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It wouldn't normally do to compare two novels simply because they shared a similar premise, to then disparage the one you liked least – unless of course it's this book, because If We Were Villains is an obvious attempt to recast The Secret History (one of my favourite novels), under the Globe's limelight. So compare, I shall.
Stylistically speaking, this is a YA novel. Both in tone and characterisation. And that's it, that's why I gave it 2/5. Not because YA is bad per se, but because this novel could have been so much more if the tone and characterisation had just been more mature.
The bulk of the group's dialogue with each other is straightforward, petulant, foul-mouthed, typically lacking any sensitivity, or worse, artistry. Unsurprisingly, this is how teenagers are meant to talk; uncouth and unattractive. The use of quotations improved the tone but it rarely felt like a decision made by the characters themselves – never felt Alex or James, but rather M L Rio who wanted to insert the quote.
Which is partly because they never really make it off the page as anything more than thinly personified tropes – tropes that Rio neatly defines for us at the start of the novel, but tropes none-the-less. This lack of characterisation might have been a deliberate choice; as in Shakespeare, the archetypes play archetypal roles. But here, as agents in a novel, that shallowness makes it difficult for my interest to find any grip in the plot beyond the murder mystery itself.
And it is precisely because of tone and characterisation that this novel isn't able to claim a pedestal place by the Secret History. Despite so much of the same set pieces, it is Tart's impressive characterisation and her richly educated tone that make the Secret History so enjoyable. And whilst If We Were Villains wasn't ~not~ enjoyable, it was certainly not impressive in the ways it seemed to wish it could be.
This is a strange book. I don't mean it has endearing quirks or interesting oddball ideas – it's strange because the writing is irregular in tone and quality, the pacing erratic, the settings somehow clear yet myopic, rambling. Not bad per se, but definitely adventurous down the wrong fork in the road.
It's a book about a self-loathing and reads like an extended greentext. The author drags you through his demented world as if he's recanting the events to a therapist, complete with the expectation that you'll pick through the narrated wreckage and refrain from kicking him out in disgust.
Not that your disgust should be very visceral, that is. The infantile “beatdowns” delivered in the first half of the novel were so glib as to be almost not worth the space they take up. A simple “I like abusing women – that's the premise” would have been as effective.
As for the entire ending scene...if you were able to cultivate any sort of emotional response from beneath the author's hack affectations (switching to second-person? stripping dialogue? why, to illustrate his mental haze and absurd paranoia? He's sober for god's sake!) and bizarre chain of events, you would probably be left thinking...is that it? Is that all they can muster? He hurts them and they stage weird pantomimes about his manhood and spike his drinks? Why are there so many people just hanging around like villainous stooges, laughing like extras in a comedy?
The narrator is 35 or thereabouts by the time the novel ends, but I'm betting Anonymous is in his early twenties. If you want to real novel about sexist misanthropy read Mishima's Forbidden Colours instead.
I really wish Fitzgerald had written a Jordan Baker spin-off sequel; clearly, there's a mysterious depth hidden beneath her skin. Ideally it would feature some frosty dates with Nick in hotel parlours, richly plated in impersonal art deco (the hotel's, that is). Their words would carome passed each other like struck golf balls, disappearing into the dark recesses beneath vanishing velvet curtains. Whole pages would be dedicated to Nick's brooding internal monologue, emerging as not so many pointless observations, like the abrupt scratch on vinyl as the record ends. The tone would be Nabokovian. The epilogue lighthearted.
In summary: was Daisy even in this book? I barely recall. Gatsby's anxiety was not endearing. The dinner party with the mistress claims the most memorability. Nick's principle of disengagement makes for b-o-ring protagonism. Wonderfully written.
This is a screenplay written as a novel. Or, this is what happens when a screenwriter renders his blockbuster idea in prose. Unfortunately what happens is the dialogue is usually wooden and overly-straightforward, without a shred of nuance; any sort of plot exegesis is delivered offhand and matter-of-fact. Scenes occurs at breakneck pace. Settings blur past the camera...you get the idea. Maybe this is normal for the genre: epic (sort-of)-sci-fi thriller? I've never read a Jack Reacher novel before...
