Ray Bradbury - The Halloween Tree

Alas! I am now 99% sure I will never have access to a time travel machine, because if I ever do, I fully intend to scoop up a large handful of Ray Bradbury's books and drop them in the path of my ten-year-old self with a note attached: READ THESE. And as my first encounter with Bradbury took place less than six month ago, at the ripe old age of 24, I can only assume that no such time-traveling opportunity will be presented to me in the future.

This didn't look like much when I pulled it off the library shelf (which I did largely because it looked short) -- a novel about a group of boys in a small American town on Halloween. Being Australian, the whole idea of Halloween has mainly entered my consciousness via the consumption of American media. A couple of optimistic kids might show up at the door every year, and we will have to cast around perplexedly for something to give them. During high school it was a good excuse for costume parties.

The first thing that struck me is that these are very boyish kinds of boys, so distinct that I think I could probably pick a Bradbury child from, for example, a Wynne Jones child, should they ever appear in the same story. The way the story is told, hyperbolistic and rapid and rough and overwhelmingly wondrous, is the perfect style for a children's story that refuses to talk down to you.

Over the course of Halloween Night, the group of boys is swept through the midnight histories of the human race: the realities and the myths behind each of their costumes -- skeleton and witch and caveman and mummy, all those classical figures that run through Bradbury's works -- and through it all they are chasing the missing member of their band, who appears to need saving from some unknown fate. It's just enough of a driving plot on which to hang ragged handfuls of fantasy and mythology and horror, and it works. Each of the scenes is evocative, and scary, and manages to sneakily educate you as well. Plus, it's overwhelmingly about how people conceptualise and cope with death, which is right up my alley.

My absolute favourite aspect of it, though, is the sound of the words. I was only a few pages in when I started doing something with this book that I've never done with any other: I read most of it aloud, or at least imagined myself speaking each word inside my head. I couldn't help it. I want to read it to children, with pauses in the spooky bits, and proper sound effects. I want to show them how words can roll together and echo, how rhythm sings when it's done right.

Here's a bit that's death-mythos and language all at once:

"...When you and your friends die every day, there's no time to think of Death, is there? Only time to run. But when you stop running at long last -"

He touched the walls. The apemen froze in mid-flight.

"- now you have time to think of where you came from, where you're going. And fire lights the way, boys. Fire and lightning. Morning stars to gaze at. Fire in your own cave to protect you. Only by night fires was the caveman, beast-man, able at last to turn his thoughts on a spit and baste them with wonder. The sun died in the sky. Winter came on like a great white beast shaking its fur, burying him. Would spring ever come back to the world? Would the sun be reborn next year or stay murdered? Egyptians asked it. Cavemen asked it a million years before. Will the sun rise tomorrow morning?"

I'm on to a book of Bradbury's short stories, now, but I haven't yet met anything that impressed me as much as this small book.

Mary Renault - The Friendly Young Ladies

For a long time I thought Mary Renault only wrote historical epics about Alexander the Great and the like, but last year I read her book The Charioteer which is set during WWII (I don't think my obsession with war literature has had a chance to air itself on this blog yet, has it?), and it was a pleasant surprise. When looking up her other more modern works, I was struck immediately by the catalogue tags assigned to this one on the local libary system: Triangles (Interpersonal relations), Bohemianism, Young women, Physicians, Houseboats, Lesbians, Sisters, Bloomsbury (London, England), Psychological fiction, Love stories.

How was I supposed to pass that up? I would have read it on the basis of any one of those, let alone the stunning mishmash of appealing images conjured up by the full list.

The book begins by following Elsie, a sheltered eighteen-year-old whose mind is the product of too many of the wrong sorts of books, and who runs away from her emotionally unbearable home situation in search of her older sister, Leo, who ran away in a similar fashion many years earlier.

Although the story purports to set Elsie up as the protagonist, at first, one of the best things about it is that in face Renault is telling the story of five people: Elsie, Leo, Leo's lover Helen, thier neighbour Joe, and Peter, the young doctor who becomes fascinated by all three women. She jumps around between their points of view to reveal the differences between people as they see themselves and as they are seen by others. When thinking about the relationships and the narration and how they interact, I couldn't go past the concept of the Johari window; if you've never heard of it and can't be arsed with Wikipedia, it's sort of a division of an individual's personality traits into those recognised in themselves and those recognised by others. Renault has a deft way of combining close third person and a more impersonal narrative voice to highlight human nature. One of my favourite quotes concerns the misunderstandings that underpin all human interaction by necessity, because we are not telepaths:

Thought's secrecy must be one of the most wonderful of the works of God. Everything else is explorable, or violable, or reacts to chemistry, or can be laid open with a knife. But thought can only be given. That's the ultimate dignity of man.

(I have perhaps been thinking too much about X-Men and Charles Xavier lately; any kind of commentary about the privacy of thought grabs me.)

