Books of 2019 Part 2: 30-21
30) The Warren - Brian Evenson
I picked this up purely because it was super short, and read it in a day to up my reading quota a bit. This is a good little bit of short sci-fi. The premise and plot remind me a lot of Duncan Jones' film "Moon": isolated setting with a central character questioning their identity and purpose and attempting in vain to consult with an intelligent computer who may or may not be on their side. I feel like the way this resolves itself becomes a little on the nose: the earlier questioning of identity, purpose and "what defines a person" were quite ambiguous, and in the end the question is changed to be more of a "maybe I'm more human than you" statement, and I would have preferred more ambiguity being left in there. It's not just that the conclusion of the story made it too overt and less subtle, but it felt like Evenson was trying to wrap up this short story neatly and efficiently, but he could have explored these questions longer and deeper without ending it, and I'd have found it quite engaging (although yes, I may not have picked it up if it were longer). The mood, the setting, the enigma of the narrator and their situation, it's all skilful world building and I was on board for a longer and frankly less definitive ride than I ended up getting.
29) Much Obliged, Jeeves - PG Wodehouse
I don't think Wodehouse will ever make a huge impression on me, because I know what sort of hijinks to expect and it's rare for him to deviate from a tested formula or innovate within his own proprietary genre. So it's safe entertainment this, and it gave me multiple chuckles throughout as he's just a witty writer and there's plenty of situational comedy here that hits the right notes to lampoon the upper classes and their foppishness. This particular novel finds Wooster misguidedly getting involved with politics to help out a friend, while fending off unwanted advances from eligible bachelorettes of his set, trying to avoid accusations of theft, and mostly concerned about a secret "butlers' book" that dishes up all the dirt on servants' masters, himself included. I did find this one ended a bit abruptly and a lot of the climax/resolution of the farcical elements told in recount rather than live action, while it also lacked a bit of the layering of situational absurdities I've enjoyed elsewhere from Wodehouse. Lots of fun but not quite the heights he can reach.
28) The Third Man - Graham Greene
This was an enjoyable read; predictably so. I enjoyed Carol Reed's film (that this was specifically written to become) in a noirish kind of way but don't recall it in great detail. This has the suspense, the mystery and so forth well woven in the way that Greene does, and the difference from the film (as I recall it, I may well be mistaken) is that this places more emphasis on the moral questions at the heart of the protagonist Martins' dilemma, in particular the revelation that his beloved friend could actually be guilty of his crimes and his deciding, in the end, to do the right thing. Some of the dialogue especially later in the book feels more organically Greene, and that made this more enjoyable than just a prosaic version of the plot I've seen on screen although the added interior psychology of the protagonist helped it along as well.
27) The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower Part 3) - Stephen King
#ContinuingSeries
I think this is the least of the Dark Tower series so far, but by no means a poor read. The main issue is probably a general indictment of the third volume in any ongoing series: the narrative is quite fragmented here, and there isn't a strong singular theme running through the parts like there was in The Drawing of the Three (guided by the three tarot cards and the quest for doors between worlds) or like there didn't even need to be with The Gunslinger, because it was all singular world creation. There's a number of different threads to this story, and because King never seemed keen on having this volume conclude the story (he actually offers a post scriptum apology to the reader for it ending so abruptly and inconclusively), there are myriad other threads introduced along the way to continue furnishing this world with characters and ideas and histories. So it feels a little patchy at times, but there are many compelling passages and a stack of fascinating themes explored along the way. My main quibble with this as a read, though, is the sequence in the middle where a character is attempting to make passage between the worlds. With no real prior context we are introduced to a haunted mansion where a 'gatekeeper' is depicted as a demonic monster emerging from the plasterboard while another amorphous demon commits a bestial act of rape on another character. My quibble is not so much in the detail or the experience of reading it (although it is unpleasant. The trouble is the sequence feels out of place here and is more cognate with King's other works. And the sequence can only resolve happily given where we know the story is going, so the fact that it drags on for so long and feels like a pointless, and endless diversion. It reminds me of that Simpsons sequence where Stephen King can't help but be reflexively drawn back into clichéd horror tropes while trying to explore other areas of interest ("It opened the gates of HELL!"). He could have been far more efficient with language and storytelling but he really got bogged down in his charnel mire here. In spite of that passage though, this was another entertaining read and a necessary stepping stone en route to the series conclusion.
