I finally got the links page transferred over from the old site into WordPress, and I’m satisfied with the layout of that page. For now. (You’ll find the “More links…” link below “Best links” in the sidebar.) I also got the “About” page updated. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to import any old Greymatter entries though. I know, it probably doesn’t matter to anyone but me!

Because I have to young daughters, I am well-versed in everything Barbie (and I confess I even own a few of the gorgeous collectible ones myself). For the past few years, Matel has been producing movies of well-known tales with Barbie in the starring role. To date they have done The Nutcracker, Rapunzel, Swan Lake and The Princess and the Pauper (which has some surprisingly good tunes in its libretto). There are also a couple of original “Fairytopia” videos. Largely, the movies are an excuse to create lots of associated toys — the just-in-time-for-Christmas product list usually feature half-a-dozen dolls at the least. But they’ve outdone themselves this year by choosing the fairy tale The Twelve Dancing Princesses. According to what I’ve seen in stores, they will have all twelve dolls available for sale and I feel sorry for the parents who won’t be able to resist the “I want them all!” frenzy of their daughters (mine, fortunately, will want the movie, but care less about the dolls themselves).

I only bring this up as an excuse to point to one of my favorite fantasy artists, Kinuko Y. Craft, who has herself illustrated a storybook version of the fairy tale. While I don’t actually own any Craft prints or books, I do have several calenders and some cards featuring her work, and I have even kept one not-very-good novel simply because I adore the Craft painting on the cover.

There is a luminous, otherworldy quality to her work, combined with a rich palette and incredible detail that serve to bring the viewer visually into that alternate reality where the story emerges. In a word, her paintings are magical.

This last one is her latest work posted on a site. It seems as good a reason as any to try Juliet Marillier’s work, an author I have never read before.

Wouldn’t it be cool if Mattel produced a line of collector Barbies based on Crafts work? Ah well, I can dream, can’t I?

As an end note, I think Mattel should really choose the Snow Queen for one of their upcoming fairy tale movies. For one thing, it has a strong heroine already, so they won’t have to alter the story much in order to keep it “PC”. And for another, imagine all the lovely silver and blue and white dresses they could design…mmm.

I usually finish a book once I start it, even if it’s so terrifically dull that I can’t be bothered to pick it up except to trudge through a chapter before bed.  Martha Wells’ The Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy was like this for me.  It’s hard to admit, because I really enjoyed her earlier books and I wanted to like these as well, but the only reason I stuck it out was because I wanted to see if the two main characters got together in the end.  The rest of the plot held no interest for me whatsover, largely because the antognists are something like the falsefront of an old building: there’s not much behind the ominous presence.  Disappointing to say the least, because the concept was really interesting and, like all of Wells’ work, quite different from the usual throng of fantasy literature (I heartily recommend her earlier works, especially Death of the Necromancer and Wheel of the Infinite).  If her villains had been as interesting as her main characters, it could have been a great story.

I figure even a dull story (or I should say, a story that I find dull, in deference to my previous post about C.S. Lewis) has something that can help an aspiring writer like myself.  For instance, I learned something very important about the characterization of villains by examining my reaction to Wells’ trilogy (I was going to summarize it, but I realize it’s quite a complex matter and deserving its own post, sometime in the future).  This is why I finish nearly every book I start.

Nearly.

What I can’t finish — and fortunately in most instances I don’t have to invest to much time before I realize I can’t read the book at hand — is horrible prose.  Now, I’m not so demanding that I expect everything I read to be Nobel or Pullitzer Prize winning quality.  Competence with the language is all I ask, and most of the time what gets published is at least competent.  But there are exceptions.

Eragon, by the precocious teen Christopher Paolini, has been the most egregious I’ve come across so far.  I know a lot of people like this book, so it must have something going for it, but “good writing” is not one of them.  Don’t believe me?  See if you can read page one aloud without swallowing your tongue.

Sadly, I had the same experience with another author just a couple days ago, this one who doesn’t have the excuse of youth to explain her cliche-driven, overwrought prose.  Jacqueline Carey is actually quite successful, and though her Kushiel books aren’t the height of artistry, they are a fun read.  Her follow-up to the first three books is the two-volume The Sundering, which I probably would have picked up a lot sooner if book-funds hadn’t been so low.  As it is, I’m really glad I borrowed book one, Banewreaker, from the library.

By the time I started reading, I was already aware that The Sundering had not been well-recieved critically.  My assumption was that Carey had failed in her experiment, telling a story from the point of view of the so-called “evil” side in a traditional epic fantasy tale.  What if, for instance, Sauron wasn’t actually evil, just misunderstood?  I was curious.  Where did she fail?  Did her concept just turn into a flimsy gimmick?  Was it too imitative of Tolkien and other fantasy epics? Was there some other flaw in her storytelling?

The problem, I discovered as I chewed through the prologue and part of chapter one, was actually quite unexpected.  The problem was much more basic.  The problem was truly horrible prose.  

The prologue — do they actually allow fantasy novels to have prologues anymore? — is a riff on Tolkien’s Simarillion, but with a different set of “gods” and none of the elegance that Tolkien embues within his telling of the creation of the world.  It’s clumsy and shallow, at best, typifying everything that has made the fantasy prologue verboten in the genre.  But I knew that this was part of the concept, that in order to carry out her experiment she needed this deliberate evocation of Tolkien, and that the prologue, of everything, was going to be the hardest part.  So I pushed on.  All the way to the first page of Chapter one, where we meet the protagonist Tanaros and the phrase:

His weapons hung about him like boulders on the verge of an avalanche.

