Review - The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

There are very few writers that leave me so eagerly anticipating their next novel that I will rearrange my schedule to read it. Years ago, I rushed to the bookstore to snatch up the latest Robert Jordan or Tad Williams installment the moment it hit the shelves. These days, with literally hundreds of patient, unread books on the shelves whispering “read me!”, and my tastes constantly evolving, very few authors receive immediate readings.

Hell, even A Dance With Dragons and The Wise Man’s Fear - and let’s admit it, ongoing series tend to receive some priority, since the story is incomplete – waited a few months from release before I cracked their spines. Anticipation, after all, whets the appetite.

But there are exceptions. When I learned some time in January that Margo Lanagan was releasing a new novel, I sat up very straight in my chair and began fishing around online for release dates. I devoured her first novel – World Fantasy Award Winner Tender Morsels - and found that her short story collections served to whet my appetite for the next novel quite enough, thank you. I didn’t intend to wait.

Then I discovered, to my chagrin, that the Australian & UK release dates were set for mid-February, while the US edition wouldn’t be released until September. September!

Waiting I would be, it seemed…because I have this phobia about paying for shipping. There are many, many things I don’t mind paying for, but shipping falls into the painful gray area of “utterly wasted money”, and international shipping…well, even the thought makes me shiver. There’s a great UK-based bookstore called The Book Depository that ships free worldwide, but it kept telling me the book was out of stock.

I’m nothing, however, if not persistent. I finally found a new copy on Abe Books – fulfilled through the Book Depository. Does this meandering backstory have a point? Not really, other than to tell any other anxious readers that you can find your own international copies in that way if you don’t want to wait until September.

And you shouldn't.

The Brides of Rollrock Island is a novel based on the author’s novella from 2010, “Sea Hearts”, which won the World Fantasy Award for that category and went on to appear in The Best Dark Fantasy and Horror of 2010 anthology. I hadn’t read the novella, mainly because it originally appeared in an Australian anthology that was difficult to come by in the US.

The Brides of Rollrock Island is an unfortunate title, and the UK edition that I purchased has underwhelming, stock-YA cover art. The Australian version of the novel kept the Sea Hearts title but the UK and US versions opted for Brides instead. Who knows why marketing departments make the decisions that they do? Sea Hearts is a far more fitting title, certainly. One that reflects the many nuances and conflicts that Lanagan portrays.

My disappointment in the presentation faded quickly once I began the opening chapter. I slipped into Lanagan’s fictional world like a selkie back into its skin.

The story is narrated by six different characters, though the bulk of the action revolves around only two, separated by a generation – Daniel Mallett, a young boy from the village; and Misskaella Prout, an outcast girl who becomes the means for drawing women from the seals. For a novel this short – it clocks in at just under 300 pages – you might think this method would hinder the ability to build character, but somehow the tale, and the characters themselves, emerge as distinct and greater than the sum of their parts.

The basic premise of the novel is this: On a lonely island, Misskaella is a witch with the ability to draw women – beautiful, enchanting women – from the seals that return to the island to breed and bask each spring. The men become so enchanted by the seal-women that they take them as wives – even those that already have wives and family – and drive all of the “human” women to the mainland.

That, of course, is only the bird’s-eye view. A cover blurb that doesn’t come close to capturing the novel’s heart. The novel has at its center a number of ideas – a contrast between real flesh-and-blood women and their idealized, submissive selkie counterparts; the effect of the absence of real female presence on the men and children of the island; an evocation of the tensions, jealousies, and bonds that form in an isolated community; but perhaps more than anything the underlying instinct – the drive – of both human & selkie alike to return home. The selkies rejoice to return to the sea; no less does Dominick Mallett rejoice on his return to Rollrock, after many years away. Nostalgia, in part. But also an old glove that fits the hand.

Lanagan’s prose is an absolute pleasure, utilitarian and poetic at the same time. It rarely bogs down or draws attention to itself, but builds on very specific details that reflect the setting and move the story forward without sacrificing style. Spare, where sparseness is required. Like Rollrock Island itself. Full of wonder at other times, teeming with the wild magic that lies beneath a bluff exterior.

