Alice's Adventures Underground

What is it about books that I like so damn much? Most belated Part 3

2010-09-18T11:18:00.000+01:00

At a recent job interview I was asked what technological advance from the last few years I thought posed the greatest challenge to publishing.

It's a bit of wave-a-flag duh-what-do-you-think question (although within the context of the interview perfectly reasonable). It's also something I've been thinking about a lot recently, what with writing a dissertation on fiction in internet-land and all, and actually, the more I think about it the more complicated it gets. The obvious answer is, I think, the e-book reader*. Yet this answer opens up a most interesting can of worms along the lines of 'what drives the change in industry? The technology or the call for the technology?'

Online fiction has been around for as long, really, as there's been online. Online mainstream fiction, on the other hand...Well, that's a more complicated story. The ghetto-ization of genre is terribly complicated territory, but the easiest way I can think of to distinguish what I think of as the mainstream reading public from the the rest is: there are readers who seek fiction out, and there are readers who seem content to have fiction thrust upon them.**

If you are one of the former, then no matter what the technology is, you're interested in what can be done with it. If you're one of the latter, well. You won't notice the advances until there's a loud and public version (e.g., the iPad or the Kindle), then you'll protest at the change in technology, then you'll adapt to a version that's popular and successful, and then you'll expect all the fiction you read offline to be right there online. Also, if you're one of the latter? You're part of a much bigger group.

It sounds as though I'm not a fan of the latter group. This isn't true. In many respects, I'm part of it. Group two is my home. I'm a bandwagon jumper and proud of it. But honestly? I think it goes like this. Group one calls for technology. Technology happens. Group two doesn't notice, notices and objects, notices a bit more, says 'ooh', adapts, takes and uses. And says that the technology changed things. Well it did, but it didn't start there. It starts with group one. People change things, things change people. But people do the uphill pushing.

*Although even as I type that, I think you could make a case for a bunch of other stuff. OpenSource software? Desktop publishing programs? The Google Book Settlement? I suppose it's where you draw the line at what constitutes a technological advance...

**This is perhaps an unfair, and certainly too simple, division, but in the interests of not getting bogged down in debates of definition and demarcation, I'm going to use it anyway. And what do you care, reader-of-my-mind? You don't care if I don't.

So....

2010-09-17T10:55:00.000+01:00

Dear imaginary reader, you may note, if you look to your right, my twitter feed. Observe. You may consequently note that all my tweets (every time I type that word, I am compelled to mentally voice it in a sort of squeak. Tweet!) are #ebz ones. If you are a curious creature, my dear imaginary friend, and why should you not be, you might inquire as to the nature and purpose of such peculiar tweets.

They are from Echo Bazaar. A rather fabulous game. I will not attempt to evaluate it as a game, on account of it's the first I ever really played, but it makes for some bloody good bits of story. It is set in Fallen London, a city that, some years ago, was sold for some unnamed sum and consequently has become a dark and dangerous place, fraught with devils, dirigibles and strange delights. At the centre of the city is the Bazaar, where it seems almost everything (I was going to say 'under the sun' but that would be embarrassingly inaccurate) is for sale. There are several different areas to explore, with more opening up as you progress, and each has its own storylets. In addition there are opportunity cards you can play everywhere. So far, I have fought off Vermin from my lodgings, hunted down a disappearing Contessa, am intrigued by the secrets of the Face Tailor, and am giving some thought to the trade in souls.

T'is all good healthy fun.

Echo Bazaar. Go take a look, o imaginary ones. It's delicious.

Well, it's been an embarrassingly long time...

2010-08-02T21:53:00.000+01:00

Crikey, I'm almost ashamed to post on here, it's been such an age. This isn't even really a post, so much as a statement of good intentions. I will write something soon, dear imaginary reader, but I think it will not be about so much books and rather more adventures in internet-land. Blame the dissertation. It's poisoning everything.

There. So much for good intentions. See you on the road to hell...

Book review: The Gone Away World.

2009-10-23T18:20:00.001+01:00

Just to give you a heads-up: this is not really a review. It's more a paean of delight. Because I love this book. It is fab.

That's not a review, is it? That's rubbish as a review. That's an indiscriminate value judgement and doesn't really tell you anything useful.

What can I say? Some books just take you that way. They find you feeling all sort of bored and blase and indifferent, and they leave you with a grin on your face. Because you just read a fab book that made you giggle helplessly with joy for pages at a time.
It has ninjas. And mutants. And mimes. And pirates. And a heartrending love story, and battles and wars that are stupid fought by people that are very good at fighting, and fantastic bits of monologue and dialogue that I wander around my house quoting at people at random, and a bar powered by a pig generator and a villain with An Iron Hand, and all sorts of awesome things.

