on the train to and from work - are not well suited to gothic. I struggled somewhat to get into White is for Witching, and it only really clicked for me about a third of the way through, when Miranda went to Cambridge(1). Perhaps the Silver House was too abstract a place for me to find mysterious, whereas Ore's view of the streets and colleges of my alma mater had the underlying familiarity which allowed it to convert what I know into something uncanny. what has a rambling guest house with too many rooms to do with me, after all, but student dorms cut incongruously into a wall hung heavy with a sepulchral air... that I can be chilled by. With my attention thus grabbed, I found the last third of the book, back in the Silver House near Dover, flowed more easily, and Ore's romantic investment in Miranda gave me more cause to fear for her inevitable doom.

I'm not convinced that the modern Gothic is my natural home (which may be the point, of course,) but while White is for Witching did not grip me as it has some, I certainly don't regret the experience. As an aside on medium, I found it more than usually frustrating to read on a Kindle, because there were many occasions when I wanted to flick back and check my recollection of some small thing, and that is hard to do on a Kindle. I am also sad that this one wasn't available as an audiobook, as I think that, well read and ideally by multiple readers, it could be something very special.

(1) Online reviews seem evenly divided on whether this juncture was when the book came alive or got bogged down.

Reading Roundup - February 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

This month I have hit my two book target, reading Nights at the Circus and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, although this still leaves me a book behind going into March, and I haven't done more than flip through The Rose that Grew from Concrete. It turns out that I suck at reading poetry in any systematic manner.

Rogues is not so much a book that I read/listened to this month as one that I finished. It's a collection of short stories curated by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozoir. The stories are written by a wide array of successful and highly-acclaimed authors working in a variety of genres, including contemporary thriller, western, horror, historical, SF and fantasy, united by the common theme of roguery. As is the way of anthologies, it's a mixed bag, with some excellent entries, some less successful, and a few that I can't honestly recall after a few months, although none of them were truly dire. Particular highlights include: Joe Abercrombie's 'Tough Times All Over', a fantasy tale following the path of a package which is repeatedly stolen from a succession of carriers; Scott Lynch's 'A Year and a Day in Old Theradane', in which a team of retired thieves are tasked with stealing a street; Neil Gaiman's 'How the Marquis Got His Coat Back'(1); and 'Now Showing' by Connie Willis, a caper of conspicuous consumption set in a near future where a corrupt cinema industry screens non-existent films in vast consumer centres. It's been a useful standby between full novels, and I may look at getting another of Martin and Dozoir's cross-genre collections some time, although for now I think I'll fill that hole with the short stories in the new Definitive Sherlock Holmes.

As the third book in the Last Dragonslayer series, Jasper Fforde's The Eye of Zoltar fails in only one respect; that of actually finishing the story. It turns out that the series is a tetralogy, not a trilogy, although Fforde's website does not have a due date for the book currently titled Jennifer and the Wizard (formerly The Great Troll War.) The book itself follows orphan heroine Jennifer Strange as she is dispatched to the precipitous terrain and treacherous politics of the Cambrian Empire to retrieve the titular jewel, with the aid of newly-minted sorcerer Perkins and pre-teen jeopardy tour guide Addy Powell, while at the same time unmasking a conspiracy and educating the impossibly spoiled Princess Shazeen in the fine art of not being a complete brat. As with the last book, there are a few niggles with continuity, not least that the trolls previously seen to be relatively sophisticated beings who consider humans as a cute but annoying invasive species have apparently reverted to being brutal, corpse-displaying savages. The stakes of the novel end up significantly greater than in the previous books, and it ends on an as yet unresolved cliffhanger, which is a bit of a bugger really.

Jane Collingwood once more provides a fine reading, with a wide array of voices and accents; some better than others. 

