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Dear constant writer;<br/><br/>    Hiya, Steve! So glad to see you didn't give up after the utterly dismal Cell; Lisey's Story really is an improvement. Then again, what wouldn't be, eh?<br/><br/>    Kidding, old buddy, kidding! Hey, we've been friends since I was 11, and if you can't take a joke from a friend, then what? Seriously, there are things about Lisey's Story that are quite good. You're back to ordinary people with actual depth dealing with both life and supernatural horrors, you've stopped pretending that you can still do the lean mean horror thing and tried to branch out. And never mind that you've done the whole "trapped woman has to unlock repressed memories to get herself to a place where she can save herself" thing already (Gerald's Game? Rose Madder?) because adding the age-old "creativity is a form of madness" and "there is power in language" themes is a good idea; there's definitely stuff to be explored here to which the horror form (all horror is metaphor) should lend itself perfectly well, and hey, if Buffy could make an entire episode (OK, half of one) about walking through someone's subconscious memories, then surely the Master of Horror should be able to spin it into a 666 (heh) page novel, right?<br/><br/>    And yeah, there is a good novel in here someplace. The bits with the Landon family, the bits with the crazed fans, and even many of the scenes between Lisey and Scott; as smarmy as they get, it occasionally makes for some emotional stuff that adds resonance to the story even if you've done a lot better. And although I hate to remind you that (spoiler Needful Things) [hide]you killed Andy Clutterbuck 15-odd years ago[/hide], it's nice to see some of the old Castle Rock people are still around.<br/><br/>    Problem is, you overexert yourself, mate. You try a little too hard to write like a Proper Literary Writer (or rather, like the popular conception of one - ie verbose, using fancy words for the sake of it, and namechecking Dostoevsky) and frankly, it gets a bit like hearing AC/DC trying to play Kind of Blue. Now, I love AC/DC, but subtle they ain't, jazz they ain't, and Stevie-baby? You're no Miles Davis. That phrase repetition thing you always do (STEVE! THE LONG BOOK!) works fine over shorter stretches, but here it wears thin before we're 1/3 through, and frankly, if I never hear the word "smucking" again, it'll be 10,000 years too soon. Jazz is all about variations on a theme, not repetition of it. And while you've always been fond of what fanfic (and possibly other amateur fiction) writers call "Mary Sue" - ie the character who is exactly like the author only more charming, more good-looking, smarter, sexier and with a Deep Dark Secret - Scott really gets too much at times. We get it, the guy's charming, Lisey loved him, now move the hell on.<br/><br/>    (And also, Stevie honey sweetie? Entire fucking chapters in Comic Sans? Not OK in 1996, not OK now, not OK ever again. Do. Not.)<br/><br/>    Now, I sound harsh. Sorry about that. Tell ya what, Stevie; for the good times, for all the years you and me went honky tonkin', for the 200-250 pages of actual pretty good Stephen King story in here, and for the fact that it's a fairly quick read (after a while you learn to skip all the "smuckings", "bools" and "bad-gunkys", conveniently cutting about 100 pages out of the story), and for the excellent phrase<br/><br/><i>        ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their business</i><br/><br/>I'm going to give you a 3/5 on my King scale. It's nowhere near the heights, but it's got miles and miles on Cell and Dreamcatcher and it made a very long train journey less boring. So 3/5; don't thank me or I might have to rethink. You're on probation, Stevie-Boy; don't disappoint me again or it's the shed for you.

OK, this was indeed a fantastic book. Meek's intentions of writing a Great Russian Novel, as mentioned by Stewart above, certainly shine through - it has scope, multiple-character plot, ethical quandaries and satire that wouldn't be unworthy of ol' Fyodor D himself - while still modern (and postmodern) enough to make it a novel for today's age.