Two of the characters are writers; different types of writers, working on different types of books, which means there's a lot of scope for insight (and snark) about the writing process, and creativity, and the publishing industry. Those were some of my favourite parts; I also (predictably) loved the parts set in 1930s London, especially a London seen through sets of eyes that are by turns entranced and bored and interested.

If you're looking for plot, well -- there's really not much of a plot at all beyond the progression and deterioration of interpersonal relationships, and a few progressions of individual character, but I can't say I cared while reading it. It's one of the most character-driven things I've ever read, and isn't pretending to be anything else, and the way it sketches and analyses character makes it all-in-all very enjoyable.

Patrick Rothfuss - The Wise Man's Fear

I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him
- Leonard Cohen

I'm going to do something irritating and review the second book in a trilogy without having reviewed the first, but don't worry: I'm not going to talk too much about the plot. What I'm going to do instead is tell you why you should be reading Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Trilogy (despite the uberdramatic name) even if long fantasy trilogies aren't really your thing. My sister made me read this one; our relationship has progressed to the point where I am no longer the sole bestower of wisdom and Good Reads advice, which is sort of depressing but also means I read things I otherwise might pass over. I read myself to death on high fantasy in high school and have left the genre largely alone ever since.

I was therefore pleased to discover that this is not your everyday derivative dragons-and-swords high fantasy, even though it features both dragons and swords. This is a (young) man narrating his memoirs, over the course of three nights, to a scribe. The protagonist, Kvothe, does dance perilously close to the realms of Perfect Awesomesauce Fantasy Hero, but is saved from it because his narrative voice is so very human: he's funny, dry, emotional, perceptive and angry by turns, and although the trilogy is indeed all about this one person, it's tribute to Rothfuss's powers of invention and lively writing that you never get sick of Kvothe's company. And the retrospective narrative technique means that there's an inbuilt curiosity about trajectory that keeps the pages turning: how did he get from there to here? We want to know. We really want to know. We wish the book would stop it with the enticing fucking hints. (Not really.)

Although this isn't an ensemble piece by any means, there's a large cast of characters that dance in and out of the story, and I think they might be my favourite thing about the entire trilogy, because they have lives. They're all recognisably complicated people who sometimes interact with Kvothe and sometimes are off doing their own thing. Even if they serve a very particular purpose for Kvothe and for the plot, the reader never feels like they're looking at some stock characters who have been dragged onstage in order to serve this sole purpose. I am particularly fond of the way Rothfuss portrays women (he's a blatantly feminist writer in a way that comes across on occasion as a mite too self-aware, but is still vastly better than the alternative, and very refreshing to see in the genre of male-authored fantasy fiction), and also Kvothe's university friends and their quirks and relationships.

In fact, the majority of the first two books revolve around Kvothe's life at the University, with the result that it kind of feels like Pamela Dean's Tam Lin fell into the hands of Raymond E. Feist and was subjected to a makeover: sure, there's adventure and myth and magic, but there are also long swathes of delightful academic time wherein people study for exams and geek out over weird subjects and get annoyed with their teachers and then go and get drunk. I love it. The greatest and best worldbuilding that Rothfuss has done is in this academic arena: all of the areas of study have been thought out and described beautifully, and their applications are fascinating, and they never come across as easy. Sometimes you have to study until your head aches. Sometimes things come easily, but sometimes you just don't have the knack for it.

The Wise Man's Fear also sees Kvothe leave the University on a sort of enforced gap year, during which this Penny Arcade comic happens (see also: the quote at the top of this review). Oh, and he also learns some crazy ninja skills and comes a bit closer to solving the mystery of his parents' death, which is related to a lot of dark mythology and a possible secret society (there's that plot I wasn't going to tell you about). Another very intense piece of worldbuilding is done here, and that's the people of the Adem, who communicate emotion and nuance via their hands rather than their faces, and have a warrior code and a matriarchal society structure that are impeccably thought out and effectively delivered. I could have read about that society forever; there's so much imagination put into their crreation that you can almost feel it coming off on your fingers as you turn the pages.

There's one more thing that I was so, so impressed to see in these books, and that's the treatment of money. There are a lot of stories where people rise from poor beginnings, and a lot of stories where it's just assumed or handwaved that the characters have enough money to live and to go and do whatever the plot needs them to do. What Rothfuss illustrates wonderfully is just how fucking difficult it is for poor students living hand-to-mouth. Kvothe never has enough money; not through fault (usually), but because he has neither family nor savings, and his tuition is expensive, and it's hard to hold down decently paid work and study like a maniac at the same time. It's a story that rings true with me and I think would with a lot of people -- not wanting to insult friends by not going out with them, but wondering how the hell you can get away with not buying a meal. Praying that no sudden misfortunate requiring money to fix it will come along, because you have no safety net. Borrowing. Pawning. Making compromises. Making do. For all that Kvothe is a talented, brilliant person, he has to work bloody hard just to stay afloat in his own life, and I always appreciate it when an author is brave enough to do that to their darlings.

This wasn't so much a review as a very long recommendation, but there it is: read The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear, and then prepare to sit around waiting for the third book along with the rest of us.

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.