When the wind was a particular strength of nor’-easter, Toddy and I would run up towards Windaway Peak. There was a blade of land there, up which funneled all the airs from Gambrel Wood to Oaten Share, and we stood on it with our toes curled over the rock like eagle-claws, and spread our arms and were held up by the wind. It would push and sluice around us, and overbalance us back down towards the path, or desert us so that we fell forward into a shallow little tumble-room on the south side, and make us laugh. (Lanagan, 273)

Lanagan’s novels and stories all seem to take place in a sort of timeless zone, an area just outside of the common world, and The Brides of Rollrock Island is no exception. There are nods toward a modern or semi-modern lifestyle, especially on the mainland – busses, motorboats, electricity – but Rollrock seems to exist outside of these things for the most part. There is no attempt to place the story in a definite time-frame, and I think it would be unproductive to do so. Like fairy tales, Lanagan’s writings take place just off the map somewhere, in that no-man’s land where fantasy and reality collide (Lanagan’s first novel, Tender Morsels, was very much about the collision of fantasy with reality).

And yet, despite the timeless feel of the island setting, we get a great sense of the “roll” of time and generations through the novel, seeing the changes through the eyes of several characters, often separated by twenty or thirty years of time.

If there was one problem I found with the novel, it was the general helplessness of the men against Misskaella and the sea-wives.

Only one male character in the novel manages to resist the lure of the selkies. His ability to withstand what all the others are utterly defenseless against is never explained, and its importance is downplayed. His resistance implies that the men’s choices are not all controlled by enchantment, but (at least in part) by free will. This casts the decisions of the rest of the male population in an unflattering light, to say the least.

I found the general weakness and simplicity of the male characters a bit off-putting. The men in this novel are not bad, heartless people, per se, but they are often crude, hormone-driven fools. There is some truth there, but it is far from a universal truth.

That qualm aside, this is a vibrant, beautifully-written novel, full of the magic of island and sea and of those things – human and otherwise – that pass between. Highly recommended.

Drawing on the Green

Spring weather has cracked open like an egg, and now that I finally have a day away from work I plan to get out into the woods and soak up the sounds and smells. It’s one of those rare spring days here in Illinois – a slight breeze, sun, the odor of damp earth & blooming green. Nice spring days are almost always accompanied by wind, so I’ll take the change while it's here.

After working last night and getting to bed late, I woke up around 11 with a folk song playing in my head. It seemed fitting for the bursting free of winter’s chains, for solitude and grey-green rocks. When it comes to this sort of thing, it’s always the fabulous poet Mary Oliver I turn to, because few people can put that yearning so poignantly:

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

From “The Journey”, © 1986 by Mary Oliver

So, with luck, I can get out and clear the mind with a long walk, find a cozy outdoor spot where the glare isn’t too bad on the computer screen and pound out a few pages in my novel – because, really, clearing my head of the static of semis, car exhaust, work, internet distractions, and electronic devices (aside from the one I actually write on) is necessary for the mindset of this novel. Wish me luck.

I’ll leave you with a couple of the songs that have been running through my head today. Because, hey, maybe they can help you clear away the smoke too.

A Year's Reading

Reviewing an entire year's worth of reading in retrospect is a daunting task. Looking back, we may misremember what we thought of a given book, or overlook the flaws that were so obvious on first reading. I'm left instead with impressions, random scenes, rather than the coherent whole. But what the hell, I'll give it a try anyway.

2011 was a year of mixed reading – a variety of genres, subjects, and styles. I followed through on my resolution to read (and re-read) more classics. I have a deep love and respect for nineteenth-century novels, but I find that all too often I pass them up because of their sheer size and the mental demands they require. Let’s face it, most modern genre novels require less of the reader than Dickens, Tolstoy, Hardy, or George Eliot.

Total Books Read in 2011: 49

That’s down several from the year before, but the difference is due more to the size of the books than anything else. I tackled some real doorstops last year. I’ve never had issues with long books, but I realized something about them last year.

Most are pointlessly bloated.

I don’t say all. In spite of its digressions, I wouldn’t shorten Anna Karenina by a word. Same goes for Middlemarch and The Adventures of Don Quixote.

In some cases, I may even encourage said author. George R.R. Martin – feel free to make the next book, and the one after that, just as long as you like. If some of the narrative is off-topic, so be it. When I open a new volume of A Song of Ice & Fire I’m perfectly happy to spend weeks, months, or years enveloped in the narrative. Though I’ve had quite enough of that Meereen plot-line. Bring everybody home to the Seven Kingdoms.

