First of all, this is not my usual genre (speculative fiction), though I do venture out of that genre onWhere to start when reviewing such a classic?
First of all, this is not my usual genre (speculative fiction), though I do venture out of that genre on occasion. I read it mainly because it had been recommended to me as the book you need to read to understand what can be done with the omniscient narrator, and just as an all-round brilliantly written book in general. Secondarily, I was going through a drought of good books, so I pulled this up from the TBR.
Middlemarch is long. It needs to be, because of all it has to cram in: the lives of multiple carefully studied characters, which cross and intersect and create the plot between them, plus a portrait of society as it was at the time it was set (the early 1830s), with observations also relevant to the time when it was written (the early 1870s), and to human life in general. It tackles marriage, the role of women, the eternal British preoccupation with class and station, the living out or otherwise of one's religion, and ethical behaviour versus what is "expected". Perhaps its most wonderful character is Dorothea Brooke (as she named is at the beginning of the book), who is both naïve and also authentically devoted to living out her religious principles; the author indicates that in another time and place, she might have been another St Theresa, but that her social context prevented her from greatness and made her merely a person who did great good in ways that were not widely known or celebrated. Because, despite making an idealistic young woman's mistake and suffering for it, she remains a deeply good person and ends up creating what I call the Glorious Ending, in which a character acts kindly and generously where many people would have acted selfishly, and so averts what looks like being inevitable tragedy. But there are several other characters, too, who grow and change through their interaction with each other and with mentors, antagonists, and situations of temptation and opportunity.
The minor characters are beautifully characterized, often through their speech; for example, Dorothea's uncle Mr Brooke, who is determinedly noncommittal about everything and avoids taking any very definite course of action or opinion, or Mrs Cadwallader, the wife of a local clergyman, who is one of those women who speaks her mind on all occasions without caring in the least about anyone else's opinion or feelings. Half a page of their dialogue is enough to show us exactly who they are.
And that brings me to my one issue with the book. As I said, this is not my usual genre, and I usually read fiction written in the last 50 years or so, mostly the last 20, rather than 150 years ago. Accordingly, I'm used to the current style of handling point of view mostly as either tight third person or, less often, first person. In either case, the viewpoint is largely restricted to that of the character; we see what they see, hear what they think, observe what they do and say, and from this decide whether they're reliable, correct, laudable, mistaken, self-deluded, culpable or excusable.
I don't for a moment doubt that the author would have been more than capable of writing in that style, and doing so brilliantly, had she been writing today, when the techniques have been highly developed through use by many writers in the interim. But Middlemarch is written very much in the omniscient narration style, now out of fashion, and to me, that was its fault. Not only because it's a less familiar style to me, though probably also for that reason, but because it made it harder to see the characters past the narrator. Early on, I made a note comparing the experience of reading it to being at a play where the actors keep freezing while the dramatist steps up to the footlights and tells us not only all of the things they think and feel, but all of the things they don't know and aren't self-aware about, and how all of that relates to their social context. She does it very brilliantly and in memorable, quotable prose, but I did find myself wishing that she'd get out of the way a bit more and give me a closer, less filtered contact with the characters.
Part of my reason for reading the book, as I mentioned, was that I wanted to learn more about the omniscient narrative style by seeing it done with great skill. I achieved that goal, but it didn't make me want to use the style; it showed me the downsides as well as the upsides.
I did enjoy the book considerably, though, and it is excellently written. It enters my Best of the Year list at the Silver tier, for solid books that, for one reason or another, don't quite qualify for gold. Bear in mind that that's a merger of how much I enjoyed the book with how well I judge it to be written; if I was only using the latter criterion, it would be a five-star, platinum-tier book for sure....more
I started reading this because my wife was reading it for a book club, and I thought it would be fun to discuss it with her, even though it's very mucI started reading this because my wife was reading it for a book club, and I thought it would be fun to discuss it with her, even though it's very much not my usual genre. In fact, it's dystopian, which I dislike intensely, and what's worse, it's a dystopia that actually existed (or rather, two dystopias, the Ancien Regime and the subsequent Terror). Mainly for that reason, I found it tough going for a while, even though the author's skill is such that he can give us a chapter in which no characters speak and almost nothing happens, pure exposition in his strong narrative voice, and have it be compelling. Reading it, I gained a new appreciation for the omniscient narrator as a writing technique.