Go ahead.  Read it again.  Yeah, it’s right there on page 19 of the hardcover edition.

There’s more I could quote (I read another 10 pages into the chapter), but I think this one line captures the rest well enough.  Right there, that’s the kind of thing that will stop me from reading a book.   A story can be derivative, its characters flat, the plot dull — I’ll keep reading, even if it takes me a month to get through it. But when an author’s use of language starts making me cringe and sputter, that’s when the books gets put away, unfinished.  (It’s a matter of time, really…it would take a long to read a whole book when you have to keep going back to reread offending phrases to make sure the author wrote what you thought they did.)

I’m disappointed, because intellectually I would like to see how her experiment turns out.  I just don’t think I can stomach 400 pages (twice over) of that sort of prose.  It’s too…deliberate.  Too obvious an attempt at creating prose that sings with vivid imagery and metaphor.  It happens all too often with people who try and imitate Tolkien, not just thematically but linguistically.  I love prose written with that antique, epic voice, when it’s well done, but most modern genre authors don’t have the same relationship with language that Tolkien (or Dunsany!) had and their attempts, like Carey’s, come across like a Britney Spears cover of a Simon & Garfunkle tune.  The story would be much better served by an unobtrusive narrative voice that lets the words disappear beneath theme and character.

Fortunately, I’m a forgiving reader.  I’m looking forward to reading Carey’s newest Kushiel series and hope it does well enough that she gets another chance to publish something different afterwards.  I hope the same thing for Wells’, too, and will continue to put the future books of both writers on my “to be read” pile, whenever they are available, and hope that my disappointment was a one-time-only thing.

I’m a great believer in synchronicity, or meaningful cooincidence, so I don’t believe it was mere chance that I laid hands on a volume of essays by C.S. Lewis just a day after completing Yann Martel’s astounding novel, The Life of Pi. I was just wandering around the library, looking for some papermaking books while the kids busied themselves in the children’s section, and there it was, perched on the end of a stack like it was just waiting for me to find it: C.S. Lewis On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. I slipped it under my arm with the other books I brought home that day because, well, I was hoping to find a topic I might write about here.

I never expected that the title essay, “On Stories”, would explain in theory what had been demonstrated in practice in the novel I had just finished.

It will be hard to explain in full without providing spoilers from The Life of Pi, and since I don’t want to ruin anyone’s first read of the book, I’ll start with Lewis’ theory and then talk about the novel behind the split.

The basic premise of the essay is that there are two ways of reading “romances”, or stories read purely for pleasure. With plenty of personal anecdotes as evidence, he proposes that some readers are driven by pure excitement — it doesn’t matter what sort of danger is faced, so long as there is a constant, inscreasing level of fear. For other readers, atmosphere or the sense of otherness, is a more important factor in their enjoyment of a story. You don’t have to guess which type of reader Lewis is, and I have to admit that, like him, I am of the latter sort. He tries not to denigrate the excitement-loving reader, but there is a subtle disdain for the type, which he associates with cinema and American “scientifiction” (this essay was first published in 1947 ).

The bulk of the essay goes on to elaborate on his preference for stories that rely on mood, atmosphere and language to provide pleasure instead of merely providing a series of exciting events. I’ll let his words speak more to the point:

Jack the Giant-Killer is not, in essence, simply the story of a clever hero surmounting danger. It is in essence the story of such a hero surmounting danger from giants. It is quite easy to contrive a story in which, though the enemies are of normal size, the odds against Jack are equally great. But it will be quite a different story. The whole quality of the imaginative response is determined by the fact that the enemies are giants. (page 8 )

He makes the same point about pirates in the next paragraph, and then later:

I have sometimes wondered whether the ‘excitement’ may not be an element actually hostile to the deeper imagination. In inferior romances…we often come across an really suggestive idea. But the author has no expedient for keeping the story on the move except that of putting his hero into violent danger. In the hurry and scurry of his escapes the poetry of the basic idea is lost. (page 10 )

And later yet again:

Good stories often introduce the marvellous or supernatural, and nothing about Story has been so often misunderstood at this. Thus, for example, Dr Johnson, if I remember rightly, thought that children liked stories of the marvellous because they were too ignorant to know that they were impossible…Belief is at best irrelvant; it may be a positive disadvantage. (page 12 )

While he does not explicitely state the point (it’s couched in examples too numerous to quote), the purpose of the marvellous in a story is united with the purpose of Art itself: “to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.” (page 10 ) Which is why, I expect, that I have always favored fiction with some element of the fantastic. Real life is narrow and desperate enough as it is, right?

How often a person re-reads favorite stories is an indication of whether or not they read for pure excitement or if their imagination is being stimulated by a sort of poetry:

The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain surprisingness…In the only snese that matters the surprise works as well the twentieth time as the first. It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delights us. It is even better the second time. Knowing that the ’surprise’ is coming we can now fully relish the fact that this path through the shrubbery doesn’t look as if it were suddenly going to bring us out on the edge of the cliff. So in literature. We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which mearely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the ’surprise’ of discovering that what seemed Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. If is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia. (page 17 )

(The above passage doesn’t relate directly to Martel — I haven’t re-read it yet — but I wanted to keep it for my own reference. But I do re-read my favorite books, and rewatch my favorite movies for that matter, and the pleasure only deepens over time.)

Thus, Lewis’ “On Stories”. How does that apply to Martel? (more…)