April
29,
2004
James Alan Gardner’s Hunted
is the sort of book that makes you want to just lean back and smile, because it’s so damn enjoyable. I mean, it combines an SF puzzle story with an over-the-top space opera — it’s got an inscrutable empire of transcendent beings, speechifying villains with dastardly plans, exotic alien insectoid races, interstellar spaceships, massive battles, the works — and does it with great characters, solid writing, and a wonderful sense of pace
Longtime readers will recall that I was similarly fond of Gardner’s other books (though Trent didn’t share my enthusiasm); but I think this book is the best of the lot so far. Either that, or I just forgot how good the other ones were, so was impressed anew by Gardner’s talent for writing enjoyably good light SF adventure.
Note that this is a quasi-sequel to Vigilant and
Expendable. It’s playing in the same universe (so if, like
Trent, you have an aversion to arbitrary rules of the universe set up
by unknowable and God-like aliens, a la Vinge’s Zones, you’ll still be
bothered by the setup) and characters from the other books appear at
length in this one. If you’re planning on reading this, you’ll
definitely want to read at least Expendable first.
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April
22,
2004
Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Last Light of the Sun
is not one
of his better books. In his better books, he evokes with seeming
effortlessness deep emotion (as in Tigana) or the epic sweep of
history (as in Lord of Emperors). In his worse books, he’s too
obviously trying really hard to evoke deep emotion (as in Lions of
Al-Rassan) or that epic sweep (as here).
The setting for this tale is a thinly fictionalized version of
England, Ireland, and the Viking North. Some people are bothered by
the thin veneer of fiction on otherwise straight-up European history,
but I’m fine with it — it lets Kay tell basically historical stories
without the ending being automatically known, and without the
characters all being overshadowed by inescapably significant names.
I’m not so fine, though, with how densely he peppers this tale with
Great Men; every other character is one of Kay’s super-genius,
greater-than-great Heroes For The Ages. What works fine for a
character or two grows ridiculous when spread to an entire cast.
Even worse are the fucking homilies. Kay apparently doesn’t
trust the reader to understand anything they read, so at frequent
points throughout the book, he spells out the meaning explicitly,
directly, and pretentiously. Consider these three paragraphs from a
span of ten pages:
In all of us, fear and memory interweave in complex, changing ways.
Sometimes it is the thing unseen that will linger and appall long
afterwards. Sliding into dreams from the blurred borders of
awareness, or emerging, perhaps, when we stand alone, at first waking,
at the fence of a farmyard or the perimeter of an encampment in that
misty hour when the idea of morning is not quite incarnate in the
east. Or it can assail us like a blow in the bright shimmer of a
crowded market at midday. We do not ever move entirely beyond what
has brought us mortal terror.
It is in the nature of things that when we judge actions to be
memorably courageous, they are invariably those that have an impact
that resonates: saving other lives at great risk, winning a battle,
losing one’s life in a valiant attempt to do one or the other. A
death of that sort can lead to songs and memories at least as much —
sometimes more — than a triumph. We celebrate our losses, knowing how
they are woven into the gift of our being here.
And so a difficult truth about human courage was played out among
those trees. A truth we resist for what it suggests about our lives.
But sometimes the most gallant actions, those requiring a summoning of
all our will, access to bravery beyond easy understanding or
description... have no consequence that matters. They leave no
ripples upon the surface of succeeding events, cause nothing, achieve
nothing. Are trivial, marginal. This can be hard to accept.
What the fuck is that? I feel like I should be stroking my
goatee and murmuring, “That’s really deep, man.” Or, considering that
I’m reading a book of fiction and not a collection of homilies, “Show,
don’t tell!” Kay could easily show how events from the past can cause
surprises in the present, how great tragedy can be celebrated, how
courageous actions can go unrewarded but be no less courageous for
that. He’s done so, even, in previous books. But here, he seems
content to just tell us these things up front, so he doesn’t have to
bother writing them out in a slightly less obvious way.
I don’t know whether Kay phoned this book in, but it sure reads
like he did. It’s safe to say that it’ll leave no ripples upon the
surface of succeeding events, cause nothing, achieve nothing. It’s
trivial, marginal. And if you’ve enjoyed Kay’s other books, you’re
not going to accept my word for it, but are going to insist on reading
it yourself. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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April
5,
2004
The odd thing about classics is that even though you know what to
expect, you don’t get it. I just finished reading Robert
Fitzgerald’s translation of Homer’s The Odyssey
, and was
mightily surprised by it.
The thing is, you know how the story goes: Odysseus pisses off a
god or two, then has a bunch of zany adventures while taking a decade
to get home from the Trojan War. There’s Circe, there’s Scylla and
Charbydis, there’s the Sirens, the Cyclops — all the stuff you’ve read
a zillion times in a zillion secondary sources. Only, it turns out,
that’s not actually what Homer’s poem really consists of.
Oh, sure, all that adventure-story stuff is there (though with more
modern spellings — Kirke, Skylla, the Seirenes), but it’s only a
portion of the whole book. We don’t even get to see Odysseus until
we’re nearly 100 pages in; and he gets back to Ithaka with 100 pages
to spare. In a real sense, the hero of The Odyssey is
Telemakhos, and the real story is the deliverance of Odysseus’s
household from the rapine of the suitors. All that voyage stuff is
just filler in the middle.
The end result is a work that’s more human-centric and personal
than I’d expected (moreso, I think, than The Iliad), but also a
bit less fun. The Ithaka stuff is interesting, and makes the book
deeper than I’d expected it to be; but it does drag on near the end.
After he gets back to his home, Odysseus seems to spend about a week
in disguise (much of it needlessly), and really draws out the
resolution.
Still and all, good stuff and enjoyable reading; which, at a couple
thousand years out, is high praise. And I remain fond of Fitzgerald’s
translation, which balances neatly between the stuffy archaism that
marks older public-domain translations, and the too-modern slang that
Fagles uses.
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