Dickens' deep anger at the injustices of both the Ancien Regime and the Terror comes through with crystal clarity, and he carried me along to feel the emotions with him. And when we hit the denouement, about three-quarters of the way in, the plot finally cohered and I was gripped by the travails of the characters. Dickens also delivers an early example of what I call the Glorious Ending, where someone is so filled with love that they completely turn around a situation that's arisen out of hatred.
There's a certain amount of reliance on coincidence involved in the plot, including some fortunate events that are never explained, but it's deservedly a classic nonetheless....more
On the face of it, this is not a book I should enjoy.
The setting is dystopian, and usually I avoid that genre diligently. It contains torture and cruOn the face of it, this is not a book I should enjoy.
The setting is dystopian, and usually I avoid that genre diligently. It contains torture and cruelty. But the blurb, and the opening, made a pretty strong promise that this would give me a redemptive arc rather than a pointless grimdark tragedy, so I pushed on through the two or three initial chapters of horror until it started getting hopeful.
Not that things then became easy - not at all. The author has done a masterful job of keeping tension, setting up seemingly insoluble dilemmas, and then resolving them in a way that's both surprising and inevitable. It's a book of driven, damaged people struggling in a cruel world, and yet somehow finding their way to a better one through love, devotion, self-sacrifice and faith.
Initially, the metal-based magic reminded me of Sanderson's Mistborn books, but it's quite a different approach. The worldbuilding was not the strongest aspect; the way the magical people worked (and a few incidental moments, like the bone viper, which functioned a lot better as a metaphor than it did as a real animal) stretched my suspension of disbelief, sometimes to breaking. But the strong characters and plot made up for it for me.
I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review. Apart from consistently getting "lay" and "lie" the wrong way round, and a few other verb glitches, which I hope will be fixed by publication, it was well edited, considerably above the usual standard.
My first five-star read of 2020 thoroughly earned its fifth star with insight, drama, and bravura writing.
Ferrett Steinmetz holds the unusual distincMy first five-star read of 2020 thoroughly earned its fifth star with insight, drama, and bravura writing.
Ferrett Steinmetz holds the unusual distinction of having written a dystopian novel I don't hate, primarily because of the way he handles his characters and the thoughtfulness and insight he brings to ideas about human society and interaction, so when I saw this one I knew it would be worth a look. It helps that (thanks to my wife's obsession with food competition shows) I've developed an interest in, and some knowledge of, high-end restaurants and their cuisine.
A high-end restaurant is the stage for this coming-of-age/revolution story, and saving it from bankruptcy that would take down the entire space station on which it's located and everyone working there is a central plot driver. Kenna, the protagonist, has been raised in undernourished poverty by parents who practice the Inevitable Philosophies, a more-or-less constructed religion that was a fad a generation or two before, but is now in eclipse. His mother's (ironic) philosophy is "I will save the starving millions," his father's "I will lead my people back to greatness". Neither of them has come anywhere close, despite extensive sucking up to the rich and powerful that entails a lot of travel on slow, cheap transport ships, in the course of which Kenna gets beaten up a lot and rarely has much to eat.
Despite the toxic nature of his parents' religion (they are really nasty, self-righteous people in two different but entwined ways) and his own rough life, Kenna has the compassion that his parents lack. In the course of the novel he journeys to the wisdom that they lack as well, in a context they despise: hard work by people who are unappreciated for their service to the wealthy elites that Kenna's parents cultivate. His parents, and of course the elites themselves, see the elites as the only ones who truly matter; Kenna comes to disagree, and articulate his disagreement powerfully.
Along the way, there's love, there's friendship, there's a new appreciation for food as something more than simple nutrition, there are vivid and memorable characters, there are tough choices, there are moments of great emotional power. Kenna's journey took me along on a journey of my own; this is the best book I've read in well over a year.
Of course, it isn't perfect. Kenna, as an Inevitable Prince, has been trained to use an exalted style of speaking (which he eventually abandons, to speak straightforwardly from the heart in the manner of ordinary people), and the vocabulary he uses is not always used quite correctly. "Vouchsafe," for example, sounds like it should mean "vouch for the safety of," and that's how the author uses it, but it does not mean that.