And mimes. Did I mention the mimes? In make-up and everything.

The ninjas and the mimes have this whole battle at one point. I'm just saying, is all.

It's fab. Go read it. Come up with your own review.

Book review: the Monsters of Templeton

2009-07-15T13:19:00.006+01:00

The Monsters of Templeton is a many layered beast. It is at once many kinds of story. It is a kind of love story directed at Americana and a certain sort of small town, where everyone is related to everyone else and your family history trails behind you in the sand leaving your secrets in the tracks for all to see. It is a history of an American town, based very much upon the author’s hometown, and it is also the history of that town’s founding family. It is the story of the last scion of that family, Willie Cooper who has come home in disgrace, kicked out of Stanford, possible pregnant, armed only with a terrible haircut and an unfinished PhD. It is also a story about a monster.

I am fond of a book with a monster or two, and this monster is wonderful. Though it feels oddly extraneous to the rest of the book, playing no part in plot nor sub plot, it pokes its head or flipper up into the narrative from time to time and disappears again, much as it does in the town’s deep lake. Four limbed, fat bellied, with a long neck, it seems to be a benign beast, taking on the role of the guardian spirit of the small town, and in this role, it apes the family that gave the town its name.
The narrative of the book is primarily Willie’s but as she delves deeper into her family history, in attempt to discover the identity of her father that her mother has stubbornly kept secret all her life (in itself an attempt to distract herself from the myriad complications of her own exploded life) it is interrupted by a wide variety of startling ancestors.
Strange abilities and myth-resembling traits are frequent in this family, the various members of which make their appearance in a series of letters and journals that demonstrate the author’s ability to switch tones between times and characters with verve and verisimilitude. These traits are rarely questioned, and this gave rise to one of my few frustrations with the book, fun as it was to read. The presence of the monster in the lake is never really accounted for, it is dismissed as an inexplicable anomaly, nor are various mines of curious ghosts and witchy ancesters ever really explored. Having solved her own mysteries, Willie goes merrily back to her university life, blithely accepting all that is strange around her and we are left to take these stories at face value, as just the myths that arise in any small town.
I perhaps could have done with a couple less ancestors, though these were entertaining characters for the most part. Willie's mother in particular lit up the novel whenever she hit the page, steering clear of 'wise mother figure' with a brisk pragmatism and the ill best friend was, thank god, spiky rather than maudlin. Overall, this felt rather like a rambunctious collection of characters linked by one long thread of history rather than by any so meaty as a plot.

Book review: Never Let Me Go

2009-06-14T22:39:00.007+01:00

I've had mixed feelings about Ishiguro ever since I read When We Were Orphans, a book I cannot well remember but which set my teeth decidedly on edge, mostly becuase I seem to remember spending much of the novel gripped with the fervent desire to hit the hero and heroine around the back of the head. I cannot remember why.

Recently however, I read The Remains of the Day, and found it utterly absorbing, a quiet, devastating character study of a dissolving world and an account of a profoundly human tragedy. It breaks your heart, but so gently, in this calm and steady, drop-by-drop way, scene by scene, loss by loss, thread by broken thread.

So I was utterly won over to Ishiguro, felt very silly for having ignored him before, and set out to find some more.

As a rule I quite enjoy science fiction that doesn't really care if it's science fiction or not. Examples include Margaret Atwood(The Handmaids Tale, Oryx and Crake, etc.) Cormac McCarthy (The Road), books of literary heritage but nonetheless not about The World As We Know It Jim. Speculative fiction then, that lovely, uselessly broad, catch-all category. Categorizing books, I increasingly feel, is a foolish and futile endeavour, so we won't tear our hair over this one. Never Let Me Go is speculative, it seems to be near future or parallel world, set in a UK recognisable and familiar, but different to our own. Because this one has an awful lot of clones.

The central narrator is Kathy, and she is one of a group of students who are being held in a school. It becomes increasingly clear that they are segregated from the outer world, and that they are aware that they are in some way held apart. They are not the only such group in the UK, moreover, yet as members of this particular school, they have a privileged position over their fellows. For Kathy and her friends, and others like them, are clones, are bred as organ donors, as a steady supply stream of useful parts for the rest of the, non-cloned, human population. Hence, they are held apart, they are held as not-quite-human, they are treated as less. It seems to be widely believed that they have no souls.

As readers following the narrative from Kathy's perspective, it is clear to us that these characters are utterly human. The recognizability of Kathy's adolescent trials and tribulations are achingly familiar - the jostling for social position, the elaborate emotional apparatus set up between Kathy and her best friend/rival Ruth, the curiosity about adulthood and the mysteries surrounding them - all of this is achingly familiar. There is no doubt in our minds that we would think, speak, act as these characters do, that in word, thought and deed they are as us. They pass the Turing Test for being human. It is difficult, confronted with Kathy's intense emotions and complicated attempts to make sense and story out of the information she is given, to think that she might not be human. It seems a nonsensical thing to say, a semantic trick.

