Her Majesty's Government-in-Anonymity is about to relocate its administrative centre – we are, you see, very security-conscious. Whilst Viscount Welwyn prepares for this move, the Government-in-Anonymity feels Her Majesty's loyal subjects could do with some advice on reading material. Read below for reviews of Stephen King, George RR Martin, Anthony Beevor, Allen Ginsberg and Nigel Barley.
The Dark Tower VI & VII by Stephen King
Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower round off King's epic story, started in the early 70s and finished in the mid 00s after an unpleasant encounter with a Patrol Boy. It is hard to get across the essence of a fantasy epic cycle via a review – it is something to be experienced from the beginning. So I will first say that you should read book I, The Gunslinger, and go from there. This is a series about an amoral, titanic hero called Roland Deschain, son of the last ruler of the greatest land in a world now lost to history. He quests for a place called the Dark Tower, for reasons that only gradually unfold. He is one of the greatest creations in literary history; ruthless, focussed, downright antiheroic at times, but challenged by his circumstances and new friends to reconsider his way of living.
So as he comes to the end of his quest, we readers are heavily invested in his fate. Of the first four books, The Gunslinger is great fun, with marvellous fantasy vision, finely observed characters and a brutal twist. It is the weakest of the first four, however, plainly written by a young man. The Drawing of the Three and The Wastelands see a growing confidence, with King's world unfolding – a collapsed, rotten fantasy world, linked in many ways to our own, vibrant one. Roland and his growing band of companions (his ka-tet, or fate-band, eventually reaches six in number) see off lobstrosities, New York mobsters, horny demons, political gangs grown old and past remembering their causes, and a suspiciously creepy monorail train. The strongest of the first four – written before King was hit by a vehicle in 1999 – is the fourth, Wizard and Glass, which is mostly a flashback to Roland's youth, and shows the cause for the quest for the Tower, and the first of his many sacrifices to that cause. Meijis is beautifully drawn, seeing the young Roland at length is fascinating (the flashbacks in The Gunslinger are mere hints), and Susan Delgado is magnificent.
And so for the final three, written in one great block. In Wolves of the Calla, Roland and band are still in Mid-World, and star in their own version of The Magnificent Seven. Book V is good, in my opinion (though many slate it and the final two books), with good characters, magnificent set-pieces, and a brave (if hammed-up) twist about the nature of the universe.
Then comes Song of Susannah, which is by far the weakest book in the series. Partly this is due to the prose being the most forced it has been; King's laconic style slips into ineloquence of the highest order. Partly it is due to the real-world setting of the majority of the book. It is not that the real world is a no-go zone, but laboured prose about Maine in 1977 is not where one generally heads for entertainment. There are still high points – John Cullum especially, and Mr GAWD-BOMB – but the whole thing limps along in a most frustrating manner. What is often lambasted – the insertion of a character version of Stephen King – is not actually the weakest part, insomuch as it makes plot sense and is only somewhat self-indulgent.
The final book does a good job of redeeming the King-character arc, however, as Roland finally reaches the home strait for his goal. There are brutal surprises in store for the ka-tet from the off, with heart-breaking, beautiful set-pieces. Every movement has its magnificence – from the assaults on the Dixie Pig (in New York) and Devar-Toi (in End-World) to the brutal trek through the snows to the equally brutal Dandelo business. The characters buzz throughout – not just Roland but all the other principals, even down to the mute artist Patrick. And then, the crescendo!
The final movement does the whole epic justice – inevitably, as with Browning poem, Roland reaches his Tower and sounds the challenge. Equally inevitably, I was in tears. Finally, there is an incredibly clever little postscript, which asks its readers if they really want to read on – and the final twist is surprising but somehow certain.
The meandering mediocrity of Song of Susannah is worth wading through to the get to the final, cataclysmic book of the Dark Tower series, which is one of the most dramatically satisfying conclusions to a story I have ever read. Between patchwork literary and cinematic source material (Browning, Leone and Eliot especially, with Elton John and others of King's own books getting strong look-ins), King has created the best of the post-Tolkien epics.
A Song of Ice and Fire V: A Dance With Dragons by George RR Martin
From the same epic cycle as the source material of the recent TV series Game of Thrones. Without mapping out the arc of the story (as I did with The Dark Tower), suffice to say Martin writes engrossing, very long medieval dark fantasy, inspired heavily by the Wars of the Roses (English civil war, not bizarre dramedy).
The strengths of Dance are Martin's mainstays: brutal, backstabbing politics and dense, believable, surprising characters. Tyrion's journeys are stately but well-paced, Jon Snow's travails at the wall are well constructed and presented, and the bitparts played by the Martells and (at the end of the book) Lannisters are effective and dramatic. The great triumph of the book, however – beyond moving the plot on! - is the Reek arc. The character begins in an absolutely pathetic, miserable state – and perhaps he deserves it, after a fashion, or so we might think at first. But even Reek does not deserve what he is put through, and slowly, falteringly, a path opens for Reek to redeem himself and regain some dignity. The question one asks right until the end is: will he? This is Martin's best character writing – powerful, moving and gripping.
The chief weakness is a weakness Martin identified years before publication – the so-called “Meereenese knot” that delayed completion for so very long. The Dany material is drawn-out, slow, and repetitive. As Martin in essence acknowledged both on his blog, and implicitly in the conclusion of the Meereen arc in this book, it became a quest to escape from a plot dead-end. The ending was satisfying, after a fashion – getting there was not.
Again, a series and book that is necessary reading for fans of epic cycles.