In the bloated department, there are varying levels of severity. Patrick Rothfuss, for example, keeps things interesting and fun in spite of an oversized and meandering narrative. I can enjoy The Wise Man’s Fear in spite of its heft because Rothfuss is a damned fine storyteller.

Another one? Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book. I don’t go in for science fiction, generally, but this is Sci Fi lite. It's about people - about how different, and yet how similar, we are to those who came before. A thought-provoking book. Not a spaceship in sight, thank you. Oversized, and beautiful, and (I thought) somewhat anti-climactic.

Going several degrees worse – Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. I’d heard good things about it, and I have a weakness for big historical novels. I found some of the story intriguing…but mostly I thought it was a big, ungainly, sprawling mess. Flat characters and a tiresomely redundant plot. I found myself, six-hundred pages in, thinking “haven’t I read this part already? Surely I did, back on page 324?”

One final mention of an over-large book? The Dragon Queen by Alice Borchardt. This was a selection for my book club. Weighing in at only 473 pages, it’s practically a novella compared to the others I’ve mentioned. And yet… And yet it seemed twice as long and painful as any of them. I will say no more on the matter. But be forewarned.

Some Highly Recommended Books of 2011:

Note: I’ll leave the classics off this list. Recommending a classic seems almost...well...redundant.

Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay – I’ve already reviewed this one here, so I’ll be brief. The latest fantasy-historical by Kay. Asian setting. It matches up well with some of his best works like A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of Al-Rassan.

Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin – Another book I’ve already reviewed here. It’s by Ursula LeGuin. What more needs to be said?

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry – I loved this book. Absolutely loved it. Harsh, funny, touching. Whether you like westerns or not (and I’m generally lukewarm on them), read this one.

Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King – Native American magic-realism. Entwines Native American mythology with modern Native American culture. It’s essentially about stories – their significance, their relevance, and the effect they have on who we are and who we would like to be.

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin – At this point, giving Martin my recommendation is like spitting into the ocean. Pointless and redundant. But I’ll do it anyway. The man is sadistic. Downright evil. Oh, and genius.

Holiday by M. Rickert – One of my favorite fantasy short story writers, and criminally under-read. This collection came out around Christmas 2010 in a gorgeously illustrated hardcover edition. Weird fiction full of deep ideas, disturbing images, and sudden unexpected glimpses of the wondrous. If you like short fiction, try her. You won’t be disappointed.

A Few Disappointments:

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett – Mentioned above. Too long, too wooden.

Something Rich & Strange by Patricia McKillip – I’m a big fan of Patricia McKillip’s books and her lush, lyrical writing style. I purchased this one because it’s a bit of a rarity. The second book in a planned series illustrated by Brian & Wendy Froud that was cancelled after this book came out. This seemed forced and overdone to me. Her images were as lush as usual, but not as clear, and the modern environmental fable didn’t work as a plot device. Stick with McKillip’s other books.

The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers – This book seemed almost like a shoe-in on the “loved it” list. Shelley & Byron & Keats and succubae in early nineteenth century Europe. It had everything going for it except its execution. I was never drawn into the story, and I found it unfocused and often confusing. The main character was neither very likeable nor very coherent. I wanted to like it. I really did.

The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll - I really enjoyed Carroll's The Land of Laughs, so I had similar high expectations for The Marriage of Sticks. The book had its moments, but the ending seemed both preachy and highly contrived. I was not impressed. I have several more of Carroll's novels hanging around, so I hope this was just a blip on the radar.

What was your favorite book that you read in 2011?

2011 Under the Bridge

I’m getting to this a bit late, but an annual review post is almost obligatory, and since this would be my first annual review post, it’s doubly so. This first year of blogging didn’t progress as smoothly as anticipated. To say that it came in small, short-lived bursts would be fairly accurate, and it grew smaller and more short-lived as the year drew on. Life, and laziness, disrupts the best laid plans. And this was not “best laid”, but more along the lines of “seat-of-your-pants”.

