Just one book this week, the second book from Tor.com’s novella line… And the latest issue of Ms Marvel.
Today I’m off to London to a workshop on the nature of consciousness, so I probably won’t be commenting as much as normal. Hope everyone’s well!
The Scar, China Miéville
Originally reviewed 1st May, 2009
I’m glad I was already familiar with China Miéville’s work before I read The Scar. I don’t think I would have appreciated it as much if I hadn’t known, to some extent, what to expect. The Scar is set in the same universe as Perdido Street Station, and has links with it, although it is not set in the same city. The prose is similar, very rich and dense, and the world-building is just as intense. It can be a little hard to get into: I remember with the first book that I found myself wondering what the main plot was going to be because what was there didn’t seem big enough. I was less dubious about The Scar, and wasn’t exactly surprised by the way the plot unfolded and unfolded and got bigger and bigger.
Which isn’t to say I knew where it was going, because while there were some things I expected and some things other people mentioned helped connect some dots, the end was still a shock to me. A good kind of shock, the “oh, that’s what’s going on, now everything suddenly makes sense” kind of shock, but still a shock. It’s hard to articulate what I felt about it because when I got to the end, I sat down to try and talk in a discussion thread about it and couldn’t summon up the words. I loved it, really, the way everything comes together, and the way everyone takes their place in the scheme of things and all the characters’ purposes make sense.
Overall, I loved the descriptions of the city. Miéville is really damn good at building up pictures like that, making you see it vividly, making you know how it works. I think I remarked in my review of Perdido Street Station that the city itself seems like a character, and the plot more like a vehicle to explore it — or if I didn’t, I should’ve. I felt this less in The Scar, but Armada is still a sort of character of its own.
Speaking of characters, The Scar has a lot of interesting ones. I’m really pleased that some Remade, who were more on the outskirts of Perdido Street Station, were closer to the heart of this book. Tanner Sack is an awesome character, I think — not too complicated in his thinking, but good and loyal. His slow transformation to become more of a sea-creature is really, really interesting to read about, and he was one of the few characters I wasn’t ambivalent about. Shekel was another, of course. I ended up liking the Brucolac more than I expected to, given that he’s a vampire and quite scary. Uther Doul is another fascinating character, and it’s amazing how much of a part he plays in the end. I didn’t like Silas at any point, so I was quite unsurprised by what he was doing, but Doul was more of a surprise. There’s a lot of manipulating going on in this book, and it amazes me how intricate it gets while still making sense.
Bellis herself, I didn’t feel much about either way. She’s rather unremarkable, really, except in being at the right (or wrong) place at the right time.
The Lovers were one of my favourite things about the book. The story surrounding them, about the scars, is intense and intriguing, and I was very drawn to the concept. Not so much to the characters, but definitely to the concept. I was actually sad when they parted because they were such a strong symbol.
I feel like I haven’t even managed to touch on the things that fascinate me about this book. It’s rich and dense, the characters are for the most part interesting and powerful. The ending is a wonderful culmination of all the threads, all the little details, and I love it. The world-building is wonderful. One of the things I like best about it is that there isn’t even any attempt to explain their science and make it like our science. It just is, but it’s not magic, it’s still science.
There are some amazing quotes, too. The ones that stuck out to me most are both related to Tanner:
-“A scar is not an injury, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After an injury, a scar is what makes you whole.”
-“In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this.
I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away.
I can’t say goodbye.”
I think those are amazing and lovely, too.
In conclusion, I think The Scar is well worth reading. If you can’t get into it because of all the denseness, persevere. I definitely found it worth it. I liked The Scar better than Perdido Street Station, but that might also have been because I was more prepared for it.
Rating: 5/5
In A Glass Darkly, Sheridan Le Fanu
I’ve been meaning to read this for ages, so hurrah that I finally got round to it. It’s a classic of gothic/horror stories, though to the jaded modern eye, it might not be that creepy at all. Of the stories, I liked ‘Carmilla’ and ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ the most — the mystery in the latter spun out satisfyingly, even if I did sort of guess how it would end. ‘Carmilla’ is mostly famous, I think, because it’s an early vampire story and because there’s a lot of homoerotic content. It’s not the most gripping reading, and the ending is pretty anti-climatic: there’s no real confrontation, but quite a tame denouement with a fairly toothless (ha) vampire.