The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 by Anthony Beevor
A well-written, comprehensive analysis of the Spanish Civil War, by an author with relatively little sympathy for either side, especially as the war progresses. A difficult read, however, due to the absolute loss of moral compass by nearly all involved, and the subsequent horror of war being magnified many times beyond my emotional limit. This was not just, or even particularly, due to the particular acts – neither side, quantitatively, challenged Hitler or Stalin – but finds a lot of its grounding in a grim hopelessness about the entire business. Dresden was a horrific war crime, but it happened in the right war. By half way through the Spanish Civil War, there were no more heroes to believe in, no real cause to cling to beyond the (very typical) power-mad seekings of rabid ideologues.
Innocent Erendira and Other Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A collection of early short stories from the master of magical realism. It is plain that even in the 1950s, Garcia Marquez had a magnificent imagination. A regular theme is life beyond death or at least beyond the body (“The Other Side of Death” especially, but also “The Last Resignation”, “Eva Is Inside Her Cat” and “Dialogue With The Mirror”), whilst the vision at times savage (“The Night of the Curlews”).
There is not, however, very much of the deep-grained sympathy for the characters that is present in his novels. Of course, this is endemic to the entire genre of short stories, and it is no surprise that the longest of the included pieces, the eponymous novella, is the story with the most rounded characters. But it is not so much “roundedness” I am pinpointing – rather, as stated, it is “sympathy”. Marquez does not seem to feel much for his characters in these stories. They are, it seems, ciphers and/or instruments, and little more. Compared to the magnificently handled, vast cast in One Hundred Years of Solitude or the great dictators in The Autumn of the Patriarch and The General in His Labyrinth, it feels like Garcia Marquez has not grasped his characters – they lie beyond his reach, forcing him to utilize them as mere tools. (No comparison should be made to Love in the Time of Cholera, because that is a joyous book, where Garcia Marquez's usual tropes are confusion and heartbreak.)
The picks of the bunch are the eponymous novella, “The Sea of Lost Time” and “The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock”.
Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
Ginsberg's masterpiece was so shocking to its 1950s audience that it caused a court case, where the plaintiffs sought to ban the poem. It still retains its force now, if not its sheer shock value (though it is still astonishingly frank about homosexual activity).
“Howl” itself is magnificent, needless to say, in its Ginsbergian appropriation of “The Waste Land”; shorter but equally valuable is “America” with its political ferocity, with “Sunflower Sutra” coming up behind (oi oi!) in a close third place. It is all in typical Beat style – think long lines of highly textured, elliptic verse. If you don't know what that will sound like as it trips along your tongue, buy this collection.
White Rajah by Nigel Barley
The White Rajahs of Sarawak fascinate me. James Brooke was an English eccentric who was born in British India and started his adult life serving in the East India Company's Army. His career in that consisted of raising a regiment of irregular cavalry, leading two courageous, pleasingly successful cavalry charges, and then getting quite badly wounded. He was invalided out and never quite got back to India (though not for want of trying).
So, out of a mixture of high-minded idealism, thrill-seeking and boredom, he ended up helping the Sultan of Brunei crush a rebellion in western Borneo, and in return was (eventually) granted freehold rule of his own kingdom. He was, strictly speaking, initially simply a private British citizen (though Imperial interests obviously got entangled soon enough). This was not, then, purely an Imperial venture (the great era of Empire was still 30 years off in 1841 – in Brooke's day many Britons didn't much like Empire). Indeed, one of the fascinating contours of James Brooke's personality was his own distaste for the profiteering, exploitative nature of empire – he sought to rule Sarawak by a set of values that would protect and develop the natives (though it might be considered a little forward to assume one knows which values will best better the poor foreign wallahs).
Sarawak continued to develop under Brooke's heir, his nephew Charles, who passed it on to his own son Vyner. Vyner was a little baffled by the whole business, and his wife was a grasping attention-seeker, but when the Japanese occupied Sarawak during World War Two, its people ardently desired the return of its rulers. When he returned in 1945, Vyner promptly sold Sarawak to the British Empire in return for a big pension – over the strongly-held objections of his subjects. Bizarre, fascinating, rollicking stuff.
Nigel Barley presents “A Biography of Sir James Brooke”, and it is that – it is very much a biography rather than a history, in the sense that Suetonius is not Tacitus. This bears fruit in some respects – compared to the standard texts of Runciman and Reece, Barley does a better job of presenting the personalities around Brooke, as well as the boisterous lives of the Rajah and his early cohorts.
This interest in personality does, however, lead on to the book's chief failing. Barley is not always particularly clear-sighted in his focus on Brooke's personality – he has, for instance, a prurient obsession with Brooke's sexuality that angles its way in (oi oi!) on more or less every page. No action of Brooke's can, Barley suggests, be understood without reference to his adoration for nubile midshipmen. Well, firstly I'm not convinced, though certainly it will have been a factor at times; and secondly, it reads like a bonkers tabloid exposure of some generally admirable public figure. It is not so much the topic that is the issue – I agree Brooke's sexuality is relevant, and disappointingly concealed by Runciman and Reece – as the tone. Barley's matey, winking prose works when dealing with the mischievous, Boy's Own elements of the story, but becomes leering when approaching the topic of sex (whether to do with Brooke or anyone else, and it is a staple of the book).
I enjoyed the book. Barley is an entertaining writer, the history is legitimate, the portrait of an opaque, charming, conflicted adventurer is convincing – but do take it with more than the standard grain of salt. Runciman is a vital counterweight, insomuch as his more sober (though no less poetic) analysis of the Brookes highlights the multifaceted motives of the White Rajahs. It wasn't all about buggery amidships.
No comments:
Post a Comment