But the similarities I keep finding aren't as much to writers as to movies; Col mentioned Ravenous, the praising of which I would like to join, but I also found myself thinking of two others:
- Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train - somewhat ironically an American movie made by a Russian, and in a sense the mirror image of Meek's book, tackling some of the same existential questions; that would be Samarin (not the Mohican) in Jon Voight's role.
- Werner Herzog's Aguirre - that's Klaus Kinski as Matula, leading his men on a hopeless quest, far beyond what is defensible or even sane. I kept expecting him to call himself the wrath of God, but of course the wrath of God - if indeed there is such a thing here - is much sneakier in Meek's world.

Yet for all its genre nods (it's something of a Wild East novel, isn't it? I'm sure we could find a role for a young Eastwood too) it's also something entirely its own. Meek's language is beautifully descriptive (I guess the fact that I keep seeing it as a movie is a testament to that) and the way he uses his realistic characters (of course, the Czechoslovak raids through Siberia is an actual historical event - and one I've always meant to read more about) to create a very personal drama out of The Big Questions is... again, the unwieldy adjective "Dostoevskyan" springs to mind. Or is it Dostoevskyesque? The book is just self-conscious enough to pull it off, despite - or perhaps thanks to - lines like this:

I don't serve. You know that. I'm a manifestation. Of the present anger and the future love.

How much can we be expected to sacrifice, and for what? How much can we demand that others sacrifice? The Czechoslovaks are, officially, fighting for a homeland they've never even set foot in. The Reds are fighting for a homeland they have barely even begun to imagine. Samarin has gone so far beyond idealism that he's passed into psychosis, and yet keeps going in the same direction. Balashov, the 19th century enlightened soldier, has stepped off the arena and the big industrial train comes down the track too fast to stop, dropping men and horses along the way as humanity eats itself to survive.

Rabbit had a wife and kids in Pennsylvania, Jack
/:He went out for a ride, and then he went back
Then he went out for a ride, and then he went back:/ (da capo al fine)

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom really is a spoiled little asshole, isn't he? Like a literary Al Bundy, still hung up on his brief turn as a high school star athlete, stuck in a dead-end sales job, watching his life go by as his wife expects her second child and is already slipping into permanent housewifeitis, afternoon TV and alcohol and all. Had this been a few years later, I guess the soundtrack would have been the Stones' "Mother's Little Helper". Only there's no one to really help Janice; Rabbit runs.

And then it all starts to get complicated. Wonderfully complicated, at times; as a story, there's not much there, but Updike's prose is (for the most part) exhilarating to read (even in the somewhat clunky translation I read). It takes a lot to have a main protagonist like Rabbit and have him carry the novel - he's not really a BAD guy as such, just doesn't think things through, not to mention being a bit of a misogynist and still expecting things to work out if he can just find the right play like he used to do in baseball. Make a few substitutions, take the penalty shot, win the game. Everyone makes a big deal about him never fouling anyone on the court; off-court, it's a different matter - with no ref to stop the game when something goes wrong, Rabbit runs too far. He can never run too far.

Updike adds a lot of depth to a fairly mundane tale and characters; discussing religion, classes, the losing side of the American dream - the people in the book are several-generation immigrants, hard-working protestants, Swedes, Germans, Anglos, doing their duty and being thoroughly miserable for it. (Yes, I quoted Springsteen for a reason.) And that's really the main problem with the novel; it's almost quite literally hopeless, a drab story told in gaudy colours. You end up wincing at almost every exquisitely worded phrase, because it's never going to end well.

It's about responsibility, isn't it? Spouses to each other, parents to children, priests to parishioners, johns to whores, man to his fellow man etc. Or perhaps rather, the lack of it. The young reverend who thinks he can make a difference, the old one who chides him for being naive.

Updike can write. DAMN, can he write. I honestly don't see how he got three more novels out of Rabbit Angstrom, but I think I'm going to find out at some point; the good description of the bad far outweighs the bad of the well-described (is that a sentence?)

it seems this sort of humane political satires can only be written in the UK - sort of like Julian Barnes meets Douglas Adams. Or so he would probably like to be thought of.