Le Fanu was good at that sense of unease/uncanniness stuff, even if it seems like weak (or green? the jokes never stop in this review) tea now. The frame story about the Doctor seemed a little pointless to me, but I think it was probably written as a way to make it a little more creepy — as if these stories were real and collected by a real person because of their topics. I’ve always thought it a pretty good device, ever since Animorphs used to give me that moment of doubt as a kid.
Rating: 3/5
The Art Therapy Colouring Book, Richard Merritt, Hannah Davies, Cindy Wilde
This book has high quality pages, so you can definitely use pens, and there are some lovely designs. They tend to be more finicky — lots of little sections to pen in, rather than big areas to colour — which may or may not suit you. The thing I think is most offputting about this book is that most of the pages are already partly coloured. I’m doing the fox from the front cover, for instance, and it comes with a coloured background and some sections of the head already coloured. Normally, I’m one of those creatures who prefers to colour in the lines and with the colours of nature, so I was a little hesitant about my rainbow fox. On the other hand, sometimes it’s nice to just colour something in differently, and see what it looks like as a complete picture — you might consider the already coloured parts of the pictures to be a sort of challenge to get really creative!
The last third of the book is for ‘doodling’, though there’s some scope for colouring, too. I was less interested in this stuff, and don’t know if I’ll really make use of it. The whole point of colouring books, for me, is that my dubious drawing skills don’t come into it.
Still, high quality book, and some of the multicolour designs come out looking surprisingly good, if you want to try something different.
Rating: 3/5
Built By Animals, Mike Hansell
This is not a book full of gorgeous full colour photographs of bowers made by birds, chimpanzee tools, termite nests, etc. I was a bit baffled to see someone giving it less stars because it isn’t that kind of book. Instead, it’s a book that goes into how making structures and using tools could be evolved, and whether it’s automatically a sign of intelligence. To me, the point begins to get a bit laboured, because I can well believe that small changes, small steps, can build up to huge effects. I mean, that’s evolution for you. That’s how it works.
The interesting thing, perhaps, is that Hansell would like to be more optimistic about the link between intelligence and tool use, and yet has to acknowledge that the data really doesn’t support it. In consequence, if Hansell told me something is a sign of intelligence, I’d be inclined to believe him. He doesn’t blind himself to the actual data through wanting a certain outcome.
My main issue with this was really the way it sort of… tailed off. There’s a final chapter talking about birds and whether they create art, and perhaps how art developed in humans, and — then there’s nothing. No conclusion. Even the chapter seems to end a bit weakly. I’d like to see something that synthesises the whole argument and presents it in a nutshell, along with any points about data yet to be collected that could shed more light on the issues. I’m sure Hansell could’ve done that; all the info is there. But this critique is maybe more the English Lit graduate part of me.
Rating: 3/5
This week’s prompt from The Broke and the Bookish is “ten finished series I have yet to finish”.
Okay, that was harder than I expected, since I’m doing this quite a while in advance and I’m not sure what I’ll have got round to by then! What’s on everyone else’s lists?
I’m sure I’ve said before that I’m reading something as a ‘guilty pleasure’ read. For a long time, I felt that way about Mary Stewart, Georgette Heyer, any urban fantasy I read, sometimes YA or rereads. And I’ve had a good think about it recently, and I’ve decided that for me, with reading, there will no longer be any such thing.
I mean, really. It’s often shorthand for “I’m ashamed of reading this, i.e. I think it is not literary enough, i.e. it is not proper reading”. It’s judgemental. If, say, reading romance is my guilty pleasure, that would imply that people who read romance regularly should also feel guilty — that it’s somehow beneath my usual standards and I’m lowering myself to read it. The intent is probably usually somewhere between that and “I don’t want people to think this is all I read”. It may be that you don’t mean anything mean/derogatory by it, but I’ve seen/heard it that way so many times, I think it’s worth unpacking and thinking about why you want to make sure people know this is a ‘guilty pleasure’.
Why should you feel guilty for enjoying something? Reading is, for most of us, primarily entertainment. For some of us, it’s our mental health; you can literally correlate my reading habits and my mood, the ups and downs of my anxiety and depression. And entertainment isn’t actually trivial. Especially when it comes to books, which offer us whole new worlds, and make us do the work to realise them. It’s important that we have these pocket universes to indulge ourselves in, and it’s important that those worlds meet our needs: escapism, comfort, exploration, imagination. Maybe what you need is a book you read as a kid, something which you know is racist and sexist, but which spoke to you as a baby queer. Maybe this particular book is terrible about homosexuality but it has an amazing portrayal of your culture. Maybe it’s just terrible, but it speaks to you right now. That’s okay.