All told, 2011 was an exciting year for me. In a time when so many are struggling, out-of-work, and out-of-pocket (including many close friends and family), I was fortunate enough to remain gainfully employed. My wife and I took a long-planned and long-awaited vacation to England in the spring, which turned out just about as perfectly as I had imagined it might.

From a writing perspective, it was neither as productive nor successful as I’d hoped. My bare handful of short stories made the rounds of some excellent magazines, with plenty of encouraging feedback but, all told, polite refusal. A glimmer of hope arrived in December with the acceptance of my story, “Flatland”, by Jabberwocky Magazine, one of my absolute favorite venues. So I’m hoping to carry that momentum of success into 2012.

The novel I began 2011 with sits (rather comfortably, for the time being, with its feet up and a full pipe of the Old Toby) at a point not far from its ending, but written so firmly into a corner that it may have to gestate there a while longer.

The good news is that I started a new novel that I’m damned excited about. It began as a short story, but I quickly realized that the idea was too large to fit within those confines. So I started from scratch. And, amazingly, I even have most of the novel loosely mapped out. That doesn’t sound like much, but given my previous methods of writing, it’s re-inventing the wheel. It seems to work, productivity-wise. It’s a great feeling not to spend the first two hours of every writing session feeling my way ahead blindly. Because, I’ll be honest, I don’t have the patience to spend two hours wringing my brain for nothing.

Within the next few days – I promise this time, no kidding – I will be posting up my 2011 reading year in review. Some great books; some not so great books. A wide variety that includes fantasy novels of various types; historical fiction; classics; short story collections; even a western (one that dually classifies as a classic, and rightfully so).

Looking further ahead - I have ideas for posts on living simply, Charles Dickens, book collecting, and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire.

Maybe, just maybe, I’ll get a few of them actually written.

Great Fictional Characters

I am knee-deep in re-reading two of my favorite books - A Game of Thrones and Anna Karenina - and they set me pondering on fictional characters. Both books have a diverse, enchanting, complicated set of characters. That may be the end of any major similarities between the two (aside from the description “epic”, which applies far more to War and Peace than to Anna Karenina).

But it’s enough. With very few exceptions, the most memorable books are those with memorable characters. Take Dickens, for example. Ask readers who love Dickens what their favorite books are. Eight times out of ten the answer will be either Great Expectations or Bleak House (I prefer the latter). Why? Because Pip, Joe Gargery, Miss Havisham, Esther Summerson, Inspector Bucket, and Mr. Jarndyce are Dickens’ most vibrant (and mutable) characters.

It takes a unique talent to make characters come alive, with all their heroism and eccentricities and faults, their selfishness and doubt and endless crises of faith. It isn’t always a comfortable situation. However much the reader may criticize her actions, or stand on the sideline sadly shaking our heads, we recognize in poor doomed Emma Bovary – who has always a romantic yearning toward what she doesn’t have – a certain part of ourselves. It may be deeply buried, but it’s there.

So I began the futile effort of casting about it my head for my favorite characters. There were almost too many to list, but I was eventually able to pare it down to five or so, with a handful of honorable mentions:

• Tyrion Lannister, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire
  From the moment we first meet Tyrion, he mesmerizes us. Tyrion is a dwarf (as in the medical condition, not the prototypical fantasy race). He is also a member of the primary family of antagonists in the books, and perhaps the most arrogant of them all. But he sets himself apart from the common run of enemies with his wit, honesty, and charm. A complicated character, we come to discover his doubts, his demons, his struggles with ineptitude, his lechery, and his heroism. But most of all his thirst for life.

• Constantine Levin, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
  It isn’t easy to select one favorite character from Tolstoy. Pierre (from War & Peace) is comparable to Levin. Anna Karenina and Natasha Rostova are two of the finest female characters in literature. Stephan Oblonsky, Levin’s easygoing and likeable brother-in-law, demands consideration. But Levin manages to carry off, through his internal and external struggles, the prize. His social awkwardness, fierce jealousy, and struggle with faith ring incredibly true, probably not least because he expressed so many of Tolstoy’s own ideas and doubts. In a novel full of sharply-drawn, beautiful characters, Levin stands in as the crowning achievement.

• Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
  Most female readers are enamored of Mr. Darcy, and yet I think that Elizabeth Bennett is more than a match for him (or any man). It is impossible, while reading Pride and Prejudice not to fall in love with Miss Bennett. Her high ideals and sharp tongue are irrepressible, and I often found myself smiling over her words, whether she was dissembling with the comically dim-witted Mr. Collins or bandying insults with Darcy. One would never grow bored with her around, though one might become overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of her wit.

• Augustus McCrae, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove
  Gus single-handedly manages to lift Lonesome Dove from an “above-average” novel to a great one. Pull Gus from the book and you have the fascinating story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. With Gus, you have a complicated saga, complete with humor, wisdom, pathos, and a kind of dusty, gnarled charm. Not only does Gus provide the humor and a large portion of the dialogue, but he provides the kind of counterpoint – the flashlight, so to speak – by which we can better see the depths of the other characters. Woodrow Call, the stoic leader of the Hat Creek outfit and Gus’s friend, would have come off entirely flat without Gus to illuminate him. Great characters can carry a story, and Gus shoulders more than his share of the load.

  Sir John Falstaff William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts I & II

  How can any list of great characters be complete without Falstaff? Drunken, lecherous, idle, and yet possessed of such a depth of brilliance that I find new puns and new ways to read his dialogue every time I encounter Henry IV. He is, I think, the only Shakespearean character that can mentally vie with Hamlet, and yet he doesn’t possess the Danish Prince’s nihilism, nor his fascination with death. Falstaff’s fascination is with life. His zest and laughter is contagious to everyone who reads or watches the play.

There are many, many more that made the short list, but didn’t quite find their way onto the final five – Nabokov’s prosy pedophile, Humbert Humbert; Dorothea Brooke from George Eliot’s Middlemarch; the wizard Ged from LeGuin’s Earthsea books, etc…

You get the picture.

Now you try! Please, feel free to share your favorite characters in the comments, and just as importantly, share a few words about why they appeal to you.

Review - Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

I said in my “Upcoming Reviews” post that I would review Under Heaven and Across the Nightingale Floor together. I lied. I decided Under Heaven deserved its own review. But I’ll get around to Nightingale Floor soon enough.

I hope.

Prior to the last few months, I’ve read little Asian-inspired fantasy. I can’t say exactly why that is. My fascination has always been with European history, myth, and legend. Native American history and mythology has always had a pull on me as well.

But the Far East has primarily stayed off the radar. The history of the Silk Road countries – the Middle-East, China, India, etc… – is fascinating, and has an immense bearing on the European history that I confessed an interest in earlier. The Far East gave Europe spices, weapons, slaves, new modes of thought, Ghengis Khan, and the Black Death, amongst many, many other things. European history would be far different without them.

So what, exactly, does it take to draw me to an Asian fantasy novel? Guy Gavriel Kay, of course.

Kay is one of the most intelligent, thought-provoking, and moving fantasy novelists writing today. His historically-inspired fantasy novels – particularly Tigana, The Lions of Al-Rassan, & A Song For Arbonne – deserve to be mentioned among the very best fantasy novels ever, in my opinion.

So when I noticed the release of his newest book late last year, Under Heaven, I knew I had to have it, even if it’s subject was outside of my realm of knowledge. Especially since it was outside my realm of knowledge.

Under Heaven lives up to its promise in just about every way. Kay once again captures the essence of a time period, in this case Tang Dynasty China. It is full of snippets of song and poetry, lyrical fragments that echo the beauty of traditional Chinese verse and is full of recurring Far Eastern imagery:

Why sir, it is true: on the shores of Kuala Nor
White bones have lain for many years.
No one has gathered them. The new ghosts
Are bitter and angry, the old ghosts weep.
Under the rain and within the circle of mountains
The air is full of their cries.

The narrative follows the stories of two protagonists: Shen Tai, who has gone to the battleground of Kuala Nor in his grieving time after his father’s death to honor the dead; and his sister Li-Mei, who in Tai’s absence has been given as a bride to the leader of the barbarian Bogü people north of the wall.

For his work honoring and burying the battlefield dead, Tai is given a priceless gift that sets off a chain reaction of political intrigue, with Tai at the center, and he has to fight to merely stay alive. Meanwhile, north of the wall, Li-Mei finds herself in mysterious, unexpected company.

The characters are exactly what one expects out of a Kay novel – fully-rounded, interesting, thoughtful. Kay’s protagonists are a thoughtful bunch, and Shen Tai and Li-Mei are no exception.

