Tag Archives: book review

The Tower at Stony Wood


In adventurous stories, there often happens to be this character who knows what’s going on. They’re the one who dribbles out confusing riddles to the hero just as he needs them, and no more. The one who could just tell everybody the big plot secret but won’t, because if that happened the characters could just resolve the story’s conflict and go home. These characters seem to take a perverse enjoyment of their job, reveling in the “Nyah, nyah, I know something you don’t know!” Such a character is the Bard of Skye in Patricia A. McKillip’s Tower at Stony Wood.

The Tower at Stony Wood starts out conventionally enough for a fantasy novel. Cyan Dag, knight of the kingdom of Yves, receives a visit from the Bard of Skye on his king’s wedding night. The Bard gives him a dire warning: the king has just married a monster in mortal form, and his true bride has been trapped in a tower! The book then proceeds like a strange dream. Cyan Dag has no specific instructions from the Bard (nor did he think to ask), so he wanders the countrysides of Yves and Skye at random, trying the towers that he comes across. He’s not the sharpest sword in the scabbard.

Invariably his experiences with towers go something like this: “Thank you! But our princess is in another castle. Please try again.”

Meanwhile, the Bard and her sister send Cyan unhelpful dreams, and in two apparently unrelated plotlines, another man in another tower is attempting to tame a dragon, and a baker and her daughter are in yet another tower watching the whole affair – princess, knight, dragon, and Bard – by magic mirror. I think I counted at least six towers in all in this book. Or maybe they were the same tower, all mystically connected? McKillip is never quite clear on this point.

Cyan and I would both like to grab Ms. Bard by the robe and ask her, “What the dickens is going on here?” There is a partial explanation at the end, but it left me feeling like somebody had just played a card trick on me.

Uncle Silas

When Miss Maud Ruthyn, heiress, is orphaned, she’s sent to live with her creepy old uncle until she reaches her majority. Said uncle is suspected of once murdering a man to whom he owed gambling debts. Oh, and if Maud were to die somehow before becoming an adult, Uncle Silas would get everything. Her father arranged it that way in his will to prove to the world that Silas isn’t a murderer. Maud gets the delightful experience of being the pork chop dangled in front of the starving wolf.

Deliciously gothicky, but there’s still plenty wrong with this novel by J. Sheridan le Fanu (better known for his short stories). For one thing, scary it ain’t. “And … there was a bloodstain … on the floor!” is about as intense as it gets. Did the Victorians scare easier than we do, or did the authors just hold themselves back? It’s a depressing prospect to think that we live in a scarier world than in 1899, but compared to Chernobyl, Silas’s murderous history is pretty tame.

Ah, Maud Ruthyn. How I love to hate her. Throughout the book she vacillates between a fainting flower petal and an imperious little brat who knows she’s better than the menials because of her education and good breeding. I know she would have made for an acceptable heroine in the 19th century, but cultural relativism can only be carried so far. I’m still allowed to be upset when she’s denigrating her own gender (The weaker sex? The weaker sex? I do beg your pardon?), failing to play an active role in the ending, or eerily echoing Robinson Crusoe:

‘I want your hand, cousin,’ she said, at the same time taking it by the wrist, and administering with it a sudden slap on her plump cheek, which made the room ring, and my fingers tingle; and before I had recovered from my surprise, she had vanished.

And if you were expecting a twist at the end, which would be reasonable to do in such a suspenseful novel, you will be disappointed. Le Fanu tells you over and over that a certain event is going to happen. And then it happens.

Now that I’ve told you everything that’s wrong with the book, I strongly urge you to go read it. If you’re the sort of person who read Frankenstein for fun, not for English class, you will love it. The point of Uncle Silas is the mood, not its illiberal characters or preposterous plot. The haunted house of Bartram-Haugh abounds with creaky rooms, opium addiction, gypsy prophecies, and … Swedenborgians. Le Fanu is a master of suspense. Just as soon as you’re dying to know what happens next, he slows the story down. He draws out each excruciating moment as the massive conspiracy surrounding Maud closes in on her. I read the last five chapters all at a gulp (nearly making myself late for work) and finished gasping for air. It was only about an hour later that I realized nothing particularly cool happened. Le Fanu just writes it so well. Definitely recommended for any fan of the Gothic style.

Characters and Viewpoint

I’ve been reading a book on craft by Orson Scott Card lately* where he suggests, to make readers hate the villain, to make the villain really, really smart.

This isn’t true in every culture, but certainly the American audience resents any character who is smarter and better educated than other people. … We’re afraid of and resent people who know more than we do, and when they act as if they think it makes them superior to us, we hate them.