26) Chocky - John Wyndham
This was an interesting read, if only because it unfolds very differently to how I'd expected, based on both the premise and Wyndham's previous work that I've read (Day of the Triffids, which I did read in a 'book writeup' year but didn't write it up as I was doing my TIME reading challenge at the time and that was all I wrote up). It's also hard not to view this through the lens of Liu Cixin's Trisolaris trilogy (respectively my #28 book of 2015, my #5 book of 2017 and my #3 book of 2018) because once I got a sense of what's going on here, it's clear that there are very similar themes here to those explored in Liu's trilogy. But where Trisolaris (or extraterrestrial force X in any other similar premise) is undoubtedly a malevolent force, the difference in this novel is that the force is theoretically neutral and, in practice, quite benevolent. As such, the conceit here and the wraparound narrative take on a mild Kafkaesque narrative form as the "what if...?" premise is taken down the logical pathways open to it, culminating in the unforeseen more nightmarish scenario, that is still presented in objective and ultimately no-harm-done terms by the narrator. It's quite a compulsively readable book because I was invested in the innocence of the central character Matthew, the dilemma of his parents when their son is 'possessed' by an invisible friend, but ultimately this was enjoyable just because it was unexpectedly wholesome and sweet. There seems to be a huge life or death or even Armageddon scenario at stake, but everybody in the end is largely well-intentioned and doing the best with what they have.
25) The Children Act - Ian McEwan
This feels a bit like minor McEwan, but only to me. I feel like if I'd come to this as an early McEwan discovery I'd have different thoughts. But I feel I know his milieu so well by now that there weren't any big surprises or revelations here. There was also a feeling I got at one point of unintended dramatic irony, where a character is assessing the situation and concludes that another character will 'get over it' in time and move on and I wanted to yell: "no, you fool! You're characters in an Ian McEwan novel, that's not how it will play out at all!". The world here is the upper professional classes with our protagonist a prominent judge, renowned for her pragmatic rationales for preferencing individual welfare over metaphysical faith-based considerations. Her dilemmas and quandaries are fairly stock McEwan stuff: putting the personal aside for the greater good, questioning the validity of religious arguments, life/death decisions in the hand of one individual. The ruminations and questions he poses are all intriguing, even gripping, stuff, but there's a sense in reading this that he had certain points that he wanted to make, and at times the narrative gets bogged down in humdrum details where he needs to progress the flow of time along but doesn't know what to do with his characters in the meantime so describes their daily routine to no ultimate purpose. It's possible that the world is just not intricately drawn and I feel he doesn't have a strong personal connection to it, so the value here is only in letting him get his point across with not a huge amount of power or entertainment along the way.
24) The Heart Goes Last - Margaret Atwood
In a similar vein, this really feels like lesser Atwood to be honest, and not just because I kind of 'get' her thing by now. It does have all her great hallmarks in the first half of the book, largely world building in this futuristic post-economic catastrophe world where our protagonists Stan and Charmaine are living in their car while trying to scrounge out what remains of a living. Then they enter an exclusive pseudo-Utopian enclave that's part prison, part gated community, and the narrative becomes quite fragmented and disjointed. It has a sort of wandering style where one leg of the story leads to the next, and so forth, but it ends up going in very different directions than it felt from the get-go and thematically becomes a bit confused. The story from about halfway becomes less about Stan and Charmaine and more about bringing down and defeating Ed, the founder of this Utopian experiment/cult, a character who doesn't really feature much at all except as a figurehead early on in the story (so the ultimate conflict being about bringing him down seems apropo of nothing). And while Atwood seems interested throughout in sexual politics, in negotiations between the 'heart' and more primal urges, the points she seems to be making feel laboured and quite stretched by the ways in which the story goes. It just felt like the focus shifted, and a lot of the world building and character construction/motivation undergoes this 90 degree turn midway; I wasn't bored or that confused by it, but I personally felt my priorities and sympathies in the story shift too much for them to have felt much impact by the story's conclusion.
23) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
(Warning: if you happen to be the one person who hasn't yet read this, I spoil almost everything in the entire plot in this review)
I resisted this for a really unfeasible amount of time. It's just one of those books that, when everybody in the entire universe is reading it and telling me it's amazing, I just put it off until the hype has been actually long forgotten. And then I can view it as an historical document, "fads of recent times". And look, I was quite drawn into this, as many people were. Hosseini has an authentic, honest narrative voice and his waxing nostalgic and sentimental for an Afghanistan of yesteryear; his observations of the Soviet occupation and, later, the Taliban regime, are poignant and wistful. But of course this is less a tribute to a fallen Afghanistan and more a portrait of guilt and redemption, with the key fault lying in the problems and prejudices of Afghan society. I say I was quite caught up in this, but mainly the first half around young Amir and his conflicted relationship with his loyal Hazara servant 'friend' Hassan, as well as his own distant father. I found the first half quite a compelling look at divided loyalties and the mistakes people make as youths that end up echoing throughout their lives. During the 'redemption' part of this narrative later in the piece when Amir returns to Afghanistan, I felt there were a few too many contrivances and conveniences that crept into the plot structure without earning them. Hosseini does his best to lay out Chekhov's gun early, but it did feel like he was quite clumsily and awkwardly telling us "hey, there's a gun here. Look. Gun. I want you to remember that there's a gun here". In particular, Amir's confrontation and final 'battle' with Assef was particularly heavy-handed. Aside from the faux-Dickensian plot machination of "oh this grand Taliban leader who just publicly stoned people to death in a stadium? Turns out... it's actually the bully who tormented Amir and Hassan as a kid!!! *jazz hands*", the fact that Assef does all of the following: he leaves Sorhab in the room with him and Amir; he conveniently forgets/neglects the fact that Sorhab always carries a slingshot with him and that he's an amazing shot with it (despite everybody talking about it constantly); AND prior to entering the room, gives his guards instructions that "if Amir walks out of the room, let him pass" - wow what a string of unfortunate missteps to allow our heroes to escape. I mean, it's all classic dramatic devices and the end goal is still cathartic and satisfying (I should add: there was a potentially hideous contrivance in the symmetry of "Amir and Soraya can't have kids in America, and now Amir is going to Afghanistan to rescue an orphaned child - oh my god will those two dovetail somehow at the end? If only there were a way to make that happen" - this isn't actually treated as a big reveal, and Hosseini merely uses dramatic irony in that Amir is seemingly the only person in the scenario or entire universe who doesn't see it coming), but I couldn't help but notice the emotional gears being turned even while I was caught up in the machine. I can see why it was such a phenomenon, but part of the reason for that phenomenon is that, like The Book Thief, it kind of gives everybody what they want to finish the story.
22) Gould’s Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan
If you're wondering, this book is the reason these writeups are a bit late, as I hadn’t finished this book before Christmas break, and so I didn’t have commute time to commit to reading, and as such there’s kind of a split in this book where I read up to a certain point, didn’t read more than a few paragraphs for over a week, then polished off the last bits in a couple of days in the new year. It’s an interesting, engaging book that has a fair few interesting reflections on Australian history, and the mythologies around colonisation and the convict population. But more specifically the most interesting observations are about the unreliability of history and the narratives coming from those who survived, and those who could tell their stories their own way (I'm reminded of that famously misquoted Churchill epithet "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it"). Flanagan’s framework conceit here is therefore interesting, that he (or an unnamed first person narrator) finds this story by convict William Buelow Gould in an old Salamanca bookshop, then loses it after getting it rebuked by history experts as a clear forgery/fraud, then tries to recreate it word for word himself. That framework is quite bemusing by the end, since Gould’s ostensible narrative has so many points to make about mythology and narratives (who dies, who lives, who tells your story etc) so the fact that the whole thing is an unrealiable recreation of an unreliable narrator’s unreliable memory-based story is quite confounding. The final few paragraphs certainly turn the whole thing on its head, and give it its own power as pure myth-making. But the conceit also had its drawbacks as I was considering it: even taking it as an obvious mythology and/or historical forgery, it just feels like the language and detail that “Gould” includes is far too flowery and nuanced to bear any resemblance to a realistic narrative, and it felt like a heavy-handed read filtered too heavily through Flanagan’s own writing (which I also found a bit too florid in his other work I’ve read - the Narrow Road to the Deep North, my #3 book of 2016 which could have been higher if not for that). It doesn’t quite have the heteroglossia necessary to really place me in that time and place (however made up it was anyway) so it ends up being an interesting read but interesting almost exclusively from an academic standpoint and as an intellectual curiosity. Intriguing and engaging, yes, but without the real emotional attachment or impact that Narrow Road had, and more of an ambiguous perplexing quality overall.