This is (technically) space opera, even though it doesn't focus on the usual concerns of space opera but just uses the furniture, and like most space opera, it isn't intended as an actual projection of technological development. There are technologies that are probably impossible, like the Escargone, a space which speeds up time inside it (my French isn't that great, so I couldn't figure out why something that speeds time up is named after a snail), but there are technologies that already exist today or are being developed that are conspicuous by their absence, like AI and mixed reality. The tech is a means to the end of the plot, so I just had to treat it as such.
Also like most space opera, there's a glaring hiatus in culture between now and however many years in the future we are (it's never specified, but there are many inhabited planets, so presumably a couple of centuries or more). Contemporary references include Niffeneger syndrome (a reference to the novelist and her randomly disappearing character); "kerbal" used as a verb for working out movement in space; the Freon smell of old refrigerators; and dubstep. This is a difficult one for space opera writers; if you want to drop a quick reference that will have emotional resonance for your audience and convey a lot in a few words, you pretty much have to pretend the reference is still relevant however many years in the future, even though realistically it's a bit like a nineteenth-century novel set in 2020 referencing Sarah Bernhardt when it wants to evoke the idea of a glamorous woman. I don't know that there's a good answer to this dilemma. Probably the best answer is what Steinmetz has done: just drop the reference in, relying on the fact that most people won't notice the anachronism but will have the emotional response you're looking for.
I did have other moments of disbelief, too: for example, why does Paulius have purchasing authority, if he's so bad with money, and given that he does have it, how has the restaurant not gone out of business years ago? But I'm unusually critical, and despite all these nitpicks, this is an amazing novel with a glorious ending that took me on a thought-provoking, gripping emotional journey.
It's not quite so good that I intend to read his trilogy; I like books about drug use even less than I like dystopias, which is saying something. Though I suspect that if I did read those books, I would be delightfully surprised. Again....more
Naomi Novik is doing some wonderful stuff lately. I was starting to feel that the flaws in her Temeraire series were outweighing the strengths, and thNaomi Novik is doing some wonderful stuff lately. I was starting to feel that the flaws in her Temeraire series were outweighing the strengths, and then she started writing standalone fantasy novels like this, and like the excellent Uprooted.
It's a twist on the Rumpelstiltskin story, but it isn't at all closely constrained by its source material. There are at least three protagonists and several more viewpoint characters (one of whom was a bit of a surprise, and a signal, for me, that that particular character might have a shot at redemption, unlikely as that seemed); the main three are all capable young women who are treated, by their culture and by the men who surround them, as far less than they actually are. They decisively prove that underestimation to be wrong.
One is the daughter of a Jewish moneylender, and I'll admit that I set the book aside for a while and read other things because I was worried about which particular other shoes would drop for a Jewish family in an analog of Eastern Europe in what seems like the 18th or 19th century.
(view spoiler)[Happily, there is no pogrom, but there is plenty of tension and risk and high stakes nonetheless.
I wondered if a story like this, that is set up with so much potential for terrible tragedy all the way around, might have what I call the Glorious Ending, where someone makes a decision out of love and self-sacrifice that takes a story that seems destined for inevitable tragedy and turns it into a triumph. When I finished it, I didn't quite feel that it had hit the full Glorious Ending, but on reflection I'm going to grant it. It came so close that I felt the heat of it, at least.
I did wonder what was going to happen with the two unwanted and malevolent husbands. Were they just going to kill each other and leave the women in possession of the field? In the end, it was something more sophisticated than that, though I wasn't fully comfortable with the resolution; it plays a bit too close to the trope of "I believe my abuser can change if I stick with him," and that probably lost the book its potential fifth star. (hide spoiler)]
The editing is at a high standard, although the author uses "hence" and "thence" when she means "hither" and "thither", and at one point misses an apostrophe (it's an obscure rule she's not observing, so I wasn't too bothered).
With those caveats, I found the story engaging, the characters powerful, the sense of tension and the stakes compelling, and the plot well-paced. It's not every author who can pull off a book with this many viewpoints and with three or four major plot threads closely intertwined, but Naomi Novik is definitely one who can....more
I don't usually pick up books with "dark" in the blurb, but for this one I made an exception, because of the author. I'm glad I did.