That’s sad. Card is probably right, and probably the technique works, but is it right to do it? Tapping into the worst part of people’s natures to make them feel something about a character? He also suggests making bad guys insane to make us hate them.

These are a couple of prejudices that it’s more or less still socially acceptable to have – I certainly couldn’t get away with having a scheming Shylock as my antagonist. But it’s not just that. I also take issue with his lukewarm acceptance of sympathetic, morally ambiguous villains.

When you separate sympathy from moral decisions – exactly what a judge and jury must try to do in a trial – you can’t be sure that your audience will reach the ‘right’ conclusions; you can’t be sure that they’ll agree with you.

What, am I going to hurt my readers’ brains?

Maybe this is why I didn’t like Seventh Son much.

I’d be interested to see what other amateur writers think. How do you build character? Do you add attributes to characters just to make them more evil/heroic, and does it work for you?

* Characters and Viewpoint, in the Elements of Fiction Writing series.

Beloved

Deep, dark, and rich, in a chocolate torte laced with cyanide sort of way.

I picked it up because Amazon.com said people who bought Edgar Allen Poe also bought this, but I was still expecting more of a historical novel than the terror ride of my life. It’s 1873 and Sethe is an ex-slave. She lives all alone in Cincinnati with her daughter, Denver, the only child she has left. Her two sons have run away from home and her older daughter is dead. During the book, she’s haunted by the past in every meaning of the word.

Paul D, who used to be a slave on the same farm as Sethe, arrives on their doorstep one day. Denver resents that they’re attracted to each other. They think Sethe’s husband died trying to escape the farm, but nobody knows for sure. Just to make matters worse, then a mysterious young woman with no wrinkles in her skin shows up, calling herself Beloved.

When Sethe’s daughter died eighteen years before, Sethe didn’t have enough money for a headstone. She was able to barter sexual favors with the engraver for just one word. Not enough for Dearly Beloved. Just Beloved.

Is Beloved the evil ghost of the dead little girl? Has Sethe finally lost her mind? Both? You just don’t know, even after it’s all over.

The best part of the prose is not what Morrison says, but what she leaves unsaid.

But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon tied around a curl of wet wooly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp.

Deliciously terrifying.

Literary lessons learned:

  • If you’re Toni Morrison, you can handle a book that is more flashback than present day. She’s Toni Morrison.
  • Magical realism: it’s not just for Latin America anymore.

The Graveyard Book


UPDATE: It appears that The Graveyard Book just won the Newberry. I couldn’t think of a current children’s book that deserves it better.

It’s by Neil Gaiman and it contains the word “graveyard” in the title, so I knew I was going to like it.

Absolutely delightful.

The book is about Nobody Owens, a boy who is being raised by ghosts. See, a hit man murdered the rest of his family, but the baby Nobody crawls out of the house in the meanwhile and the ghosts in the local cemetery take him in. There he gets into the usual trouble a boy in a graveyard gets into, getting kidnapped by ghouls, awakening an ancient menace in a barrow, and getting on the wrong side of a corrupt shopkeeper. For these he gets admonished by his loving, if rather ineffectual, adoptive parents, who died a couple of hundred years before he was born.

And then there’s Silas. I cannot begin to describe how awesome Silas is. In fact, I can’t describe him in much detail at all without giving away a major spoiler. Here’s a couple of hints, though: Silas sleeps during the daytime and he consumes only one food – and it’s not bananas. He’s the one who really brings Nobody up and teaches him what’s what. There are so many reasons this is a piece of great writing. One is Gaiman’s peculiar brand of odd humor (see the bit with the banana). The other is the themes. Nobody is a very human character who’s trying to grow up and understand the world, even though he’s had a most unusual upbringing. Silas is torn between letting Nobody be with the living where he belongs, and wanting to protect him from the hit man who’s still out there somewhere.

And any book with the following line in it has got to be good:

They avoided one garden (“Psst!” whispered the Honorable Archibald Fitzhugh. “Dogs!”) and ran along the top of the garden wall, scampering over it like rats the size of children.

Mainspring

Most peculiar story.

Remember how you learned about deism in your AP European History class? A bunch of French philosophers thought they would be clever and decided that God had created the universe, wound it up like an enormous watch, and left it to run its course. What would happen if the universe really was a huge watch? What would happen if a talented short story writer tried to build a novel around this central conceit?

The result is … interesting. This is a world a lot like your usual steampunk Earth, you know, Great Britain never lost the American Colonies and airships are floating around everywhere. And everybody can see the brass gears in the sky that define Earth’s orbit. The universe, or the solar system at least, runs on clockwork.

