Microreview: Runemarks

Runemarks
by Joanne Harris
Alfred A. Knopf, 2008

Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat, has written a so-called ‘teen novel’ that must not be missed by any open-minded reading adult. Runemarks is a masterpiece of the genre, as smart as it is funny, as assured as it is vast.The story opens in the Strond Valley, and the first line is sufficient to let the reader know what joy awaits them: “Seven o’clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the End of the World, and goblins had been at the cellar again.” The End of the World was the Norse cataclysm of Ragnarok, in which the old world of the gods, the Aesir, had passed away in fire and betrayal. The new world is a far humbler place, in which ordinary folk view any hint of magic with deep suspicion – and so don’t know what to make of our young protagonist, Maddy Smith, whose magical gifts are evident even in infancy.

The book’s sly humor is evident even before the first line, however, as in this section from the Dramatis Personae:

Odin, Chief of the Aesir, blood brother of – and ultimately betrayed by – Loki
Frigg, his wife; lost her son because of Loki
Thor, the Thunderer, son of Odin; has more than one bone to pick with Loki
Sif, his wife; once went bald because of Loki
Tyr, god of war; lost his hand because of Loki
Balder, son of Frigg; died because of Loki
Loki

The story of Maddy’s awakening into the broader world of ancient magics spellbinds the reader, and Harris’ deft combination of high drama and ancient lore is always leavened with an offbeat, decidedly modern, irony, as when Maddy manages to magically ensnare a goblin and then accidentally betrays the provincialism of her magical education:

The goblin swore in many tongues, some animal, some Faerie, and finished off by saying some very nasty things about Maddy’s family, which she had to admit were mostly true.
Finally, he stopped struggling and sat down crossly on the floor.
“So what do you want?” he said.
“What about – three wishes?” suggested Maddy hopefully.
“Leave it out,” said the goblin with scorn. “What kind of stories have you been listening to?”

Runemarks is the kind of story all fantasy fans should be listening to. This book is not to be missed.

–Steve Donoghue

more diamonds from the mine

more gems from the web:

The Atlantic presents a new book review from destroying angel B.R. Myers;

Thomas Rowlandson is paid his long-due tribute at BibliOdyssey;

in the New York Sun, Giles Harvey gives the skinny on Peter Carey’s newest “My Illegal Self”;

The Virginia Quarterly Review self-polices, self-judges, and self-condemns (and merrily goes on publishing clichéd poetry);

Guardian UK: rough times for book critics? dance critics? yes, and art critics too;

in Newsweek we learn what Aron Ralston, the guy who hacked his arm off with a pocket knife and lived to write a very good book about it, is up to these days;

more bad news for science;

Ryunosuke Akutagawa, a too-unknown Japanese writer finds posthumous friends at the New Haven Review;

more highlights from the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks;

we’re all trapped;

and …finally… there is an Australian fiction contest premised on a series of imaginary book titles… and with a short film by an Open Letters editor as first prize (along with some exceptionally nifty kit…)!

RIP: Paul Scofield, 1922 - 2008

Microreview: Quiver

Quiver
Peter Leonard
St. Martin’s Press, 2008

Impossible for this debut novel not to receive inordinate amounts of press, since it’s the fledgling effort of legendary crime novelist Elmore Leonard’s son. Readers who’ve delighted over the decades to such taut and wonderful books as Get Shorty, Maximum Bob, and 52 Pick-Up will be understandably curious to know if Peter Leonard has managed to absorb any of his father’s unmistakable gifts.The short answer is that he has, and this isn’t necessarily a good thing – after all, he can be presumed to have gifts of his own, right?His story is fairly pro forma: Owen McCall has been accidentally shot dead with an arrow by his son Luke while the two of them are out bow-hunting. The novel opens with Luke and his mother Kate still fresh from this death and staggered by it. Then the narrative takes a lengthy and risky flashback to Kate and Owen’s courtship, not only to give the reader background into the tragedy but to introduce the book’s joyously hissable villain. The shape of the book’s climax is hugely predictable – I got it on page 4 and considered myself a little dim at not seeing it sooner.