I recently read aI don't usually pick up books with "dark" in the blurb, but for this one I made an exception, because of the author. I'm glad I did.
I recently read a set of guidelines for a short story market that said "Don't send me X unless you're Silvia Moreno-Garcia," so I'm not the only one who thinks about her this way. I'd previously read her novel The Beautiful Ones, which is so full of potential to be a horrible tragedy, but instead pulls off what I've come to call the Glorious Ending: a character rises above themselves, above what any ordinary person would do, and does something that is so much the right thing, so much an act of love in the face of a dark world, that everything is changed.
Well, at the risk of a vague spoiler (because I don't think you'll guess exactly how it comes off), she's done it again.
The protagonist, Casiopea, a young Mexican woman whose native (late) father is used by her family as an excuse to make her their domestic servant, is fully believable as a naive young woman who hasn't ever left her small town, but has read widely and has big dreams. Or, actually, relatively small and conventional dreams, which end up being rendered irrelevant by the actual adventure that finds her: the lord of the (Mayan) underworld needs her help to regain his throne from his usurping brother. She continues to be believable, and becomes increasingly rounded as a character, as she copes with this bizarre and unwanted situation, confronting sorcerers and gods and other supernatural beings, plus her spoiled and hapless cousin (who also gets a bit of a growth arc).
Early on, the story starts looking like Cinderella, and the narration specifically averts that conclusion; nor does it work out remotely like Cinderella, because if anyone is rescuing anyone, it's the young woman rescuing the prince. And herself, and indeed everyone, in the end. It's magnificent.
The omniscient narrator is unusual these days, but it works; it gives us extra insight into the protagonist when she doesn't have insight into herself yet, without becoming an intrusive character voice in its own right.
The Mexican setting, one I'm not very familiar with, is beautifully and richly portrayed; there's a strong sense of place and of culture. The language, vocabulary, and writing mechanics are at a level I see all too seldom from native English speakers. (I assume, from the authentic feel of the Mexican setting, that the author has English as a second language, but I could be wrong there.) There's a thread, evolving ever so slowly and subtly but clearly, of romance, but it doesn't follow a conventional path; nothing in this book does.
I've been through a spell of reading not-very-good books for a while, and this was a welcome breaking of the drought. It's going near the top of my Best of 2019 list, both because it's extremely well done and also because it's exactly the kind of book I most enjoy.
I thought I'd read this before, but I didn't remember it once I got into it, and I would have remembered a book like this. I think I'd just heard abouI thought I'd read this before, but I didn't remember it once I got into it, and I would have remembered a book like this. I think I'd just heard about it so often that I assumed I'd read it, particularly since I love the author's other work.
McKillip writes with a magnificent complexity and depth, in the mythopoeic style championed by Tolkien. Lest we be fooled by the commercial epic fantasy of the 1970s and 1980s into thinking that Tolkien was all about armies and orcs and a quirky mixed group on a quest, this book reminds us that there was another, deeper layer to his work, which few subsequent authors have the skills to emulate. It's poetic, without ever trying too hard for beauty for its own sake; it's mythic, while also being anchored in the reality of human psychology; it's epic, without depicting a single battle on stage (though a battle forms an important part of the backstory).
Love, revenge, betrayal and jealousy weave powerfully through the plot, as do wisdom and self-understanding. (view spoiler)[It has what I'm going to start calling the Glorious Ending, in which love, kindness and wisdom head off what seems an inevitable tragedy born of bad choices, fear, betrayals and resentment. (hide spoiler)]
The central characters are magnificent, grand, and wholehearted. The setting is vivid, rich, and magical. The beasts of the title are worthy to stand beside the great dragons, lions, cats, swans, falcons, and boars of myth and legend.
A couple of quotations, to give you the flavour:
"My heart is in your heart. I gave it to you with my name that night and you are its guardian, to treasure it, or let it wither and die. I do not understand you. I am angry with you. I am hurt and helpless, but nothing would fill the ache of the hollowness in me where your name would echo if I lost you."
"I have many people who know my name, but only one or two or three that know who it belongs to."