The plot: a wealthy Yemenite sheik effectively hires the British government to help him implant salmon in the rivers of Yemen; after buying a castle in Scotland, the sheik has come to the conclusion that salmon fishing is the most relaxing and peace-bringing sport in the world, and his country could use some of that. Since Yemen is a smoldering hot desert, everyone pretty much dismisses him as a nutcase, but hey, he's paying the bill so why not... plus, it would make for some killer PR, which PM Tony Bla... sorry, PM James Vent really needs considering how poorly the Iraq war is going. So a dry old salmon expert and a young beautiful woman (PLEASE GOD JUST ONCE CAN WE HAVE A BOOK WHICH DOES NOT HAVE AN OLDER MAN AND A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMAN WORKING TOGETHER, INITIALLY MISTRUSTING EACH OTHER AND THEN GROWING CLOSER ETC? JUST ONCE?!? KTHXBYE) start looking into it and gradually start to realize that as long as you really believe in something, you can achieve anything... if not for those pesky al-Qaeda who, of course, are dead set against using Moslem land for something as un-islamic as salmon fishing.

Now, it's not that it's not funny, because it is. It manages to get in some pretty good kicks in all directions, and somewhere underneath it all is a very serious undertone of the danger of becoming so rational that you no longer dare dream of anything at all which hasn't already been proven to work.

But the problem is that Torday (this is his debut, at age 60) is a decent storyteller but not a very good writer. Had he stuck to the first person or third person throughout he could probably have made this a better much book, but the problem is he keeps shifting perspective - from diary entries to e-mails to interrogation transcripts etc - and hardly ONE of them sounds authentic. Call me crazy, but I just don't buy that people who are being interrogated by MI5 (or is it MI6? I can never remember) will spend pages on poetic descriptions of the highlands or the kindness of Yemenite bedouines. If this happened once or twice it wouldn't bother me in a satire, but when it's done this consistently, it grates. Who the hell decided that literary qualities were unimportant just because it's a matter of comedy?

Incredibly detailed, with some very well-written characters (I was initially a bit wary as she started off by describing then hair colour of the various protagonists, but then I quickly forgot about that and built my own images instead - and boy, does she make it easy to do that). One might argue that the characters are ALL the novel's got going for it, but... well, there's a bit more to it than that.

The reverse-timeline thing bugged me a bit at times - by the time I reach the beginning of the book I'm not sure of all the details of how it ended. But for the most part, I thought it worked very well - we see enough of who they ARE to want to find out how they got that way and be willing to do the detective work, even if I would like to know how it "ended" for real (which I suppose is a good sign - I care what happens to them). OK, granted, Helen wasn't my favourite; her defining characteristics are basically insecurity and jealousy, and I found it a bit hard to sympathize with her at times...

The overuse of the word "queer" struck me too, and... well, it does serve a point in that the word "gay" doesn't get used one single time, IIRC. As JfP says, these were queer times, and it's almost so that the "queer" theme of the characters become a metaphor for the whole living-in-war experience - constantly hiding, constantly afraid to let yourself live, to poke your head out because you might get it blown off. As such, it works very well, and I'm sorry to say I must (just as I did with Brokeback Mountain) disagree with the standard complaint that "If the characters had been straight, the same story wouldn't have interested anyone" - because if they had been straight, it wouldn't BE the same story, would it?

The image that will remain with me, though, is Kay sitting in front of her smashed house, grieving a loss she hasn't experienced yet. Very powerful writing.

The weirdest - and, sadly, least enjoyable - Calvino book I've read so far, which is saying something.

The whole thing is built around tarot cards. A group of travellers in a deep forest settle down around a table, and since they're mute, they try to tell their stories by showing the others tarot cards in specific sequences - call it a deckamerone of cards. It's a semiotic novel like Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana to the 3rd degree; every story told, while on some level an obvious play on classic antique and medieval epics, is filtered through a triple blind - the storyteller is limited by what the cards actually show, the narrator of the novel is limited by his interpretation of what the cards mean, and the reader of the novel is limited by his/her knowledge of the myths, cards, and literary nods involved.

