Literature

The greatest strength of China Miéville’s New Crobuzon novels is the freshness, the outright alien-ness of the world and the peoples that populate it, and that continues to shine through in Iron Council. The problem with the book seems to be a lack of control. The idea of much-abused railway workers taking over a job site and stealing the train to form a kind of socialist utopia is a little far-fetched, but in a world where people have beetles instead of heads, it’s certainly workable. The problem is the execution. The idea that an awkward collection of working class folk, criminals, and prostitutes would be able to organize themselves, successfully fight a well-trained military, and then escape, all while having to continually tear up the track behind them and lay it anew ahead of them is preposterous, even in Bas-Lag. I understand that Miéville has socialist leanings (so do I,… Continue Reading →

In The Scar, Miéville returns for a second time to New Crobuzon (or more accurately, Bas-Lag and the floating pirate city called Armada) in a novel that is far more refined and entertaining than Perdido Street Station, although I enjoyed that novel very much. The narrative spends most of its time with Bellis Coldwine, a peripheral character from the first book (I don’t recall if she actually appears, although her name is familiar, so I presume she was at least mentioned) and Tanner Sack, a Remade criminal (although he is possibly the most honest character in the book, and his crime is never once mentioned). I think it’s fair to say that these two characters are high among the reasons that I enjoyed The Scar more than Perdido Street Station. They are both flawed, with complex inner lives that can shift from cold selfishness and blind wrath to pity to… Continue Reading →

I’ve mostly (but not always) been treating these Bond novels in a couple of ways. First, I’ve been dealing with them as guilty pleasures, books that I read with a Ulysses dust jacket over the cover (I don’t actually do that; in fact I really love the lurid painted covers). Second, I’ve been using them to wind down between more serious books, books that are more emotionally intense or intellectually demanding (or just plain boring). Thunderball reminded me that Fleming’s prose is actually quite good. It’s extremely compact and straightforward, but that isn’t a limitation. Fleming still manages to convey a sense of physicality and decadence without ever letting go of its plain serviceability. The racism and bigotry that marred some of the other books is mostly absent from this book (mostly because the Nassau locals aren’t really given any substantial parts in the book), and Domino Vitali is pretty… Continue Reading →

This book has been on my must read list since I saw Sally Potter’s exquisite adaptation back in 2004. I have to say that I was a little disappointed by the book. I generally have a love/hate relationship with Woolf’s writing. I loved Mrs. Dalloway, Three Guineas, and A Room of One’s Own, but absolutely hated To The Lighthouse, Between the Acts, and the recently published Carlyle’s House and Other Skeches. I was very much hoping that Orlando would fall into the “love” category. Alas, it did not, but I was pleased to discover that it did not therefore fall immediately into the “hate” category. There are serious flaws in this book, at least from my point of view as a reader for pleasure. Both action and genuine introspection were rare, and though centuries passed, the pace of the novel was far slower than it should have been. Woolf could… Continue Reading →

To begin, the cover image you see on the left is not what the cover of my copy looks like. It is, so far as I can determine, the cover of the most recent Vintage paperback edition; my edition is also a Vintage paperback, but was published in 1966, and has a rather tacky yellow and brown photo of some birds and marshes on the cover. My edition was also rather poorly typeset and printed, but the spine was nice and supple, so it still felt nice and comfortable in the hands. About the actual content of the book: it would be better to call this two separate, interlaced stories, joined more by common (and contrasting) themes, than a single, unified novel. The first tale, the one the novel opens with and spends the most pages on, is called “The Wild Palms” (the title of the novel was intended to… Continue Reading →

This book is not so impressive as the other two I have reviewed here (at the time of this writing, you should be able to find both reviews simply by scrolling down the main page). While words like “clever” and “original” were the sort of thing to come to mind after reading King Rat or the more robust Perdido Street Station, the word that jumps to the fore after reading this collection of stories is “derivative”. They aren’t bad stories, really. “The Tain” definitely deserved all sorts of awards, and neither “Details” nor “Familiar” are the sort of thing that would have occurred to me in a million years, which is exactly the sort of thing good fantasy should be. I don’t want my expectations confirmed, I want them denied. I want surprises. But. But but but but but. “The Ballroom” was so straightforward a ghost story that I had… Continue Reading →

It’s about time. With this, the third Discworld novel, I can say that Terry Pratchett has hit his stride, and I finally understand what all the fuss is about. That’s not to say their aren’t problems with this book; there are problems with every book. If we were to go around behaving as though a book—any book—were perfect, we wouldn’t be very good readers, now would we? The ending kind of sneaks up out of nowhere and becomes a giant, blazing action sequence full of bright lights and sound-effects (or descriptions of same) when the book, up until that point, had really called for no such thing. Pratchett was doing so well. Even though gender equality was the major theme of the book, Granny Weatherwax and Esk were people first and representatives of a gender second (or even third, actually), and the same could be said about the bulk of… Continue Reading →

Despite being labeled as “A James Bond Novel” on the cover, this book isn’t actually a novel; it’s a collection of short stories (the first of which is actually “From A View to a Kill,” a title which makes considerably more sense in the context of the story than it did for the film) with “For Your Eyes Only” being the most prominent. For the most part they are typical Bond fare, if on a smaller scale. They deal with Bond in between major assignments, which is actually quite refreshing, even if labeling it as a novel made the changes in continuity jarring (the stories are presented in the same format as the chapters in the previous seven books). My favourite stories were actually two that had nothing to do with espionage. There was “Quantum of Solace” which was actually a meditation by the Governor of the Bahamas on romantic… Continue Reading →

I love this book. Let’s get that right out of the way. I first encountered Mr. Alexis’ work a few years back in a collection called And Other Stories… edited by George Bowering. It claimed to be a collection of cutting edge postmodern Canadian short fiction, and by and large it was (there were a few dogs; Atwood’s contribution, taken from Good Bones, was probably the most glaring example), but it was Mr. Alexis’ piece that impressed me the most. It was a remarkable piece about a strange, strange narrator called André Alexis (every male character in the story is named André Alexis, and every female character is Andrée) who is investigating the origins of mysterious love letter, addressed to a woman with the same name as his wife but intended for a woman in Ottawa, New York rather than Ottawa, Ontario. There was even a very clever bit in… Continue Reading →

It took me a while to determine why this book might be so controversial, though the fact of its publication in the late 1950s—at the emergence of the hippie generation—might have something to do with it. In straightforward terms it’s a novel about a militaristic Roman-style republic set at an indeterminate point in the future. It’s not really an adventure story; it delineates the structure of the military and its relationship to society at large by following the career of Juan Rico. Most reviews tend to focus on how Heinlein used the novel to expound his views on the responsibilities the individual has to the state, the role of military service in those responsibilities, and the cause of youth crime. Heinlein seems to believe that the only members of a society who deserve suffrage are those who have taken the safety of that society as a personal responsibility by serving… Continue Reading →