And as usual, even the antagonists of the story are shown in their many shades of grey. Self-centered, stubborn, and power-hungry, certainly. But fully human in their desires and goals, as prone to mistakes and miscalculations as anyone else.

I have read elsewhere online that many were not happy with the ending. The novel does change pace during the final third of the novel, as if Kay had far too much story to wrap up within a single volume. The main narrative arc of the novel comes to rest directly before the primary action that the novel has been building toward, and I can see how some might find it anti-climactic.

I, however, struggle to find fault with it. Can you have a novel that takes place directly before the start of WWII? Does it then have to encompass WWII, or can it merely encapsulate its events and the parts the characters played in those events? That is the situation here – wherein the main novel essentially ends prior to a major event – and that event (and our characters’ roles in that event) are wrapped up epilogue-style, as if by a future historian looking back.

While I don’t find fault with the hurried dénouement of Under Heaven, I did find myself wishing to spend more time in Kay’s alternate China. I certainly wouldn’t have been opposed to two books to tell the entire tale.

By turns beautiful and heartbreaking, Under Heaven is not to be missed.

Upcoming Reviews

Due to my general laziness (I may have mentioned this previously), I’m several books behind on my reviewing. I started with the intention of reviewing most of the books I read this year.

So an idea of what you can expect forthcoming in the next few weeks:

• The Bards of Bone Plain by Patricia McKillip
• Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay
• Across the Nightingale Floor by Liam Hearn
• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones
• Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan
• Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

I probably won’t review all of the aforementioned books, depending upon time and desire. Since there are some similarities between them in setting and tone, I will likely do a joint review of Under Heaven and Across the Nightingale Floor. Compare and contrast, that sort of thing. I feel almost bad to do that to Nightingale Floor, since it was a solid first novel, but very few novels compare well with Kay’s best works.

Currently Reading:

• The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
• The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (audio).

The Rothfuss book will be joining the list of “To Be Reviewed” shortly. Stay tuned.

Into a Dark Wood - Reviewing Robert Holdstock

 I stumbled across a recent (and excellent) review / overview of Robert Holdstock’s “Mythago Wood” cycle over at The Green Man Review, and it got me to thinking about the books.

If you’ve never read them, these books are some of the most mind-blowing, original, puzzling, and under-appreciated novels in the fantasy genre. And they’re nearly impossible to explain. They’re “you had to be there” novels, because nothing I say can clearly capture, or even loosely capture, the essence of Holdstock’s novels.

Ryhope Wood is a small tract of forest in Herefordshire, England. It’s approximately three miles across. You could ride around it entirely in a few hours. But inside, once you breach its outer defenses, it is both timeless and nearly endless. You could travel for lifetimes without reaching the far side.

What Holdstock does in these novels is capture that most difficult thing in all of writing to capture. Magic. I mean real magic. Not fireballs and unicorns and all the other stuff genericized by the larger part of the fantasy genre as “magic”. I’m talking real bone and sinew magic. Echoes in the blood magic. That fleeting feeling that momentarily comes over you when you hear a snatch of music, or smell a campfire, or feel a sudden kinship – however briefly – with your older, deeper self. The self that still remembers cold nights huddled over smoldering fires in the primeval forest. The self that remembers the smell of animal-skin clothing and the taste of rare boar meat.

These books won’t appeal to everyone. They are difficult. Opaque. Unlike most fantasy novels, the reader never fully understands the rules of the wood. As soon as something starts to become clear, we realize we are walking on quicksand and must move aside and reconsider things. Quickly. If you think you are aware of where one of the novels is heading, there is a good chance that you are dead wrong.

The books venture into the labyrinth of the subconscious, the hidden parts of our mind that we can’t directly access but are there nonetheless, living fragments of our latent human instincts, remnants of our “survival of the fittest” past when each day was a struggle to survive. As such, the labyrinth is the recurring theme of the books. The mind and the forest are reflections of one another, labyrinths, and each character travels in toward the dark, unmapped center in search of the self.


Is there really a collective subconscious? I don’t know. I’m not a psychologist. And I’m certain psychologists couldn’t agree on an answer either. But reading these novels, it certainly feels true. And for those with a background or an interest in mythology and mythological symbolism, these books are a treasure-trove.