The wisdom at the heart of this book is that, in caring for others, we come to understand ourselves; and the person who comes to this insight most clearly is not the young boy, but the magically powerful middle-aged woman. It's a landmark work in the fantasy field, and I'm glad it's being reissued in ebook, and that I had the chance to read it through Netgalley for this review....more
The question that held me in suspense almost throughout this book was, "What genre is this?" It has elements of literary (particularly the focus on thThe question that held me in suspense almost throughout this book was, "What genre is this?" It has elements of literary (particularly the focus on the interiority of the characters); elements of romance (the focus on the characters' relationships); and a relatively small, but in the end significant, speculative element, in that the two main characters are both telekinetics in a society where this is not common, but also far from unheard of.
The main reason I wondered about the genre is that if it was pure literary, it might turn into a tragedy in which the characters spiralled downwards through helplessness into hopelessness and everyone ended up miserable. There was definitely potential for that to happen, given the premise: Hector, a stage performer with a powerful telekinetic ability, has returned to the capital city of Not!19th-century Not!France after a long time touring out of the country, and is now a wealthy man. He meets a young woman, Nina, who happens to be the cousin of the man his first love married instead of him. He's never got over that youthful love, or the disappointment of losing her, and he uses the pretence of courting Nina to get back in to see her cousin's wife.
There are all kinds of ways in which that could go bad, of course, and for a long time it looked like all of them were going to happen, intensifying the question: is this a literary novel where everything falls apart while the author describes it beautifully, or a romance, in which the characters manage to make a happy ending? And is the fantasy element (the telekinesis) merely decorative or symbolic, something that Nina can do but is discouraged from doing because of her social status and her gender, or will it end up being significant to the plot? Answers inside the spoiler tag.
(view spoiler)[It turns out to be a romance, and the telekinesis is important, so I will declare this to be a fantasy romance with strong literary sensibilities. (hide spoiler)]
The characters are wonderfully drawn, their desires and decisions believable. The setting is lightly sketched, in the sense that there's no in-depth exploration of the speculative element, but the places and the society are beautifully evoked, no less so for being closely based on historical models. The language occasionally shows hints in an odd phrasing or two that the author may not speak English as a first language, but it's generally elegant and capable without being overly obtrusive.
Overall, I enjoyed it very much and looked forward to each time I had the opportunity to read it.
I received a copy from Netgalley at no charge for the purposes of review....more
Independent, modern young woman narrates, in First Person Smartass, how she was just an ordinary person with an ordinary life who didn't believe in thIndependent, modern young woman narrates, in First Person Smartass, how she was just an ordinary person with an ordinary life who didn't believe in the supernatural, but then it turned out that the supernatural believed in her, and around about the same time she met this guy...
There are hundreds of authors writing that exact book at the moment, many of them very badly; and when I see an instance of it, I usually move on, sometimes with an eyeroll, to the next book in the hope of something I haven't seen dozens of times before. But I was vaguely aware of the name "Tim Pratt" - I think I've read one or two of his short stories - and paused long enough on this one to get the sample and see if he wrote it well.
He wrote it very well indeed.
I was surprised, when I read the back matter, to discover that (as T.A. Pratt) he's the author of the Marla Mason series. I stopped reading that series because it is so completely unlike this. Marla is lacking in empathy, violent, and amoral; the protagonist of this book is intensely empathetic, and her rejection of the easy, violent solution gives us an ending that I found fresh, unexpected, and extremely satisfying.
Also, there's a mysterious magical house, and for some reason I love mysterious magical houses. There are some cool magical items, too, and the author wisely dodges the Q trap (where every single one of them turns out to be the only thing that will save James Bond at some key moment of the plot); some of them are simply cool rather than being at all useful.
I appreciated that the protagonist didn't rush into her relationship with the man she met, and that she took the time to communicate with him about something that could have split them apart (this is lampshaded as something that would resolve practically every romantic comedy plot much more quickly, and is a thing that real adult human beings do). She makes good decisions throughout, in fact - not only good-sensible but good-morally - so the plot is not driven by her stupidity and risk-taking, meaning that when the love interest saves her it's not infuriating.
Overall, annoying tropes are avoided or averted, the characters work well together, the protagonist's voice is genuinely witty and amusing, and we end up in an unexpected and satisfactory place after an enjoyable ride. This book demonstrates that even an overused premise can still be the starting point for a fresh and well-executed story....more
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