Thankfully time travel is not approached with the intent of deliberately confusing the reader. Timelines split, things repeat, but the reader may rest assured that any of these threads can be plausibly abandoned at any time, if the plot so calls for it. Which means you don't have to keep it all in your head as the plot progresses.
It would be chauvinistic to suggest this is bad writing, cinema-as-a-novel, so I won't, but also because it isn't. The plot is extremely fluid and interesting and engaging; the romance and trauma genuinely heartrending. But everything else feels flat, rendered in 2D, without any of the depth I have come to expect from the format. (In all likelihood I am projecting my dissatisfaction, in a way, with the poor quality of modern cinema onto this poor novel. Sorry)
Difficult to follow, unnecessarily referential; am I supposed to have Wikipedia open whilst reading pop philosophy?
I like Slavoj's brand of leftism. It's bold, unapologetic and he doesn't try to intellectualise concepts away into obscure inaccessibility. I don't always agree with the implicit morality beneath some of this arguments, but that's neither here nor there. This book is just hard to read – not in a “Kant is hard to read” but in a “this Facebook comment chain keeps getting derailed”, (before they introduced nesting replies, of course). Stick to the point!
In short: achingly poor writing sustaining a sometimes exciting plot. However the Moties (despite being utterly humanoid, which, for a work of speculative fiction should really be considered a faux pas, or at least a tut-tut) were often a joy to listen to chatter, especially the three ambassadors at the draw of the novel, who provided more insight into the Motie psyche than the however-many-snippets of dialogue that came before. Definitely a side-eye thrown at the expressive interjectional use of “rape” though.
I wasn't aware this was YA when I started, and had I known that, I wouldn't have given it another glance...largely because YA is written for people who like YA, a group to which I do not belong. How do you criticise a genre for lacking in areas that it simply doesn't care about? It wouldn't be fair to complain about all the teen angst and melodramatic one-liners when that's the point. So I'll focus on the literary basics:
Leigh Bardugo writes bad action. She writes Hollywood action. The characters are wrapped in plot armour and the enemy pawns are utterly dyspraxic, fragile stick figures. Slow, cinematic attention is afforded to the protagonist's feats of combative excellence that they unleash upon their unwitting foes. In her world, physical fights are determined by how stern one's resolve is and how lumbering, brutish and bovine the enemy is, not on any realistic measure of...anything. What's worse, these slim-fingered teenagers and waifish girls are masterminds of athletic skill, reaching their apotheosis at tender seventeen...
Far be it for me to criticise a mainstay of YA fiction, but if your cast of characters have a median age of sixteen and a half, surely they some similar emotional and mental semblance to their age? I had to age up Bardugo's cast by about 6 years each just to inject some credibility into the story. Kaz was perhaps the most guilty of being a “just...one...more...gimmick” type character, as if he was written for a play-by-post forum RPG. I have no clue how he found all the time to gather all those personal quirks and perfect all those skills by 17, but colour me impressed.
The worldbuilding was lacklustre. I wanted to make a concession here: a deeply complex, compelling world isn't necessary if the story is plot or cast-driven (which this is). But Bardugo's worldbuilding is complex, and takes up a fair bit of wordcount...it just isn't compelling. The pages are flush with descriptive interjections about the Grishaverse and its geopolitics, but they're rarely interesting or well thought-out or satisfyingly deep. I can forgive the cringey fake-Dutch, but I can't forgive the lazy, trope-filled caricature that is Fjerdan. Half the book is spent up there yet absolutely nothing of interest returns with the cast to Kerch. They're written as typical faceless frozen brutes centered mindless martial zealotry, despite the insinuation that they're an entire, thriving kingdom. They have an entire warrior caste of elite...teenagers? They have a completely contradictory social code of anti-magic yet their sacred castle is riddled with obviously Grisha-made artefacts? They keep a bunch of tanks just lying around with the keys in, fueled up, ready to burst through their walls whilst the entire nation's military complex does what, exactly!?
