Ray Bradbury - Farenheit 451

Kingsley Amis called Farenheit 451 'the most skillfully drawn of all science fiction's conformist hells', and having read it hot on the heels of Brave New World (which I couldn't find enough coherence about to properly review, at the time), I was doing a lot of comparisons in my head while I read it. So there'll probably be some comparisons in this review, as well, and I can pretend that this discharges my obligation to say things about Huxley's work.

But starting with this one. I have had a niggling desire to read this book since the age of twelve, when my Tournament of Minds team -- I think this is an Australian thing -- had to write a skit based on its idea of secret oral tradition, of families passing down the classics through the generations to preserve them even though books were banned.

(The skit had to show how two classics had accidentally become merged into a single story along the way: we picked Macbeth and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lady Macbeth and the White Witch were SISTERS and there was RAPPING, and I played a version of Lucy who had a tea fixation. It was epic. We were the state champions.)

Farenheit 451 gives us a world where books are forbidden; burned, along with the houses in which they're found, by the Firemen. The justification is that they lead to confusion of ideas: that truth cannot be known (and neither, of course, can it be controlled) in the cacophony of words and opinions that exist in books. The protagonist is Guy Montag, a Fireman, who begins -- of course -- to question the beliefs that his job is based on, and finds himself destroying his life in an effort to seek out greater meaning.

First and foremost, I am head-over-heels in love with Bradbury's ability to manipulate language, to tell a good story and to deliver it wrapped in sharp, fresh imagery. Particularly striking is the extremely creepy invention and description of the Mechanical Hound, and also a scene where Montag is frantically trying to remember a quote from the Bible while advertising blasts through the train in which he's riding. And this quote, which I read five times in a row, marvelling at how effective the rhythm is:

We are bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it's here. And the hour is late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colours.

The vividness and the gorgeous urgency of Bradbury's prose creates that skillful drawing that Amis picked up on, and along with it comes a sense of humanity that is striking when you consider some of the other moral fables of science fiction. Putting it next to Brave New World, as I said: while both of them are books about particular ideas, particular ways in which society might become restricted in the name of increasing its members' happiness, I think Farenheit 451 successfully manages to be, over and above this, a book about people. Or at least a person. Montag's inner life is what drives the book, what's lingered on, and what delivers the message. It means that the narrative is smaller, tighter, than the explicit and wide-ranging world-building delivered in Brave New World (which has its own charms, albeit more intellectual ones).

As with a lot of older sci fi (yes, Brave New World had this problem too) there are some serious issues related to the portrayal of women. Montag's wife Mildred isn't quite one-dimensional, but she's never sympathetic; just shrill, pathetic and pitiable. And as the catalyst for Montag's changing views on his occupation, the character of Clarisse just might be the prototypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl: she turns up out of the blue and talks about whimsical things! She tries to get him to expand his horizons and enjoy life! And, tellingly:

...Clarisse's favourite subject wasn't herself. It was everyone else, and me.

Ah, the dream of repressed and empty-souled men everywhere: a pretty young thing whose existence is all about you.

Anyway.

I have to love this novel, because at heart it's about the words with which we choose to fill our lives. Bradbury is telling us his opinion of the importance of books.

Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out int he long run. And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddam steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirros for the next year and take a long look in them.

The importance, then, seems to be a direct echo of Santayana: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It's an adventure story that's telling us to honour our stories, because they're how we learn about where we've been, and what we look like now, and where we might be heading.

Take a long look in them.

Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

I don't know much about Michael Cunningham beyond the fact that The Hours was one of my favourite books last year; I was impressed that he'd elevated Virginia Woolf fanfiction into a publishable art, and thoroughly enjoyed the book. Specimen Days is quite similar to The Hours in some ways: it's about three people with intertwined fates, it tells three stories set in three different time periods, and it's tightly woven around an existing text. In this case, however, it's not Mrs Dalloway that forms the thematic heart of the story: it's Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

The three stories that make up this book are not told side-by-side, but in succession: first the one set in the nineteenth century, then the one set in the present, and then the one set in the future. All three use New York as their setting in a way that turns the city into the fourth protagonist (the fifth one, of course, being Whitman's poetry); I've seen this done successfully for London -- China Meiville does it all the time -- but never for an American city, except in the realms of television. (It could be that I just don't read a lot of American literature.)