This makes the latter half of the book, where Kathy is a carer looking after those of her peers who have already started to have their organs harvested, terribly sad. That sounds rather banal, but it is. The character of Tommy, previously both social outcast and, later, Ruth's long-term boyfriend, but signposted all through the book as Kathy's kindred spirit, returns, following Ruth's death. He and Kathy think they have discovered a way around the system. They believe that there is a gap, an escape route, that if they somehow are human enough, they will be set free. Yet in the end, there is no omniscient overseer, no single giver-and-taker of life, no Court of Appeals. There is no conspiracy, despite all the elaborate explanations they put forward to each other as teenagers. There is simply an immutable, unstoppable system. It is finally clear that it does not matter if they meet some indiscernable criteria, if they tick enough of the right boxes or not, they will simply not be allowed to be human. There is no place for them as human in the system, and no way for them, as unhuman to change this system. They are doomed and it is terribly, terribly unfair.

Never Let Me Go thus provokes a sense of the impossibility of setting criteria for humanity. There are intelligences, artificial, alien, clones, throughout fiction which are not human and yet are, which meet any criterion for humanity we may choose to set yet fail in some intangible way we cannot explain. Ishiguro suggests that such criteria are essentially false. We cannot prove ourselves to be human. There can be no conditions to be met. We are simply ourselves. We cannot ask more of others. To term someone human or not human is a false categorization; it misses the point of humanity. It is a most inhumane thing to do.

What is it that I like about books so damn much? Part 2

2009-06-14T09:11:00.008+01:00

To continue, if reading is an intensely personal process, it is also a intensely social one. There is, I think, a tension when reading, between the isolated and the reaching-out aspects of the act.

In isolation then we are left alone with the book and ourselves. We read through the prism of our own consciounesses, that is to say, through the maze of our own absorbed social conventions and ideas. Our understanding of new concepts brought to light in our reading is necessarily bounded by those concepts we already contain, and are constituted of.

What isolates reading, then, from other social acts? For example, how is reading a book not only a different experience but a different kind of experience from having a conversation? Is that, in fact, the case?

Well, OK, first the most obvious differences: I read in my own time. There is no pressure for an instantaneous response. I can go back and forth, revisit and reconsider passages, extract multiple meanings from one paragraph whilst ignoring another completely, put a book down and pick another up as the whim takes me - all of this is under my control.

Moreover I don't have to defend my responses. If I think an argument is complete nonsense, unless I take the trouble to find some public arena to say so, then I needn't say why. A conversation is a public event to the extent that it involves at least two people directly. Reading is a private one, though the option of going public is there, now more then ever (as is evidenced by the existence of this blog).

Book review: My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead

2009-06-13T11:14:00.009+01:00

It's now an established part of my holiday preparation ritual that the day before I leave, I will have a great flurry and panic and visit about six shops in quick succession because I realise that I have no mini shampoo bottles, no sunscreen, and I can only find one of last year's pair of sandals and need urgent replacement. It is also a part of that ritual, that I stare at all my bookshelves, decide that nothing on there will keep me sufficently occupied whilst sunbathing, and swoop around Oxfam book sections, scooping up everything I can see that costs less than £2.00, has at least 300 pages and seems to have a reasonably pleasant cover.*

It is in this way, before anyone shrugs dismissively, that I came across Jeffrey Eugenides's collection of love stories, My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. I had vaguely heard of it before somewhere in a newspaper review archived somewhere in the depths of my memory, where it had been tagged with the thought hmmm. maybe?...But it fufilled all the relevant criteria (£2.29, about 540 pages, very pretty swirly cover in purple and blue.) And so I bought it. And it was a veritable cornucopia of absorbing stories that could stab you through the heart with a single sentence or make you laugh and wince together.

The title refers to the love poetry of Catullus, which I have never read, but which I gather from the introduction did the same sort of thing. Catullus' poetry was written for his mistress, a married woman referred to as Lesbia in his poetry and called Clodia in reality, and two of these poems dealt with Lesbia's pet sparrow. In the first of these poems, Lesbia's sparrow is the subject of some jealousy, receiving as it does more of Lesbia's affections than he does. In the second, the sparrow is dead, and in mourning it, Lesbia is no longer interested in love but instead spoils her appearence with tears.