(Minor spoiling tangent - I have absolutely no fucking clue what was happening with the tank scene in the Ice Court. The teenagers can just...drive tanks? Fire it's various guns? Drive through stone walls? Also, when driving into a stone wall, people are thrown FORWARD Leigh, not backwards!!)
Anyway, the plot was written to a solid tempo despite the flashbacks, which were kept relatively short and entertaining. Quick-paced enough to keep you reading. I didn't find the (as another review mentioned) sitcom-style, cheesy humour to be too difficult to swallow. At times both the good and bad guys couldn't help but force in exposition about their cunning plans into their dialogue (often at very awkward instances), but this can be forgiven. Because its YA.
(caveat: I'm aware there is plenty more Grishaverse books. Maybe the worldbuilding is more complete in them, but I won't hold my breath. Bardugo has shown herself to me to not quite get what I consider to be good worldbuilding. It should leave you wanting to know more; woven deftly into the story; exhibit uniqueness and originality; be coherent and informed and consistent. This ain't all that).
Lastly, a fitting soundtrack to how I imaged much of the events unfolding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJGcO5Une-g
Ted Chiang's style has the same steady, metronomic pace as that of an exam scenario writer, avoiding any flair and unnecessary imagery. But instead of asking us to calculate how many leftover fish we have, we're given depictions of the moral choices that might be common in our cybernetic future and asked to contemplate them as if they were here in the world today. The lack of any commonplace SciFi tropes or attempts at impressive visuals means every line is dedicated to the story's ideas. This is a good thing, because Ted's ideas are phenomenal in their own right. The Lifecycle of Software Object kept my mind in a constant runaway state as I thought about AI rights and our obligations to them, each page turned in a dazed state. That same actuarial style - and Ted's light use of realistic jargon - makes it easy to imagine these moral choices as being tangibly relevant to us.
The only downside, of course, is that unless the dilemmas are of any interest to you in the first place, the underlying story will be as dry and boring as a biscuit. I haven't read anything else by Ted at this time; all I can say is this: this approach could have easily failed if he had chosen a slightly less interesting topic.
No Longer Human is not so much a miserable story as it is frustrating. So much of what the protagonist does, thinks and feels are marked by a deep self-pity and what I can only describe as an inertia.
I didn't quite pick up on the themes of post-war depression and formless anxiety that reviews ascribe to this book, at least not at first. The scenery around Yōzō reflects a placid Japan; the tension of war is faint undercurrent to Yōzō's insipid love trials. The later chapters fail to energise this background, and instead simply prop up the screen as we watch Yōzō tumble like a ragdoll down a barren slope.
After finishing the book and ruminating on it somewhat, the sense behind the imagery has become clearer to me under this interpretation: that Yōzō's disqualification from the security of belonging is a metaphor for Japan's completed descent into total social anomie; though my reading of this is vague.
Before reading this book I had already read up a little on Dazai's life and was prepared to read it whilst looking for the autobiographical fragments. It is here, I think, that my reading of Ningen Shikkaku has been unwittingly biased and my distate for Yōzō prompted. Luckily there is a manga by Junji Itō I can read.
Dry...but drought-like rather than acidic, the dryness of cracked Karoo earth rather than tart Cape chenin blanc. When reading this book, the mind is forced into an unfocused, baking landscape of shimmering images and strong, unidentifiable smells. At times there are shapes that bear resemblance to something familiar: a plot thread suddenly rearing up from the parched, sandy pages (suitably yellowed with age, untouched). Unfortunately Nadine Gordimer's driven and frankly inventive, yet schematically mindless prose doesn't justify the infrequency of these captivating bulges. Roughly half the scenes require some sort of straw-grasping analysis in order to generate coherence, far more than I'm prepared to indulge in.