21) Small Gods - Terry Pratchett
I picked this up as a first taste of Discworld, mainly because my friends (especially atheist friends, I believe) have raved about this as a great satire of religion, but also because it seems to be the general consensus that you can read this without much knowledge of Discworld lore and enjoy it on its own. And indeed, I wasn’t lost during it so that was true. Whether it’s really that great a satire I’m not sure about. It definitely is a funny book, and I found plenty of moments that gave me a chuckle or a wry smile. But I felt like I was enjoying the book and the satire more during the early stages, where Brutha is the only person who can hear the great god Om and is therefore the only actual believer in the city dedicated to and named after the god himself. But the plot became a bit convoluted after that; elements like Brutha’s perfect memory, the wandering in the desert, developing his own will and arguing with his god, it felt like there was a singular focus at one point and a number of plot devices get piled on that felt unnecessarily complex. It all came together again in the end, and it’s cleverly constructed plot-wise, but I just found it sharper and clearer in its satire early on, and more fantastical/plot-driven in the middle so it just dragged a little for me (yes, ultimately I guess the problem is I'm just not that big on fantasy per se). It was still entertaining, but I feel like there are more focused and more biting satires out there, and this one feels like it belongs mostly in the broader Discworld universe than necessarily a mirror held up to our own world.
I picked this up purely because it was super short, and read it in a day to up my reading quota a bit. This is a good little bit of short sci-fi. The premise and plot remind me a lot of Duncan Jones' film "Moon": isolated setting with a central character questioning their identity and purpose and attempting in vain to consult with an intelligent computer who may or may not be on their side. I feel like the way this resolves itself becomes a little on the nose: the earlier questioning of identity, purpose and "what defines a person" were quite ambiguous, and in the end the question is changed to be more of a "maybe I'm more human than you" statement, and I would have preferred more ambiguity being left in there. It's not just that the conclusion of the story made it too overt and less subtle, but it felt like Evenson was trying to wrap up this short story neatly and efficiently, but he could have explored these questions longer and deeper without ending it, and I'd have found it quite engaging (although yes, I may not have picked it up if it were longer). The mood, the setting, the enigma of the narrator and their situation, it's all skilful world building and I was on board for a longer and frankly less definitive ride than I ended up getting.
29) Much Obliged, Jeeves - PG Wodehouse
I don't think Wodehouse will ever make a huge impression on me, because I know what sort of hijinks to expect and it's rare for him to deviate from a tested formula or innovate within his own proprietary genre. So it's safe entertainment this, and it gave me multiple chuckles throughout as he's just a witty writer and there's plenty of situational comedy here that hits the right notes to lampoon the upper classes and their foppishness. This particular novel finds Wooster misguidedly getting involved with politics to help out a friend, while fending off unwanted advances from eligible bachelorettes of his set, trying to avoid accusations of theft, and mostly concerned about a secret "butlers' book" that dishes up all the dirt on servants' masters, himself included. I did find this one ended a bit abruptly and a lot of the climax/resolution of the farcical elements told in recount rather than live action, while it also lacked a bit of the layering of situational absurdities I've enjoyed elsewhere from Wodehouse. Lots of fun but not quite the heights he can reach.