Finally for the month, I gave up on Viking epic West of the Moon on the grounds that if I'm going to tell my daughter she ought to change library books she isn't reading, I ought to do the same myself, and instead picked up Cressida Cowell's How to Train Your Dragon, on which the film is based. It is a completely different beast, far more interested in joke names about bodily functions than father-son bonding, and featuring a culture in which dragons are ubiquitous in the place of hawks and hounds, but less so as horses. It's not a bad book, and a quick read besides, although I'm in no hurry to plough through the next eighteen of the buggers. I confess, I am probably biased in that I saw the film first and loved it, and enjoyed the second one (although it has its problems, some of which I think I overlooked in considering the films as part of the wider world created in the accompanying TV series,) but in this case I definitely prefer the film.

(1) Although in all honestly I am baffled by the reader, Roy Dotrice's decision to give the Marquis a French accent. Name notwithstanding, I've always considered the Marquis to be a London boy.

2017 Reading Challenge - We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Book 3 (February, Gothic)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson

Reason for Reading: This one was a recommendation on my original classics challenge. I realised I was very low on female authors (and in fact on American authors,) and my sister suggested that I add We Have Always Lived in the Castle to my Gothic selection. In a way, that was the start of the transformation of the challenge into a way of stretching, albeit only slightly, my cultural horizons.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a short novel, recounted in the first person by Mary Katherine 'Merricat' Blackwood, the younger of two sisters living in splendid isolation with their crippled uncle in their grand old family house. It emerges throughout the story that, six years prior, the rest of the family was murdered when arsenic was mixed with the sugar. Merricat had been sent to bed without supper as a punishment, Uncle Julian took only a little sugar and Constance took none, which resulted in her being tried – and acquitted – of the murders. As a result of these events, Julian was crippled, Constance reduced to an agoraphobic shut-in and Merricat became a half-feral creature, practicing home-cooked sympathetic magic to transform their home into a mystical fortress, into which outsiders intrude only briefly before being driven away by the fear which the Blackwoods purposely cultivate. Then Charles Blackwood arrives, a cousin intent on 'helping', and Merricat's world begins to unravel.

The novel is perhaps most notable for the perspective of its thoroughly unreliable narrator, Merricat, whose fantasies of life on the Moon and the mystical duel in which she engages with Charles to purge his influence from the house border on hallucination. For her, the world is a mystical place, governed by invisible forces that she manipulates through self-created rituals. She views everyone outside her immediate circle with poisonous distain, frequently picturing those around her dead, and shelters Constance even when Constance herself tries to push at the boundaries of their circumscribed world. Hers is a simple, unsophisticated voice, but powerful enough that I barely began to challenge many of her assertions until I had finished the audiobook.

Merricat is eighteen, but acts as if she is still twelve, while Constance is some ten years older, but acts like an ingénue thanks to their near-total isolation from social influences. The narrative depicts Charles as a grasping, conniving bastard, but in his last appearance there is just a shade of doubt to cast doubt on whether this is because he was an irredeemable gold-digger, or because Merricat could see no good – indeed, no humanity – in him. Similarly, the villagers act in a truly monstrous fashion towards the family, seeming to justify Merricat's view of them as subhuman brutes, but when the 'friends' of the Blackwoods insist that they misunderstood events, there is no counterpoint to tell us if Merricat viewed some lesser offence through her own skewed lens, or if rather, after the fact, the other 'good' families of the area simply do not wish to confront the possibility that they live among people capable of harbouring such hatred.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is an odd, dark little novel, with a deceptive and lingering power in its simple prose style and a morbidly compelling central character. There is a film adaptation in post-production, and I am honestly fascinated to see how they bring this to the screen, and sceptical of the ability of the visual medium to do the story justice.

2017 Reading Challenge - Nights at the Circus

Book 2 (January, Magic Realism(1))

Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter

Reason for Reading: Angela Carter is one of the primary exponents of magic realism in the western world, and one of my mother's favourite authors. Her work is not entirely new to me, having read The Bloody Chamber a time or two since first seeing Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, and I had heard bits of Nights at the Circus on BBC7 as was, but never all of it.