The clockwork that powers the Earth is running down, and only our hero, Hethor, can rewind it. Why the angel Gabriel chooses Hethor for this mission is never made clear, but it might have to do with the fact that he has a magical ability to tell time. Unfortunately, for the first half of the book, Hethor’s kind of a twit. For the second half of the book he reminds me of Dune Messiah. It’s an improvement, but … still.

And now for some quibbles. Earth is anchored to its orbital gearing by a miles-high toothed wall around the equator. The airship’s crew says that the air should be bad if it weren’t for the blanket of air that magically coats the top of the wall, so let’s say the wall extends to the top of the troposphere. That’s about 6 miles. (And that’s a conservative estimate; it could be much taller.) During northern hemisphere winter, this thing is going to cast a shadow of 6 * tan 23.5º or 2.6 miles long*. Wouldn’t this have some pretty weird effects on global climate? You’ve got a narrow strip of tropical land that gets six months of night just like at the poles. And that’s not to mention the fact that the Equatorial Wall prevents the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere oceans from mixing.

But Lake spares no time for such plotholes. He’d rather explore what happens to people in a world where evidence of God’s creation is, well, pretty obvious. There are freaking gears in the sky! And yet, astonishingly, there is a group who calls themselves the Rational Humanists. I don’t quite understand their philosophy, but they seem to believe that mysterious beings called clockmakers built the universe, not God. That doesn’t seem to make sense. Isn’t it the Rational Humanist thing to do to seek a natural explanation for the gears in the sky? What does it accomplish to transfer the responsibility from God to a bunch of magical Keebler elves?

I’m probably trying to approach this story like too much of a Rational Humanist myself; I should just sit back and enjoy the ride. Despite the protagonist, there’s a lot to like. There’s lots of airships and plenty of action scenes. One of the ships seems to run on hydrogen fuel cells, which is cool. There’s a strong implication that one of the characters is a cyborg. Then again, this happened at the end of the book, at which point I would not have been too surprised if Elvis had walked on stage. Oh, whatever. I’m over-analyzing. Go check it out.

* I’m assuming Earth’s a flat surface. At a scale of 2.6 miles, it’s not going to matter much.

Tigana

“This is one of those stories in which the very extremes of human emotion can tear the reader apart.”

Said the review on Amazon.com. My own impression was something more along the lines of meh. I’d give this book maybe a 3 or a 4 on the Richter scale, you know, the sort of earthquake that rattles the windows a bit, and people who felt it can talk about it for the next day or two (I’m from California originally.)

The premise for the book is really a pretty cool curse. While King Brandin is conquering the western half of the Peninsula of the Palm, his son dies in battle in Tigana, one of the Palm’s greatest provinces. Brandin extracts revenge from the Tiganans by obliterating the province’s name. Nobody from outside of the province will be able to hear it when the word “Tigana” is spoken. Pretty sweet, huh?

Unfortunately, the book is marred. I can see where the Amazon reviewer got the “very extremes of human emotion can tear the reader apart.” Every two or three pages, it seems, some character or another is falling passionately in love, railing at the injustice of the Tigana curse, getting his or her heart broken, having a life-altering revelation, or getting brutally murdered. It all adds up to I can’t believe any of these characters, and believe me, there are dozens of them. And Guy Gavriel Kay finds it necessary to tell us the life story of all of them, in lengthy backstory.

Here’s an example of the histrionics these characters get into:

“Erlein was literally shaking with fury. Devin looked at him and it was as if a curtain had been drawn back. In the wizard’s eyes hatred and terror vied for domination. His mouth worked spasmodically. He raised his left hand and pointed it at Alessan in a gesture of violent negation.”

Alessan had just bound the wizard to his will using some very old magic. How about shock? Disbelief? No, Erlein pitches a hissy fit before he even learns the stipulations of his binding.

I quit about halfway through, after the third or fourth unnecessary sex scene. I did, however, skim through the ending out of curiosity. There is an impressive casualty rate on a par with Hamlet or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which probably would tear me apart had I actually cared about any of these people. Okay, I cared about Tomasso. But he doesn’t play an active role after about the first fifth of the book.

I’m sad to say that this book is better than most of its brethren. Kay is original in that his story is set in an upside-down wannabe medieval Italy instead of wannabe medieval England, some of the characters are (gasp!) gay, and there is no clearly definable Dark Lord. But how can I trust an author who uses the phrase “river of tears” in a non-facetious manner?