28) The Third Man - Graham Greene
This was an enjoyable read; predictably so. I enjoyed Carol Reed's film (that this was specifically written to become) in a noirish kind of way but don't recall it in great detail. This has the suspense, the mystery and so forth well woven in the way that Greene does, and the difference from the film (as I recall it, I may well be mistaken) is that this places more emphasis on the moral questions at the heart of the protagonist Martins' dilemma, in particular the revelation that his beloved friend could actually be guilty of his crimes and his deciding, in the end, to do the right thing. Some of the dialogue especially later in the book feels more organically Greene, and that made this more enjoyable than just a prosaic version of the plot I've seen on screen although the added interior psychology of the protagonist helped it along as well.
27) The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower Part 3) - Stephen King
#ContinuingSeries
I think this is the least of the Dark Tower series so far, but by no means a poor read. The main issue is probably a general indictment of the third volume in any ongoing series: the narrative is quite fragmented here, and there isn't a strong singular theme running through the parts like there was in The Drawing of the Three (guided by the three tarot cards and the quest for doors between worlds) or like there didn't even need to be with The Gunslinger, because it was all singular world creation. There's a number of different threads to this story, and because King never seemed keen on having this volume conclude the story (he actually offers a post scriptum apology to the reader for it ending so abruptly and inconclusively), there are myriad other threads introduced along the way to continue furnishing this world with characters and ideas and histories. So it feels a little patchy at times, but there are many compelling passages and a stack of fascinating themes explored along the way. My main quibble with this as a read, though, is the sequence in the middle where a character is attempting to make passage between the worlds. With no real prior context we are introduced to a haunted mansion where a 'gatekeeper' is depicted as a demonic monster emerging from the plasterboard while another amorphous demon commits a bestial act of rape on another character. My quibble is not so much in the detail or the experience of reading it (although it is unpleasant. The trouble is the sequence feels out of place here and is more cognate with King's other works. And the sequence can only resolve happily given where we know the story is going, so the fact that it drags on for so long and feels like a pointless, and endless diversion. It reminds me of that Simpsons sequence where Stephen King can't help but be reflexively drawn back into clichéd horror tropes while trying to explore other areas of interest ("It opened the gates of HELL!"). He could have been far more efficient with language and storytelling but he really got bogged down in his charnel mire here. In spite of that passage though, this was another entertaining read and a necessary stepping stone en route to the series conclusion.
26) Chocky - John Wyndham
This was an interesting read, if only because it unfolds very differently to how I'd expected, based on both the premise and Wyndham's previous work that I've read (Day of the Triffids, which I did read in a 'book writeup' year but didn't write it up as I was doing my TIME reading challenge at the time and that was all I wrote up). It's also hard not to view this through the lens of Liu Cixin's Trisolaris trilogy (respectively my #28 book of 2015, my #5 book of 2017 and my #3 book of 2018) because once I got a sense of what's going on here, it's clear that there are very similar themes here to those explored in Liu's trilogy. But where Trisolaris (or extraterrestrial force X in any other similar premise) is undoubtedly a malevolent force, the difference in this novel is that the force is theoretically neutral and, in practice, quite benevolent. As such, the conceit here and the wraparound narrative take on a mild Kafkaesque narrative form as the "what if...?" premise is taken down the logical pathways open to it, culminating in the unforeseen more nightmarish scenario, that is still presented in objective and ultimately no-harm-done terms by the narrator. It's quite a compulsively readable book because I was invested in the innocence of the central character Matthew, the dilemma of his parents when their son is 'possessed' by an invisible friend, but ultimately this was enjoyable just because it was unexpectedly wholesome and sweet. There seems to be a huge life or death or even Armageddon scenario at stake, but everybody in the end is largely well-intentioned and doing the best with what they have.