Nights at the Circus is a novel in three parts. In the first, an aerialiste known as Fevvers recounts her life history to an American journalist named Walsher in the closing years of the 19th century. Fevvers performs with a magnificent pair of wings spreading from her shoulders, and claims to be a genuine winged woman. Hatched from an egg, raised by honest prostitutes and briefly ensnared by the rich and venal for their own reasons, hers is the story of a unique being, a freak of nature, and its truth or falsehood remains uncertain.

In the second part, Fevvers, with her companion and foster-mother Lizzie, sets out on a grand tour with an American circus, to St Petersburg and thence across Siberia to sail to America, and Walsher follows, taking up the role of junior clown. Even as the Petersburg performances take them to the heights of stardom, jealousy and madness tear at the circus, and Fevvers is stalked by a wealthy but sinister admirer. In the third part, Fevvers' internal monologue becomes accessible to us as she begins to lose her magical nature. The circus is hijacked in Siberia and the performers cast adrift in a world becoming more magic and less real by the moment.

Nights at the Circus is an extraordinary novel just on a linguistic level. No sentence is functional or throwaway, every one is crafted, whether for soaring poetry or crude vernacular (of which there is plenty.) The book weaves a strange and magical world out of mostly ordinary things; Lizzie manipulates time with a clock, while Fevvers' virtue is defended with a toy sword the loss of which diminishes her. Fevvers herself is a wondrous grotesque; a towering, graceful glutton who gives forth high philosophy in the language of the London street. The other characters in the play are no less fantastical, their circus roles imbuing them with a potent, archetypal magic of their own. Even Walsher, the putative everyman, is eventually disabused of his skepticism through a magic of his own, first as a clown and then as a shaman.

This is an extraordinary, dizzying fantasy of greed and magnificence, envy and liberation, spirituality and carnality. Once more, I have no regrets over choosing this one, although I do wish that Audible had the Kirstie MacColl reading I remember (but which Google appears in ignorance of.)

(1) In one passage of the book, the very world it is set in is described in exactly these terms.

Reading Roundup - January

2017 Reading Challenge
I was halfway through the month when I began my challenge, so it's no big surprise that I haven't finished all of my January targets yet. I have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I'm about a third of the way through Nights at the Circus. My final goal for January is a poetry bonus, and thanks to my partner Hanna I will be looking at The Rose That Grew From Concrete, a collection of the poems of Tupac Shakur.

The Last Dragonslayer is the first book in Jasper Fforde's Jennifer Strange trilogy, and the recent subject of a Sky Christmas special adaptation. It is the story of Jennifer Strange, a foundling working in indentured servitude as the acting manager of a magical talent agency; a job which involves finding respectable work for half a dozen odd sorcerers and supporting twice as many retired former employees in a hotel full of random old enchantments. Some might consider this work enough for a fourteen year old, but when Big Magic starts to brew and big money is offered for a certified vision of when the last dragon is going to die and leave the Dragonlands open for a land grab, she discovers that she is also the last in the long line of Dragonslayers.

So, the thing I couldn't escape listening to The Last Dragonslayer is of course the differences to the adaptation. It's been a while since I'd read it, so many of them passed me by, including a whole subplot about the impending war between Hereford and Brecon once the Dragonlands ceased to be a constant barrier to invasion. Also the quarkbeast is a lot weirder, the sorcerers of Kazam more numerous and less universally benevolent (Lady Mawgan, the only one whose name made it to the TV, is practically a secondary antagonist.)

I went on from there to The Song of the Quarkbeast, book two in the series. With Jennifer still in King Snod's bad books, Kazam faces the prospect of their arch-rivals at Industrial Magic (newly rebranded as iMagic to be more with it) taking over the firm and becoming the sole authorities on magical practice; a state of affairs that would leave them, and in particular their manager the Amazing/All-Powerful Blix, free to gouge the public to their hearts' content. Yet there is more at stake even than the threat of a hostile takeover motivated by a long-standing feud between Blix and absent Kazam manager, the once-Amazing Zambini, as Jennifer stumbles on a sinister plot to abuse the rarest and most remarkable creature in the world in pursuit of ultimate power.

