Fran: V is for Valentine

V is for Valentine, Genevieve Valentine, and her book Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.

This is a weird book--very literary, almost poetic--set in a dystopia of a ruined world with little city-states.  The circus travels from place to place and are very much the close-knit group coming into communities where they don't fit.  In this respect, Valentine keeps the conventions of the circus--attracting the weird and misfits, who bond together because they cannot bond elsewhere.  The ringleader is Boss--a woman with a tragic background that gives her strange powers to create the mechanical human hybrids of the Circus Tresaulti; Boss takes the broken bodies of people, often near death, and infuses them with machinery.  The most glorious characters include Panadrome, the human headed music box, Alec and Bird, characters who (at different points) are created with wings, Ayers the strong man able to do feats beyond normal because of his machinery.  Most of the book is told from the viewpoint of Little George, the circus gofer, who longs for the mechanization that the rest of the circus has and which Boss denies him (he wears fake metal on his legs when they stop in towns).  Valentine plays this feeling as well with Stenos--the man who partners with Bird because he longs himself for the wings that make her Bird.

The first 2/3rds of the book are somewhat slow and I found myself slogging through.  The last section is a set piece in which Boss, having been captured by the mayor of one of the towns who hopes to use her power for his own army, is rescued by the circus.  The conflicts between Bird and Stenos, between Elena (the brass boned trapeze artist) and almost everyone else, the new role for Little George (which I will not spoil) come to a head in this section.  Perhaps it's my flaw as a reader that I was reading for plot and so really felt that I had been rewarded by something finally happening in this book. 

Literary science fiction/fantasy (a Nebula award short-listed book); interesting world creation; somewhat disappointing overall.

Ed: Q is for Quennell

I admit that I picked up Peter Quennell’s The Wanton Chase in part because I need a Q for my author AtoZ. I still have J, O, U, V, X and Y to go, if y’all want to make recommendations, although I have two Js out from the library already, and I should probably start one of them, as soon as I finish the Pratchett. Anyway, I needed a Q and although I had never heard of Mr. Quennell, as far as I knew, he qualified. And it’s a hell of a title, innit? I don’t know if it counts as judging a book by its cover (which I certainly do and encourage people to do) but that’s why I picked it. Well, and the title page said it was an autobiography that picked up in 1939, and I knew from where it was in the library that it was a British author, so, you know, worth a shot, right?

It turns out that Mr. Quennell was one of those dines-with-more-famous-authors authors, which of course is right up my proverbial. Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, Kingsly Amis, Constantin Brancusi, Augustus John, Esmond Lord Rothermere and Ian Fleming, George Duthuit, George Moore and Emerald Cunard, uswusf. I eat that shit up with a spoon. On the other hand, while the writing style and tone were amusing enough, the anecdotes were carefully anodyne and sometimes instead of coming to a conclusion just drifted away to nothing. It’s an odd book, that way; he doesn’t seem to get the point of his own stories.

The other thing about the book that really struck me was the way the mores have changed in fifty years or so. Marital infidelity is taken as a matter of course, and doesn’t reflect poorly on the unfaithful spouse. Sexual attraction toward the young, even to adolescents, is a quirk rather than a disease; he is amused rather than appalled. Racism, of course, both explicit and implicit. And then: his total blindness to working people of any kind, his inability to see waiters, servants or foreigners as humans, and his utter indifference to suffering of any kind. The callousness is a pose, of course, but that just begs the question: the mores have changed so much that a pose of indifference is strange and unpleasant, as opposed to… amusing?

Thanks,
-E.

Ed: T is for Thurber

I had somehow never read The 13 Clocks. I'm not sure why. I read a lot of Thurber as a kid, and I read more as an adult. I knew about this one as Thurber writing a Thurberish story of a prince in disguise, a curse, a wicked Duke, a quest, all that sort of thing. And people love it. Neil Gaiman loves it.

I didn't love it. I loved bits of it, mostly individual sentences, but I didn't really love the thing in itself. I'm not sure why.

Digression: I have recently started using the phrase curate's egg a lot. Do y'all know the phrase? It's from a Punch cartoon titled True Humility in which a humble curate, at tea with his bishop, assures his reverend boss that parts of his egg are excellent. When I call something a curate's egg, I'm saying that there were good bits, but that it didn't quite work as a whole thing. I don't know if I've been saying it frequently of late because I have been seeing and reading an unusual amount of stuff that doesn't quite work for me, or because I have been finding an unusual amount of excellent parts in the usual rubbish I come across. End Digression.

Maybe the reason I didn't love it was its adherence to the gender roles of This Kind Of Thing. As a child of the women's-lib 70s, and as a father in the 21st Century, I have grown used to these stories subverting those gender roles. The maiden's total lack of agency (or indeed entity) seemed like a hole in the book, and the overwhelming masculinity of the village made me sigh a bit. That may have been enough to put me in the wrong mood to be charmed. And loving something like this is just not as likely if you're in the wrong mood. Ah, well.

Thanks,
-E.

Ed: L is for LaBute

I hated Woyzeck. I oughtn’t to be surprised, I suppose—I’ve never finished reading any of Neil LaBute’s plays before, and I’ve never finished reading any of the translations of Georg Büchner’s play before, either. I thought I would give it a try, though.

I know that the fragments that make up the original playscript form a tremendously influential piece of writing, and that theatrical expressionism and modern drama may well date from the discovery of the thing. I dunno. It’s awful, and I don’t see any merit in it. The language, the situations, the characters, the theater. It seems as if it would be somewhere between depressing and boring, unless it were laughable. Most likely it would fall into the irritatingly superior category. I mean: yes, various despicable people treat poor Woyzeck cruelly and drive him to madness and murder, it’s terrible what such people do, tsk tsk tsk. I’m glad I don’t know anyone like that. And you don’t. I swear to you, you don’t know anyone like any of the men in this play.

I don’t see any wit in Mr. LaBute’s adaptation, either. It doesn’t even seem to be a great part for an actor. I mean, it could be, with enough time for the poor sap to run around wordlessly and wildly breaking down whilst the rest of the cast shouts at him, but… yicch.

Thank you,
-E.