25) The Children Act - Ian McEwan
This feels a bit like minor McEwan, but only to me. I feel like if I'd come to this as an early McEwan discovery I'd have different thoughts. But I feel I know his milieu so well by now that there weren't any big surprises or revelations here. There was also a feeling I got at one point of unintended dramatic irony, where a character is assessing the situation and concludes that another character will 'get over it' in time and move on and I wanted to yell: "no, you fool! You're characters in an Ian McEwan novel, that's not how it will play out at all!". The world here is the upper professional classes with our protagonist a prominent judge, renowned for her pragmatic rationales for preferencing individual welfare over metaphysical faith-based considerations. Her dilemmas and quandaries are fairly stock McEwan stuff: putting the personal aside for the greater good, questioning the validity of religious arguments, life/death decisions in the hand of one individual. The ruminations and questions he poses are all intriguing, even gripping, stuff, but there's a sense in reading this that he had certain points that he wanted to make, and at times the narrative gets bogged down in humdrum details where he needs to progress the flow of time along but doesn't know what to do with his characters in the meantime so describes their daily routine to no ultimate purpose. It's possible that the world is just not intricately drawn and I feel he doesn't have a strong personal connection to it, so the value here is only in letting him get his point across with not a huge amount of power or entertainment along the way.
24) The Heart Goes Last - Margaret Atwood
In a similar vein, this really feels like lesser Atwood to be honest, and not just because I kind of 'get' her thing by now. It does have all her great hallmarks in the first half of the book, largely world building in this futuristic post-economic catastrophe world where our protagonists Stan and Charmaine are living in their car while trying to scrounge out what remains of a living. Then they enter an exclusive pseudo-Utopian enclave that's part prison, part gated community, and the narrative becomes quite fragmented and disjointed. It has a sort of wandering style where one leg of the story leads to the next, and so forth, but it ends up going in very different directions than it felt from the get-go and thematically becomes a bit confused. The story from about halfway becomes less about Stan and Charmaine and more about bringing down and defeating Ed, the founder of this Utopian experiment/cult, a character who doesn't really feature much at all except as a figurehead early on in the story (so the ultimate conflict being about bringing him down seems apropo of nothing). And while Atwood seems interested throughout in sexual politics, in negotiations between the 'heart' and more primal urges, the points she seems to be making feel laboured and quite stretched by the ways in which the story goes. It just felt like the focus shifted, and a lot of the world building and character construction/motivation undergoes this 90 degree turn midway; I wasn't bored or that confused by it, but I personally felt my priorities and sympathies in the story shift too much for them to have felt much impact by the story's conclusion.
23) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
(Warning: if you happen to be the one person who hasn't yet read this, I spoil almost everything in the entire plot in this review)
I resisted this for a really unfeasible amount of time. It's just one of those books that, when everybody in the entire universe is reading it and telling me it's amazing, I just put it off until the hype has been actually long forgotten. And then I can view it as an historical document, "fads of recent times". And look, I was quite drawn into this, as many people were. Hosseini has an authentic, honest narrative voice and his waxing nostalgic and sentimental for an Afghanistan of yesteryear; his observations of the Soviet occupation and, later, the Taliban regime, are poignant and wistful. But of course this is less a tribute to a fallen Afghanistan and more a portrait of guilt and redemption, with the key fault lying in the problems and prejudices of Afghan society. I say I was quite caught up in this, but mainly the first half around young Amir and his conflicted relationship with his loyal Hazara servant 'friend' Hassan, as well as his own distant father. I found the first half quite a compelling look at divided loyalties and the mistakes people make as youths that end up echoing throughout their lives. During the 'redemption' part of this narrative later in the piece when Amir returns to Afghanistan, I felt there were a few too many contrivances and conveniences that crept into the plot structure without earning them. Hosseini does his best to lay out Chekhov's gun early, but it did feel like he was quite clumsily and awkwardly telling us "hey, there's a gun here. Look. Gun. I want you to remember that there's a gun here". In particular, Amir's confrontation and final 'battle' with Assef was particularly heavy-handed. Aside from the faux-Dickensian plot machination of "oh this grand Taliban leader who just publicly stoned people to death in a stadium? Turns out... it's actually the bully who tormented Amir and Hassan as a kid!!! *jazz hands*", the fact that Assef does all of the following: he leaves Sorhab in the room with him and Amir; he conveniently forgets/neglects the fact that Sorhab always carries a slingshot with him and that he's an amazing shot with it (despite everybody talking about it constantly); AND prior to entering the room, gives his guards instructions that "if Amir walks out of the room, let him pass" - wow what a string of unfortunate missteps to allow our heroes to escape. I mean, it's all classic dramatic devices and the end goal is still cathartic and satisfying (I should add: there was a potentially hideous contrivance in the symmetry of "Amir and Soraya can't have kids in America, and now Amir is going to Afghanistan to rescue an orphaned child - oh my god will those two dovetail somehow at the end? If only there were a way to make that happen" - this isn't actually treated as a big reveal, and Hosseini merely uses dramatic irony in that Amir is seemingly the only person in the scenario or entire universe who doesn't see it coming), but I couldn't help but notice the emotional gears being turned even while I was caught up in the machine. I can see why it was such a phenomenon, but part of the reason for that phenomenon is that, like The Book Thief, it kind of gives everybody what they want to finish the story.