The Song of the Quarkbeast is an odd biscuit, in that it doesn't always gibe with the first book in the series. Much of this is due to small errors which are fixed in version 1.1 (rolling upgrades via website being a feature of all Fforde's books,) but there are still a few things that don't add up; such as the suggestion that the Price brothers are never seen together being dropped without comment, or the fact that suddenly everyone knows that the Mighty Shandar is alive and has a family of hereditary agents, where previously they had wondered who his agent might have been in his day. By their own lights, however, each book is a delight, full of Fforde's quirky charm and delightfully read by Jane Collingwood.

Finally for this month, Body Work is the first of the Rivers of London graphic novels (formerly comic book limited series,) putting a face to apprentice wizard and police constable Peter Grant well ahead of any adaptation. It's the tale of a killer car which gets broken up for parts, and seeks to exercise a vengeance more marked by passion than by accuracy via the vehicles into which its parts have been transplanted.

Given the constraints of the medium, Body Work is much more straightforward than the average case for Peter Grant, lacking the space for red herrings and side plots. It's got the humour, and the action, and indeed the horror of the original down. Fellow Doctor Who alumnus Andrew Cartmel (he of the Master Plan) gets Aaronovich's style, and the art by Lee Sullivan and Luis Guerrero may not match the pictures in my head exactly, but they'll do and then some (although if I'm honest I always pictured Beverly Brook as a bit more casual, a bit less fetish wear.)

The End of an Era - The Adventures of Doctor McNinja

In 2004, Christopher Hastings began publishing The Adventures of Doctor McNinja online. A few years back, he started getting professional comic-writing gigs from Marvel, and about a year ago announced that he would be winding up the story of Doctor McNinja.

As his name suggests, Doctor McNinja is a doctor from a family of ninjas (specifically, Irish Ninjas(1), although his mother is Jewish by birth,) who, having abandoned the family business of assassination and pursuing memetic fueds with pirates, heals the sick and fights - and also, if we're honest, commits a lot of - crime in the city of Cumberland, Maryland(2). Initially facing an eclectic gaggle of threats such as copyright trolling fast food clown Donald McBonald, 'American Ninja' Frans Rayner, velociraptor-riding palaeontologists, vengeful pirates and Dracula, he eventually found his nemesis in the form of King Radical, a super cool crimelord intent on making the world a more radical place.

After travelling into space and into the future with Cumberland's mayor, astronaut and chrononaut Chuck Goodrich, and thwarting Radical's attempts to merge the world with his own home in the Radical Lands, McNinja entered into a final duel with his enemy as King Radical managed to become President and used the power of his office to exact petty and extravagant revenge on those who had thwarted him over the years(3). It is a fight that will cost McNinja his clone brother, his family and his very identity; and perhaps his life.

Ninjas can't grab you if you're on fire. Tru fax.

The twelve years of The Adventures of Dr McNinja is probably as textbook an example of Cerebus Syndrome as you'll find without having to read past the first couple of volumes of Cerebus itself and into the crazy stuff(4). It runs from a weird little comic about a doctor who is also a ninja to something with a coherent arc plot and goes to some pretty dark places by the end. And yes, it's still about a doctor who is also a ninja, who fights a man who wears a crown and rides a motorbike and dreams of filling the world with dinosaur people and introducing proper, radical tennis, whose secretary is a gorilla named Judy, who studied with a clone of Benjamin Franklin and whose youthful ward has a resplendent moustache. It's been a real blast, and if you haven't done so already, maybe you should check out the archive; it's substantial, yet finite, and that's not something you can say of many webcomics.

Also, he does a team up with Axe Cop.

(1) While the 'Mc' prefix is more commonly associated with Scots names, the two countries share a lot of cultural roots, and 'O'Ninja' just doesn't pop the same way.
(2) By long-standing agreement, the local police won't pursue him for any crime as long as he can reach his office and call 'base'.
(3) Well, this feels ominously prescient now.
(4) Cerebus Syndrome is when a work gets more serious over time, rather then the author having a complete psychological collapse, although that also happened with Cerebus the Aardvark.