In collecting these stories, Eugenides uses these two invocations of the sparrow to mark out the boundaries of the love story. Roughly the living sparrow translates to some obstacle to the loving relationship and the dead sparrow is that same love wounded in one way or another. Between these two poles of love unfufilled and love broken lies the love story (happy and fufilled love is not denied by this delineation, incidentally, it's just that a cheerful relationship does not a good story make).

This collection includes a wide range of the great and the good, from Chekhov's story The Lady with the Little Dog, to Alice Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain. In such a wide range of authors though, what is most striking about the collection as a whole is how many of these stories end in ambiguity and bittersweetness. The collection, on the whole is gentle in its treatment of characters - all flaws and foibles are on display, but so are great acts of humanity. In The Bear Came Over the Mountain, one character carries out a profound and generous act of love, yet is revealed also in the past to have betrayed his wife on numerous occasions. In Natasha, the protagonist is helplessly passive, unable or unwilling to help his desperate and tempestuous tenage girlfriend. In Innocence, by comparison, the protagonist goes to tremendous effort to bring his girlfriend to orgasm, treating the challenge as one might treat a particularly cryptic crossword that one was determined nonetheless to complete. Some characters drift miserably through mazes of fraught emotions, others strive and yearn and act. My favourite story, the one I returned to reread first, hitherto utterly unknown to me, was Jon, by George Saunders. In this, Jon is the name given to an adolescent boy almost a man, living in a strange, bubble-like reality made up of brands, products and adverts, docile from drugs and supervised by sinister-benign authority figures. Jon gets his fellow inmate and companion, Carolyn, pregnant. Greeted with pleasure by those around them, they marry and are briefly, shallowly happy but as Carolyn gets closer to giving birth,she is filled with doubts, and strives to leave the shielded community the two grew up in. Fearing the outside world and all the difficulties it entails, Jon at first refuses to go with her, but after she has gone, the frailty of the world he lives in is only too apparent to him. For the love of her and their child, he leaves the false reality for the real one, and his fictional family for his true one. It becomes a remarkable act of courage and love. He shoulders his responsibilities and becomes a whole real person in doing so: he is made more by love.

This story ends, as those that dealt with the living sparrows, the obstacles to love, tended to do, on a note of hope. It is those stories dealing with the death of love where the endings

are more ambiguous, less of an ending and more of a trailing off. Several of the stories end in death, the only end that can be truly final in fiction, and for those that don't, death looms as the only finality, all other endings being merely arbitrary points.

If there is any underlying common theme, it might be this; that in loving unsuccessfully we suffer terribly, but it is nonetheless better to love than not, and, loving, it is better to act and fail, for it is so that love is kept alive.

*It sounds like an exaggeration. But no, I am completely shallow in this matter. If it's thick and has a pretty cover design, I'll nab it. Panic book shopping. I have found some gems with this method, believe it or not. A fair amount of rubbish too, obviously, but let's face it, I am not discrimating. I will read anything, anything, on holiday. I will take the back of cereal packets to the beach if need be.

(I haven't actually done that. No point. You'd have finished reading about the history of Kelloggs before you'd even left your room. But I would if I had too, is my point.)

What is it about books that I like so damn much?

2009-06-05T16:14:00.001+01:00

It’s partly the tactility of them. No other experience, to me, ever quite matches that clean angular sense of an unopened new book, or the reassuring softness of old, much-turned pages. The smell of paper can take people back to their childhoods. Libraries and book shops, with their piled up sense of books laid up in store, reading experiences in potentia galore, can be nigh-on hypnotic. There’s a corner of the big academic Waterstones on Gower Street with a most distinctive smell where I used to go and hide post exams until my heart rate returned to something like normal. Books, for me have always had an intensely physical, comforting presence.*

But as well, it’s what they represent. Ask people why they read and you’ll get myriad responses, from escapism to enlightenment. It is, to my mind, as broad and meaningless a question as asking someone why they talk, for heaven’s sake. People don’t read with just one purpose in mind, any more than they have conversations the same way with everyone. There are books which are like old friends that we can read with disrespect, skipping the parts we’ve read too many times and know off by heart, going straight to favourite passages like talking in the shorthand of shared jokes. We are somewhat more formal with books we’ve only just met, reading them politely from beginning to end, with due attention to detail, perhaps skipping passages if the book we’ve just met is something of a bore. If we do go straight to the last page and read the end first, it is with a slight feeling of transgressing social norms.

This, as metaphors go, is whimsical but surprisingly stretchy. Reading a book is a conversation of sorts, one that you contribute to as much as the book, and yet all your contributions are done without you noticing. It's a most peculiar and unique process, unlike almost any other experience.

*If one of your big worries about e-books is their deficiency in this respect, worry no more! Someone has both thought of and solved this problem for you. http://smellofbooks.com/