22) Gould’s Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan
If you're wondering, this book is the reason these writeups are a bit late, as I hadn’t finished this book before Christmas break, and so I didn’t have commute time to commit to reading, and as such there’s kind of a split in this book where I read up to a certain point, didn’t read more than a few paragraphs for over a week, then polished off the last bits in a couple of days in the new year. It’s an interesting, engaging book that has a fair few interesting reflections on Australian history, and the mythologies around colonisation and the convict population. But more specifically the most interesting observations are about the unreliability of history and the narratives coming from those who survived, and those who could tell their stories their own way (I'm reminded of that famously misquoted Churchill epithet "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it"). Flanagan’s framework conceit here is therefore interesting, that he (or an unnamed first person narrator) finds this story by convict William Buelow Gould in an old Salamanca bookshop, then loses it after getting it rebuked by history experts as a clear forgery/fraud, then tries to recreate it word for word himself. That framework is quite bemusing by the end, since Gould’s ostensible narrative has so many points to make about mythology and narratives (who dies, who lives, who tells your story etc) so the fact that the whole thing is an unrealiable recreation of an unreliable narrator’s unreliable memory-based story is quite confounding. The final few paragraphs certainly turn the whole thing on its head, and give it its own power as pure myth-making. But the conceit also had its drawbacks as I was considering it: even taking it as an obvious mythology and/or historical forgery, it just feels like the language and detail that “Gould” includes is far too flowery and nuanced to bear any resemblance to a realistic narrative, and it felt like a heavy-handed read filtered too heavily through Flanagan’s own writing (which I also found a bit too florid in his other work I’ve read - the Narrow Road to the Deep North, my #3 book of 2016 which could have been higher if not for that). It doesn’t quite have the heteroglossia necessary to really place me in that time and place (however made up it was anyway) so it ends up being an interesting read but interesting almost exclusively from an academic standpoint and as an intellectual curiosity. Intriguing and engaging, yes, but without the real emotional attachment or impact that Narrow Road had, and more of an ambiguous perplexing quality overall.
21) Small Gods - Terry Pratchett
I picked this up as a first taste of Discworld, mainly because my friends (especially atheist friends, I believe) have raved about this as a great satire of religion, but also because it seems to be the general consensus that you can read this without much knowledge of Discworld lore and enjoy it on its own. And indeed, I wasn’t lost during it so that was true. Whether it’s really that great a satire I’m not sure about. It definitely is a funny book, and I found plenty of moments that gave me a chuckle or a wry smile. But I felt like I was enjoying the book and the satire more during the early stages, where Brutha is the only person who can hear the great god Om and is therefore the only actual believer in the city dedicated to and named after the god himself. But the plot became a bit convoluted after that; elements like Brutha’s perfect memory, the wandering in the desert, developing his own will and arguing with his god, it felt like there was a singular focus at one point and a number of plot devices get piled on that felt unnecessarily complex. It all came together again in the end, and it’s cleverly constructed plot-wise, but I just found it sharper and clearer in its satire early on, and more fantastical/plot-driven in the middle so it just dragged a little for me (yes, ultimately I guess the problem is I'm just not that big on fantasy per se). It was still entertaining, but I feel like there are more focused and more biting satires out there, and this one feels like it belongs mostly in the broader Discworld universe than necessarily a mirror held up to our own world.
posted by Sean's Beard at 1:53 PM
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