The payout in the end was a benzo haziness borne of the African sun, a feeling I actually quite liked, whilst the protagonist's ennui was served generously alongside sketches of a lost place I still call home.
Confessions of a Mask is the precise analysis of a youth estranged from reality. From the start Kochan is isolated from the very concept of normality. His overbearing grandmother shields him from the social company of other children and forces him into a world of introspection and bookish over-analysis and melodrama. His frailty torments his self-image and fills him with a hatred for himself and his body. His sexuality, rooted so deeply in his own self-image and, in all likelihood, a mysogny born from his grandmother, is treated like deepest crime hidden beneath the Mask.
But the Mask and Kochan are markedly different in how they view the world. To the Mask his sexual desire is shameful and secretive, whilst in the temple of his mind Kochan explores himself with a feverish enjoyment.
“...surely at that time I would be able to do it. Surely normality would burst into flames within me like a divine revelation.”
“This was the first time I used my love for Sonoko as a justification for my true feelings.”
Perhaps not the best introduction to Ursula's work. A thin, flickering insight into a saturnine world, borne quietly aloft by prose that neither excites nor jarrs - much like a veneered IKEA tabletop: unassuming. The names are unmemorable; the characters vague, like faces beneath a frosted pane; the threat so very difficult to process. What is there for the Reader to grasp at? The Reader of Scifi might clamber for the queer, suggestive threads that allude to her other works (of which I have no knowledge). For the Reader of Fiction, Gaals? Waifish females and F1-speed romance? Unsatisfied is what they will be.
Did I enjoy it? Yes. The (relatively) lengthy Moscow entrenchment was a good bit of macho fantasy that reminded me much of David Gemmell. But the peculiar bickering between the humans was hazy, like dialogue written by Tommy Wisseau and the story generator from Rimworld mashed up. The final result was akin to a music video that didn't quite fit the lyrics of its song, leaving you engrossed yet a little confused.
If you read contemporary reviews of Dracula, you'll find it was critically panned by the average reader. Some of the other names of the day considered it a sleeper classic but otherwise the real cultural value of Dracula comes from its Hammer incarnations. Which is entirely understandable, as the weight of Stoker's laborious prose prevents any sort of impression to form in the reader's mind beyond the desire to sleep – or strangle the heroines for their stupidity.
In some sense I wish Dracula from the page had had more of an impact than the cinematic Dracula. The heavy mustache, the fierce Stygian features...they make for a much for evocative vampiric archetype than what we've in fact been left with.
‘Big, if true'
At numerous times did I want to shout ‘Well, of course you'd come to that conclusion!' The author, however, conveniently did that for me on multiple occasions throughout; and with great humility in the epilogue, which had the odd effect of improving the credence of his findings.
The Ancient Paths is at times eyeglazing, especially when it dives into the murky thicket of French topnyms that I have never heard of and could barely place without a handy map (which I most certainly did not deploy whenever I opened the book up). Unfortunately, the maps frequently supplied on-page weren't of much use as they tended to be some distance away from the exposition that references themm, and far too numerous for my liking. The end result was me flittering past the paragraphs that I knew provided the relevant array of evidence, instead reading the sectional tl;dr with a little nod and a ‘hmph, makes sense'.
What really held this book up was the author's whimsical, reverent descriptions of the fantasies he had concocted for the events of the past, bringing to life ancient figures that would have otherwise been prosaic features of history class. In some sense, this blend of scholarly fiction supported the dryness of cartographic schema.
But it wouldn't be fair to not critique the thesis of the book, which is that European prehistory, that is, the scientific history of the Celts, has been sorely misrepresented. By the end of the book I had constructed a peculiar identification for the ancients of Europe: mystical yet rational; methodical and possessing a superior consciousness of the world around them that seems to defy the notion of ‘I live here, he lives there, and beyond there be dragons' that seems so commonly held. Perhaps the most ubiquitous mistake made is thinking the ancients of Anitiquity couldn't make long-distance calls. Oh how wrong we are!