These books aren’t without their faults. They are unevenly paced. Their strangeness is sometime off-putting, keeping the reader at arm’s length. Since they operate on a different set of rules, we don’t often clearly understand the characters’ motivations, and it causes us to mentally question the decisions they make.
These are quibbles, really, in the greater scope of things. Because these are great, great books. If you are a reader of fantasy literature and you haven’t read any of the Ryhope novels, you are missing out on one of the truly great series of this (or any other) genre. Do yourself a favor and check them out.

Oh, and start with Mythago Wood. It’s the right way to introduce yourself to Ryhope.

Laziness and other Virtues

I’m terribly overdue for a few new posts. I’ve been on silent mode. Mute.

Why, you ask?

It’s complicated. Incredibly, densely complicated. Remember theoretical physics? Complicated like that.

I’m lying, of course. I never took theoretical physics. And if I had, well…I suppose it’s probably best for my self-confidence that I didn’t.

I haven’t posted because…wait for it…I’m lazy. This is therapeutic, right? Admission is the first step on the road to recovery.

I’ve got a long streak of laziness that creeps past my blogging (or anti-blogging as it might be called) activities and into my everyday life. I’m working to conquer it. I’m just not working very hard. That’s my only pun, I promise.

This is the bane of my writing life (and also my home- and yard-care regimen, according to mine own dear wife). But, you see, conquering my reluctance to actually sit down and write is the very reason I started this blog. I wanted to cultivate the habit of writing. Every. Single. Day.

Even when it’s hard.

Even when I’m tired, or lacking confidence, or distracted, or when I don’t have a single idea what to write.

That last point was the blog’s intention. Random thoughts. Spew out my ideas on music, or baseball, or family, or a recent book I’ve read. I’ve got plenty of them rolling around up there in my cluttered, disorganized mess of a mind. It’s about initiating a habit to sit down and allow words to flow onto paper (or screen).

Because I’ll be honest. I’m not the world’s greatest self-motivator. I’m not a Type A personality. My attention span is approximately five seconds, give or take four. It’s a miracle anything gets done.

But it does. Work progresses. I’ve completed a couple of stories recently, and began another that has outgrown its initial idea. I think there’s a novel there. A damn good, original novel. If I can get it out. It’s going to be fun to write.

My current novel is stalled, however. Twenty-two chapters in, somewhere around the 2/3 point. This is (to put it mildly) frustrating. Not overwhelmingly frustrating. I am not contemplating a belly flop from a high bridge.

Yet.

It is damaging to my fragile self-motivation because now – oh now – I have to go back and try to fix it. I wrote this far without a script, without any more than a vague plan for an ending. And now that things are coming to head, I don’t have confidence in the direction it has taken. It seems contrived, and a bit stale.

I have no intention of letting it die, but it’s clear to me now that substantial portions of it are going to need to be reconsidered and rewritten. Frankly put, it’s a mess, and it threatens to undermine my daily resolve.

So, two things.

One, back to the blog. Fingers on the keyboard. Thoughts on the page. Habit.

Two, outline.

I’m afraid that my pre-planning is a disaster. I wrote myself into a corner because I didn’t plan enough in advance. I let the plot flow with minimal forethought for where the story was going. Sometimes these things work themselves out. In short fiction, they usually do. Or, at least, they’re easy to fix. This novel, on the other hand, is like a river that’s come over its banks. And I failed to put up any levees. Time, I suppose, to get out the squeegee and the wet/dry vac and try to put things back in order.

My goal is to spend more time on set-up. It’s a fine line to walk, because outlined scenes are simply not the way I write. I like to allow scenes to proceed naturally from the characters and situation. Outlined scenes so often seem wooden and lifeless, like a scene from a daytime soap. Characters can surprise you. They grow. They change. And, occasionally, they take you places you hadn’t planned or intended to go.

When it happens, and it works, it’s wonderful. When it doesn’t, you end up with the mess I have now. So it’s become abundantly clear that I need to set a clearer target for my stories, all while staying the hell out of the characters’ way.

Sounds complicated. But considerably less complicated than theoretical physics. That’s something, at least. I’ll let you all know how it goes.

And, I'll leave you with a pretty picture. You're welcome.