As an allegory on storytelling, it's a remarkable feat, the way symbols and archetypes can show up in different ways and have a universal meaning even though they take on completely different roles depending on the context. And Calvino is a brilliant stylist. But in the end, it feels more like he's experimenting and showing off because he can, because he wants to make a point; the stories themselves rarely grab me. I'll want to reread this, in fact I think I want to put it on a shelf in my bathroom and read a story every now and then (most are just 3-4 pages).

If there is one thing a literary education is good for it is to fill you with a sense of doom. There is nothing quite like a vivid imagination for sapping a person’s courage. I read the diary of Anne Frank, I become Anne Frank. As for others, they could feel plenty of terror, cringe in corners, sweat with fear, but as soon as the danger had passed it was as if it had never happened, and they trotted cheerfully on.

The "others", in this case, being our narrator's fellow citizens of a run-down neighbourhood in 1960s Boston. Born in the basement of a used bookstore (his crib lined with shredded pages of Finnegan's Wake), neglected by his alcoholic mother, bullied by his siblings, young Firmin has to feed and raise himself - the thirteenth child to a mother with twelve tits.

(Yeah, he's a rat.)

And so Firmin starts eating books. And then reading books. As the others grow strong and leave the basement to mate, scrounge for food and get run over in the street, Firmin stays behind, the smartest and loneliest rat in the world, ravenously reading his way through the entire published world of literature - from the Great Books to religious pamphlets, sci-fi novels to long-debunked medical theories and maps of the world. He teaches himself to read, teaches himself to critique, to discuss, to interpret... only that as a rat, he has no one to discuss it with. Other rats avoid him (as he them), and this being pre-computer age with its feather-touch keyboards, there is no way for him to communicate with humans; he can only squeak, and he's too weak to work a typewriter. As far as anyone can see, he's just a rat to be poisoned or stomped on. For a long time, his entire world is made up of books and the local cinema, which only shows old black-n-white Hollywood movies and cheap porn. And then something happens...

Name-dropping time: Firmin reads a bit like a tragicomic(er) Tales From Underground filtered through Fritz The Cat. I'd say it's what Auster was trying to do with Timbuktu, except it's much too sentimental (in a good way) to be Auster. But above all - and this reference might be a little obscure - I'm reminded of Hrabal's Too Loud A Solitude, which is eerily similar yet completely different. Two rat-infested basements, two outsiders-by-necessity who, pursued by the authorities, build their own world from books, two short novels about the power and lack of comfort offered by literature... Yet Savage has created something pretty unique: a narrator who could have been unbearably cute but instead is one of the most touching anti-heroes I've come across in a long time, a metafictional short sharp shock (148 pages), a very poignant tale of lonely people unable to connect to others (some rats, some humans), and a story that first cracks me up and then gradually turns the screws until we know that this can never end well. Firmin is just a rat, so he fits perfectly in that proverbial handbasket we're all in whether we realize it or not.

(And Hell, as Jean-Paul Sratre pointed out, is other rats.)

I'm sorry. That last piece was exactly the sort of pun that makes this sound like a joke. It's not. It's one of the most rewarding reads I've had all year, and I really hope more people will give it a shot. Firmin deserves that.

My opinion of Haddon from The Curious Incident... is pretty much intact: ho-hum. Bother is a quick read for 375 pages, there's quite a few chuckles and even one or two pretty poignant things about love and aging (though it hammers the fear-of-your-body-decaying theme into the ground without ever coming close to the poignancy of, say, Philip Roth's Everyman). Problem is it's just so incredibly predictable. Once we've gotten to know the characters (hypochondriac father, philandering mother, gay son and his lover, brash daughter and her fiancé whom everyone assumes is an asshole even though he never actually gives anyone any reason to think so) they just plod on like that, whining and being dysfunctional-lite for 300 pages until the end, which turns out exactly as you'd have guessed 30 pages in. A better writer might have made those 300 pages between setup and resolution fascinating in themselves, but here it's mostly the distance we have to travel to get to the end - ironic for a novel about not letting fear of the ending stop you from enjoying life.