The three protagonists -- Luke, Catherine and Simon -- do not appear in one narrative each; all of them show up, in different bodies and situations, in all three stories, although they take it in turns to be the central character. Luke's story is that of a boy who becomes convinced that his dead brother is speaking to the world through machines. Catherine's is of a forensic psychologist trying to prevent the actions of a child suicide bomber. And Simon's -- my personal favourite -- is of a man who's not quite human, on the run with a woman who's definitely an alien, in search of answers and a future. The three characters are always linked together by some form of love or other, and the poetry is always there, always spoken, always vitally important. Each of the book's sections could stand alone as a story, but it's only when they're lined up and you can see the people and objects and motifs that connect them that this becomes a novel rather than a collection.

As you might expect from the use of Whitman, this is by and large a book about poetry, and about the idea of America. It's about the isolation of individual lives, and about the interconnectedness of the world. I love the way Cunningham writes; his prose is beautiful without ever feeling heavy or overdone, his worldbuilding is wonderful to experience and his characters are complex and engaging. I wouldn't call it a page-turner and I certainly wouldn't call it uplifting, but it's a good book for reading slowly and just letting the ideas at the heart of it spill over you.

Diana Wynne Jones - Eight Days of Luke

SCHOOL FETES ARE THE BEST PLACE TO GET BOOKS. Some poor deluded person will always have donated something that you deeply desire, and you will pick it up for the ludicrous price of $1! It feels almost illegal, like at any point, as you are hugging your bag of books to your chest and scurrying past the milkshake stall, you will be stopped by large men in security uniforms.

"Sorry," they'll say. "There's been some mistake here. The universe doesn't believe you should be acquiring so much literary enjoyment for so cheap a price. Hand over the books."

Uh, this has never happened to me. Obviously. But I can never shake the feeling that it might.

The excellent thing about these particular editions of Diana Wynne Jones's books (stay with me, this is relevant) is that their garish spines stand out beautifully in the Children's Books section, even though Children's Books are pretty damn colourful as a rule. When I saw this one, I leapt in, realised that it was one I hadn't read yet, and made a loud noise of gleeful acquisition, startling everyone else in the vicinity. Most of whom were...children. Funnily enough.

Eight Days of Luke is a very short book, so I expect my review will be short also. In fact I'm pretty sure the above blathering about fetes will comprise the majority of it.

Basic plot summary: David enjoys spending the holidays with his family about as much as Harry Potter does, so when a mysterious boy called Luke shows up out of the blue, claiming that David has released him from some kind of imprisonment, he's pretty pleased to have some company. Until some strange people start showing up and threatening him. (And even then, he's mostly pleased that his holidays are looking a lot more interesting.)

If you're at all familiar with Norse mythology -- which I am in a vague sense only; I had to look up a few things to fit the pieces together -- then you'll love this one to pieces. The mystery is satisfying, the plot bounds along at a satisfying rate, David is a very teenage teenage boy, and DWJ pulls off one of her best family portraits in showing us both the grubby psychology of his relatives and the ways in which David observes and thinks about their games and behaviours.

It's quintessentially Wynne Jonesian, which means it reads kind of like an Enid Blyton book and American Gods got drunk at a party and reproduced. (Neil Gaiman has gone on record re: how much he was and wasn't influenced by this book, which came out long before American Gods was written.) Plus there's a lot of talk about cricket, which I always like to see in my British fantasy.

And that's about it! Short & sweet.

Margo Lanagan - Black Juice

After reading Tender Morsels, I was determined to hunt down more of Margo Lanagan's work, and the library was good enough to supply me with some of her short story collections. I picked up this one first for the simple reason that it had a medal on the cover (2004 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards), thus proving that I am easily swayed by awards and other cheap tricks.