So if what you need to read is a saccharine romance where the heroine swoons into her lover’s arms, don’t feel guilty. Please don’t! It is almost definitely worth examining why you have to minimise the fact that you’re reading it — is it problematic? Are you trying to duck a stereotype (like woman on her period = chocolate and chick flicks)? Is it about you, or about how you want people to see you?
But it’s not worth feeling guilty about taking some time out and having fun. Fuck that noise. Examine it, sure — when you have the time and energy.
Terra, Richard Hamblyn
The subtitle of this book is “Four Events That Changed The World”, which might raise a question in some people’s minds since none is earlier than 1755. Well, it’s not saying these are the only important disasters to change the world, or even the most important; the idea is, I think, that these are events which prompted thought, scientific advances, and provisions for the future. The earthquake in Lisbon prompted innovation in building techniques; the toxic fog in Europe prompted thinkers like Franklin to work on the atmosphere (and gave us important information about climate change); Krakatau prompted research on volcanoes and impacted ecosystems; the tsunami in Hilo prompted international cooperation to get together a warning system.
These aren’t really about single great triumphs of someone in particular, but about the development of a deeper understanding of the Earth and the way it works. Sadly for me, it’s mostly about eyewitness accounts and less about the scientists, architects and politicians who had to respond to the events. It’s pretty much disaster porn to just go on about the way someone’s skin was hanging off their body during the eruption of Krakatau — I’d be much more interested in the scientific side of things.
But I guess for that, I have my Open University textbook… I just wish this had been somewhere in between: illustrative, but more scientific. It’s not badly written, and there is interesting information, but I got a little bit tired of the scenes of horror.
Rating: 3/5
Mariana, Susanna Kearsley
This surprised me with the bittersweetness of the ending. I guess I was expecting a happier one after The Winter Sea managed to work it all out. Still, it’s satisfying that this dodged my expectations, and in more way than one — it deceived me all the way through about the identity of a particular character, and yet when it became clear, it was suddenly obvious as anything. And I do care enough about the other characters to be a little sad about the way it works out; not everyone is going to be happy, for sure.
This is a slow build, really, with Julia’s slow feeling her way into the past, the lack of urgent drive in either timeline until pretty late on. It’s not my favourite of Kearsley’s books, perhaps, but it was fun to read, I got involved with the characters, and it definitely manages to pin down that sense of place which I’ve enjoyed in her other books. I could almost drift in Julia’s life, Julia’s house, while reading this, just as Julia drifted into Mariana’s world… It feels close enough to touch.
Rating: 3/5
The Magus, John Fowles
Once upon a time, I read The French Lieutenant’s Woman and, to my surprise, rather enjoyed it. It’s not the kind of novel I normally go for, but the writing is good, and it had me intrigued despite myself. So I picked up The Magus, only to leave it on the shelf for a couple of years awaiting some mythical ‘round tuit‘. When it came to picking a book for a challenge that I should’ve read in school, I was pretty stuck, because I nearly always did my reading — the only exception being a Robin Hood novel which had Fabio on the cover. So I decided this more or less counted and dug in.
At first, it was good to dig into; the writing is good, evocative, solid. The descriptions of Greece are gorgeously claustrophobic, making me think at once of the violent myths of Ancient Greece and the sunny happily-ever-afters of Mary Stewart’s adventure romances set in that area of the world.
But… there’s something terribly same-y about the ennui of the narrator. It did remind me of a widely touted literary antecedent — Great Expectations — without characters as bold and dark as Miss Havisham. It reminded me too, somehow, of The Great Gatsby. Fowles’ introduction talks about how it’s a profoundly adolescent sort of story, and perhaps that’s why it also conjured up The Catcher in the Rye a little.
What do those three novels have in common? I wasn’t a great fan of any of them…
The Magus remains beautifully written throughout, but the tone drags decidedly and I just really longed for Stewart’s version of Greece, with characters who care and dare and do, rather than halfass around the place. Despite my two degrees in English Lit, I fear I’m proving myself terribly bad at reading literary fiction with appreciation! Alas. (But then again, I did love The French Lieutenant’s Woman…)
Rating: 2/5