This book marks the 13th year of Cato & Macro's campaigning together (and the 17th book in the Eagles of the Empire series).
Scarrow's approach to storytelling is as solid as ever: brief, visceral action; light intrigue; a healthy pendulum-swing between lightheartedness and striking grimness, all supported by a reliably fast-paced plot. This makes for thoroughly engaging fiction, and the Blood of Rome is no exception.
With that said, the way in which Cato's mental anguish was handled wasn't satisfying or explicable - a fact mentioned by Macro many times - and it just seemed occur for no real reason at all other than to introduce tension between the two factions of Rome and Rhadamistus. The main body of the plot progressed without many of the events meaning anything; the real interest was in how the characters conversed and struggled against each other, wherein lies my main complaint. These conversations were short and largely uneventful. The story could have been much improved by having Bernisha play more of a role earlier on, or by having Rhadamistus present more of a threat than simply an angry manchild. (The entire death sequence of Glabius seemed utterly pointless as it affected literally no one's morale). Cato's mental instability could have been given greater weight if it had actually lead him to do something rash, rather than sit around dazed for a few days.
Four stars because Roman commando's are awesome, but Scarrow failed to portray compelling drama to a sufficient extent.
Too much random dialogue and shoegazing – which is not to say that the rambling dialogue and shoegazing wasn't enjoyable, simply that there was too much of it.
The best part of this book was Terry Jones' foreword. It really gives the reader a different platform from which to view this book and its flights of absurdity between short speculative sci-fi diary entries, like the neurotic elevator or the time-oscillating restaurant. Now they were dead cool. And as Terry Jones says: no one reads Doug for his characters. Has Trillian ever done anything at all yet?
Good Evening, Mrs Craven is a collection of morose little stories about the left behind well-to-do of England during WW2.
Panter-Downes' style is economical and aphoristic, describing the bucolic scenes with an emotive, painterly delicacy, though terse and minimalist; focus is instead given to character dialogue and internal monologuing. Her prose clearly reproduces English dialects in a delightful, and highly readable, manner.
In the epilogue, it is mentioned that some critics back home in England had felt the stories falsely represented the realities of the war for the majority of the country, who were suffering enormously more than the dotty old madams. This makes sense, given that Panter-Downes' stories focused on the stranded English gentry as they were evaporating beneath the weight of the frequently mentioned ‘social revolution' occuring at the time. However, the author was, after all, asked by her American editor (as she wrote for the New Yorker) to keep writing about larny British ladies in their drafty country houses because thats what the Manhattanites wanted to read. Her depiction of idyllic upper-crust English society was what cemented her fame across the Atlantic, though perhaps it is the historical value of her writing, with its touching prose and quaint cast, that has cemented Good Evening, Mrs Craven's legacy.
One story in particular stood out to me: a woman who longed for the closeness and comradeship that the airr aids had forced into her stilted, austere English life. Her loneliness and attempts to strike up friendship were rendered in soft, heartbreaking prose. It is this scalpel-fine examination of human emotion - without tending towards the clinical - that I appreciated most of all.
At times impervious and meandering, the second half of the story makes up for the first by accelerating its pace and improving the flow of the plot. There was a lot of head-scratching going on in the first 30 pages or so as I tried to connect the obscure details together, wondering just exactly how much of this had any point.
Unfortunately, the ending exposed very little of what I actually wanted to know, despite the neat closure of the main narrative. The whole book rests on a framework of interesting cultural set-pieces and backdrops and an intelligent account of the historical events occuring at the time, as well as an honestly interesting cast.
The finished product, however, simply didn't do justice to the elements that had propped it up.
It's a hallmark of good fiction when the stories crop up again and again like curious fish breaking the surface, consistently over a period of years. ‘Sandkings' is still an utter classic; ‘The Monkey Treatment' still fills me with a sense of surreal deja vu; ‘The Pear Shaped Man' still makes my skin crawl. An impressive collection, although it seems only the horrror elements held together in my memory.