'Singing My Sister Down' has become quite well known; it's a quiet, ruthless story that has real overtones of horror for me. A young boy and his family head to the tar pits for a ceremonial picnic and singing session during the hours of his older sister's ceremonial execution. Lanagan's skill in building up a society that has alien customs but familiar interpersonal dynamics is displayed beautifully here, as the family's bickering and love and shared grief are played out against the strange, slow, slow ritual of death.

I found 'My Lord's Man' to be the weakest story of the bunch, not because it isn't well written but because it doesn't have as much of a narrative as the others. It paints a clear picture of three people and the complicated ways in which they relate to one another, judge one another, and forgive one another. But it feels -- not quite incomplete, but lost. As though it needs to be part of a larger whole.

'Red Nose Day', on the other hand, was my favourite. The story of a pair of assassins that slowly expands and expands into something weirder and deeper, it's got the perfect balance of tension and instant strong characterisation. It's a truly bizarre, chillingly imagined tale that reads like Terry Pratchett by way of Stephen King; you're not sure if it's a joke, but you certainly don't feel like laughing. In fact, you feel like backing away gently and hoping it doesn't notice.

When I was quite young my grandfather, who's spent a lot of his life in places like Sri Lanka and India and Bangladesh, wrote and illustrated a wonderful book for me, from the point of view of a labour elephant who had a lot of strange adventures with his handler. It was the first thing I thought of when reading 'Sweet Pippit', which tells the story of a group of elephants in search of their favourite human, who has been arrested and taken away from them. Once again Lanagan mixes recognisable human culture with the fantastical creation that is the elephants' customs, personalities, and powers. And I think that if elephants had names for themselves, they would absolutely be things like Booroondoonhooroboom.

I'm still not sure what to think of 'House of the Many'. Without a doubt it's incredibly well put together, once again abandoning normal fantasy tropes for the scarier and closer-to-home details of a cultish group of people controlled by a single man, seen through the eyes of a small boy. (Margo Lanagan, like Diana Wynne Jones, seems to have a fondness for child narrators.) But I think I was hoping it would lead up to something bigger.

I really liked 'Wooden Bride' but again felt that it could be more effective if it was part of something longer. Maybe because the idea of it -- 'bridehood' as an event that has nothing to do with men and everything to do with girls coming into their own, all the trappings of a wedding blurred into myth and meaningless ritual -- was something that made me yearn to see a wider context, instead of a short vignette that gives the bare bones of the concept and not much more.

'Earthly Uses' is a really fucking creepy story about a boy who lives with his abusive grandfather, and is sent to fetch an angel to heal his dying grandmother. Except 'angels', in this story, are definitely not the shining intermediaries we associate with the word. Gah. I still get shivers thinking about this one, which I suppose means it's a very effective piece of storytelling.

I let out a cheer when I worked out that 'Perpetual Light' was recognisably set in Australia; most of Lanagan's stories are set in unnamed and/or unrecognisable cultures, and there's a sad dearth of Australian urban fantasy or sci-fi in general. To be honest I'm still not entirely sure what parts of it are about -- I'd need to reread it, I think -- but there are definite themes of environmentalism and family, a much more science fiction feel than any of the other stories in the collection, and a kind of mild, dusty dystopia that I loved because it was based firmly in the NSW bush. I also thought the narrator, Daphne, was a great character. I would happily read novels worth of this particular world.

'Yowlinin' was another favourite of mine, largely for the narrator -- a half-wild girl abandoned by her village because her parents were killed, a girl fiercely proud of her independence and scornful of everyone else, but also with a bit of a crush on one of the village boys -- and partly because I think it had the most effective pacing and plot. Like 'Earthly Uses', it features the kind of magical creatures that you're likely to have nightmares about.

'Rite of Spring', about a boy who participates unwillingly in a harsh and dangerous ritual that is needed to bring about the start of spring, is another one that has a strong sense of myth to it, with the struggle of human beings against the grudging elements, and the idea that our rituals and beliefs have real consequences.

All in all, this collection left me with both a wild jealousy for Lanagan's powers of imagination and language, and a desire to snap up all her other books as soon as possible.