...On Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy is one of my favorite novelists, occupying a place at the top of my list with Tolstoy and Tolkien and very few others. There, I’ve said it. I enjoy Thomas Hardy and his peculiar brand of pessimism.

Having admitted Hardy is among my favorite novelists, I’ll admit something else. I’ve only recently read Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I can’t say why it is that I’ve waited so long to get around to reading what many consider to be Hardy’s masterpiece, except to say that Hardy isn’t someone whose entire oeuvre you swallow whole. He needs to be digested in bits and pieces – for the reader’s sanity, at least.

It also reminds me of an essay by the very funny and acute Nick Hornby, who wrote in response to his first (late) reading of David Copperfield (Dickens is Hornby’s favorite writer):

“Even the snootiest critic/publisher/whatever must presumably accept that we must all, at some point, read a book for the first time. I know that the only thing brainy people do with their lives is reread great works of fiction, but surely even James Wood and Harold Bloom read before they reread? (Maybe not. Maybe they've only ever reread, and that's what separates them from us. Hats off to them.)”

Hardy’s novels, however, test the very reasons that we read. Why do we read? To discover? To explore? Escape? Learn?

Few people, whatever their reasons, read specifically to be depressed. Unless a novel is really spectacular in other ways, if it depresses me I will eventually put it aside and probably not return to it. Crime & Punishment was that way for me. In spite of an interesting plot, halfway through I found that I dreaded picking it up again. A few of Faulkner’s novels have affected me this way - Sanctuary, to name just one.

Hardy doesn’t depress me. His novels plummet unerringly toward the tragic. Poor Tess Durbyfield is doomed. Nearly everyone who picks up this novel understands that before reading the first line. Most of Hardy’s novels work in similar fashion – tragic character flaws bring about a downfall; circumstances conspire against happiness; selfish (and even well-meaning) secondary characters contribute to the effect.

I think it is a mistake to think, however, that all this adds up to a sum total of gloom. It does not. Aside from one particular instance in Jude the Obscure, gloom often suffuses the books but never dominates them. Hardy was pessimistic about human nature. He was also well aware of nature’s ambiguous attitude toward humanity. Nature the sheltering hand, the ever-nurturing mother, does not exist in Hardy. Nature is nature – beautiful and treacherous and altogether enigmatic.

This ambiguity and general pessimism does not supersede beauty, which you find literally everywhere in Hardy’s novels and stories. Beautiful people, magical moments, and – more than anything – an incredibly vivid and breathtaking landscape, are ever-present.

Hardy’s prose is poetic in the extreme, and more visual than just about any other writer I can think of. That is something the three novelists I mentioned in the opening have in common. Hardy, Tolstoy, and Tolkien all create some of the most vivid scenes and landscapes imaginable.

One thing that great art does is allow us to see things more clearly than we could with our own eyes. Hardy’s “Wessex” is that way. Everything down to the smells, colors, and sounds of that country are indelibly impressed upon the mind, more so that if we had walked that country ourselves. Consider this passage, describing Tess and Angel’s rambles into the morning pastures around Talbothay’s dairy:

Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like a white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous rocks. Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and hang on the wind sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails subdividing the mead, which shone like glass rods. Minute diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess’s eyelashes, and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes scintillated in the sunbeams and she was again the dazzlingly fair dairymaid only, who had to hold her own against the other women of the world. (136-137)

Hardy’s novels (and short stories) are absolutely brimming with scenes like this, which makes the reader long to walk into the story however poorly things are bound to turn out.

I consider myself an Anglophile with a particular love of the English countryside – thatched cottages, rolling English hills, stone fences, a thousand years of history at every turn. For someone with an interest in that sort of thing, Hardy supersedes even the charm of Dickens or Austen, who are less pastoral in their approach.

That is not to say that Hardy’s novels are not flawed, in some respects. The overarching doom of the protagonists seems almost contrived rather than naturally-occurring. There are so many little moments of hope and possibility for these characters, and yet always there is that chance meeting that destroys all, the one comment left unsaid. Hardy is often keen to point these moments out with comments like – “If she only would have appealed to --” Of course she does not, the road to happiness goes untaken, the fate is unfortunately sealed.

Quibbles, really. Because like the best travels, the point of Thomas Hardy’s writings is the journey, not the destination.