“They were careful of their demeanor that they not be thought to have opinions on what they heard for like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand”
-All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
To categorize Cormac MCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses as primarily a “literary” novel seems to me to be doing it a disservice, because what it really is, and what it functions best as, is a Western with a literary bite. All the trademarks of the traditional Western novel are here (and beautifully so) – the hard-bitten characters forced to grow up too early, the deep-running friendships evinced by nothing more than casual surface talk, the necessary, ever-present nature of food, guns, and horses, the transitory sense of life as constant travel while the characters search for permanence or at least the illusion of it…McCarthy has finely captured and in fact rejuvenated a genre that seems to be dying out. Don’t get me wrong – All the Pretty Horses is not a straight Western. Most Westerns set up one particular conflict early and then circle around it for the rest of the novel (usually a conflict with a particular antagonist) and as soon as this is resolved the novel is over (often with a gun battle). Simple, contained, and straightforward. All the Pretty Horses is much longer, more sprawling, more inclusive of potentially epic themes. But it possesses the same sensibility of dust and travel and survival mechanisms as most Westerns, and has the same stripped, linear storytelling style. I think I am going to enjoy it.
To Reference: Top Fantasy Series, Fantasy 100, YA Fantasy, Locus, Nebula and Hugo awards, Locus Index
Fantasy: Ursula K. LeGuin, Garth Nix, Peter Dickinson
Romantic fantasy: Robin McKinley, Juliet Marillier, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Jules Watson
Fallback (flawed or not quite to my taste but enjoyable): Stephen Donaldson, C.J. Cherryh, Robert Jordan, Diana Wynne Jones, Lois McMaster Bujold, Patricia A. McKillip, Melanie Rawn, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Janny Wurts, Tad Williams, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (YA)
To try: David Eddings, Caroline Stevermer & Patricia Wrede (Regency romance with magic), Simon R. Green (sci fi & fantasy), Piers Anthony (sci fi), David Mitchell (sf, ), Nalini Singh
Tried & didn’t take: George R.R. Martin(A Song of Ice and Fire series)
Outgrew: Anne McCaffrey, Eoin Colfer, Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander
Avoid: Alice Borchardt, Jasper Fforde, Diana Gabaldon, Philip Pullman
I recently finished reading Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair, and it was delicious. Well-done whodunits are extremely hard to find, and a mystery which doubles as a romance with thoughtful bits of social and religious commentary along the way is even rarer. The Franchise Affair is all of these, a thoroughly engaging and satisfying novel about a middle-aged barrister who becomes the reluctant defendant of two women charged with the brutal kidnapping of a young girl. Robert Blair, a lawyer who has been known as “dependable” his whole life, is a particularly compelling protagonist as a man whose sense of justice drives him to great lengths to defend the women he believes to be innocent. Quick-witted Marion Sharpe, her fearsome mother, and Kevin McDermott, Robert’s old friend and a brilliant defense lawyer, are just a few of the other characters who populate this beautifully written novel. Any fans of Agatha Christie should enjoy this, and I have since discovered that Josephine Tey, a Scot, is a highly-regarded mystery writer whose novels are generally considered classics, but who wrote only a handful of novels and is thus well-known than many of her counterparts in the genre. I’ll certainly be reading more of her.
I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then–how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. A denial heralded the thrice crowing of a cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas. The adult mind can lie with untroubled conscience and a gay composure, but in those days even a small deception scoured the tongue, lashing one against the stake itself.
-Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
I cannot decide what I think of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was given to me as a birthday present and is therefore required reading. It is both elusive and precise, disturbing and faintly comforting. It took me a good four chapters to pin down the literary style which it reminded me of – magical realism, which I’ve encountered most strikingly before in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s brilliant novels(which is not to say I particularly like magical realism as a literary style or form – in fact I am ambivalent about it, having both my doubts and appreciations of it). While it is is not necessarily a pure or even extreme example of that form, being grounded in a domesticity and precise character development which makes the book as much the chronicle of a marriage as the story of a series of fantastical events, it is certainly a tale in which the world we live in and its realities are loosely defined and constantly changeable. The hero, Toru Okada, an unemployed former legal assistant, is living a life made up of small details – tasks such as cooking, laundry, and taking care of the cat – which give his life order and meaning while his wife works. It is also these small things which first begin to go awry, beginning with the cat, which goes missing just previous to the book’s opening. In his search for the cat (driven by his wife’s almost frenetic concern, because for her it is a symbol of something – their marriage, perhaps), Okada comes across other odd or missing things, such as his polka-dot tie which was left at the cleaners six months before and is miraculously (and inexplicably) still there, or the macabre young woman who lives on his street and subtly entices him with her unpredictability, or the mysterious voice which calls him on the phone and invites him to phone sex. A thread running through all of this is the presence of the wind-up bird, an unseen being in the tree near their house which announces the arrival of each day by emitting sounds like a spring winding up. It is his meeting with a medium hired by his wife’s brother which serves as somewhat of a turning point in the novel, however, and from there, Okada gradually stumbles into a world in which nothing makes sense. The fantastical, the odd, and the downright ridiculous(the medium wears an outdated vinyl hat) exist side by side with the mundane and ordinary(cooking, eating, phone calls with his wife), and in that juxtaposition, Marukami builds up a constantly-increasing sense of menace. As Okada finds himself frantically searching for his wife along with the cat, his perceptions of reality and the ordinary are constantly challenged and erased, as he searched through a world grown suddenly labyrinthine. He is plagued by a sense that invisible powers beyond his control are moving him like a puppet.
It would be easy for Marukami to make this fantastic journey a little too fantastical, to throw off all sense of reality or human identity and simply indulge in the magical hijinks which pepper the plot. But Marukami, a master prose stylist, carefully arranges these more fantastical elements of the plot in order to propel it forward, and exerts a fairly tight control over them by interspersing them with human drama. On the other hand, it would also be easy for him to make this novel an overt tragedy, to play up the human drama for emotional effect by making the novel a murder mystery of in which we, along with the narrator, watch helplessly as he is propelled to certain doom in his quest to find his wife. Marukami resists this also, however (for the most part), allowing sly humour and what he portrays as the vivid mundanity of human existence to ground even the most ridiculous moments. In style the novel reminds me occasionally of A.S. Byatt – it possesses a little of her textured, occasionally macabre imagination, and the at times it takes on a dark fairy-tale-like aspect reminiscent of her more experimental works such as The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
Marukami’s weakness lies in the contrived effect of many of his plot elements – there’s an aura of self-consciousness which dogs the book, as if Marukami knows he’s taking risks and is constantly checking on us as audience to see if we are “getting” what he is doing and where he is going, and its validity and cleverness thereof. This makes his prose a little uneven, as he meanders in order to shore up plot points or adds unnecessary physical description and in particular psychological glances into his character’s mind. But I’ll discuss this more later once I’ve read the second half of the novel.
A few passages here and there stand out like gems as the prose rises to lucid distilled loveliness-
“As happened each morning, I heard the wind-up bird winding its spring in the treetop somewhere. I closed the paper, sat up with my back against a post, and looked at the garden. Soon the bird gave its rasping cry once more, a long creaking sort of sound that came from the top of the neighbor’s pine tree. I strained to see through the branches, but there was no sign of the bird, only its cry. As always. And so the world had its spring wound for the day.”
Download Rossini’s “Overture-The Thieving Magpie”, mentioned in Chapter One
“Gone mad, they say, as if madness a place you can go to, a land you can find yourself in, trapped in.”
“So there I was, pretending not to watch, and there he was, pretending not to be watched; and you may see the very same thing, Sir, at any polite gathering of society ladies and gentlemen.”
-Excerpts, Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