Peter Leonard’s problems crop up most often when he’s called upon to do the things his father does so well, like narrate action. Here’s Luke taking on a taunting schoolmate:

Luke, outweighed by sixty pounds, got up from his desk and swung the edge of Algebra II into Falby’s cheekbone and blood spurted and Falby yelled and brought his hand up to his face and Luke swung at him again and then kids were grabbing him, holding him back and Mrs. Hyvonen, their teacher, came in the room and freaked.

First the simple ungrammatical substitution of ‘in’ for ‘into’ inadvertently makes the passage obscene, then that ‘freaked’ banishes it altogether. These are rookie mistakes one imagines his father made too, without the attention of the whole reading world upon him while he made them. Luckily, the son also shares the father’s gift for vivid, simple description, as in this passage where a character has been bow-shot:

He looked like he was going to say something – blood bubbling out his mouth – but didn’t or couldn’t. There was fear in his eyes, knowing he was going to die and knowing there was nothing he could do about it. His hands let go of the arrow and he fell over on his back. His eyes were open, looking up at her, but he was gone.

Given the father’s deep Hollywood connections, Quiver is bound to become a movie someday soon – Zac Efron’s probably taking archery lessons as we speak – but readers in search of a fast-paced gripper need not wait; the book will do just fine.

Microreview: The Rain Before It Falls

The Rain Before It Falls
Jonathan Coe
Knopf, 2008.

When Bret Easton Ellis called Jonathan Coe “the most exciting young British novelist writing today,” he was either partaking of the mind-altering substances he himself has so extensively chronicled, or he was referring to some extracurricular activity of Coe’s, like juggling or knife-throwing. This must be so, because Coe’s novels couldn’t be exciting if you set them on fire and hurled them through the window of a nunnery.

Coe’s latest effort (for him and his readers, make no mistake), The Rain Before It Falls, is no exception. It purports to tell the multi-generational story of a family of plucky women, from the time of the London Blitz to the era of cell phones. Rosamund – who during the war was sent to the countryside to live with her cousin Beatrix – makes a tape-record of her life, and years later her niece Gill and Gill’s grown daughters listen to the tapes comment on them. Beatrix also has a daughter, Thea, who subsequently has a daughter of her own, Imogen, and … etc.

The result is a slim novel of almost unbelievably excruciating dullness. Detail piles on homely detail like some kind of toxic snowfall, and even the overwriting offers no accidental amusements:

I looked out of the window that morning, and for a moment, a brief moment, my heart soared and the terrible knowledge that had been crushing me for the last few hours – the knowledge that I’d been banished from my parents’ house, sent into an undeserved and inexplicable exile – was lifted from me. I turned to share this moment with my cousin Beatrix, who slept in the attic bedroom with me, but her bed was empty and the bedclothes disheveled. She was always an early riser, always downstairs before me. Such was her appetite for breakfast and, more than that, for life itself.

More than breakfast! The reader’s mind staggers.

The experience is exactly akin to being trapped in the musty parlor of an elderly relative while they recount every last thing that’s ever happened to them:

Christmas was always a problem, in those days. It is a difficult time for the single woman. Yes, Imogen, I was still alone, and still living in my bedsit in Wandsworth, although in other respects, life was starting to improve. I’d handed in my notice at the department store, taken courses in typing and shorthand, and found myself a job as a secretary to the director of a publishing house in Bedford Square. It was the beginning, did I but know it, of my career in publishing …

But unlike in real life, where such torment might be endured for the sake of a hoped-for inheritance, there’s no reward for suffering in this case. Readers are advised therefore to steer clear of the parlor.

– Steve Donoghue 

still more Gems from the Web!

a list of stuff from this week — all more than a little worth passing on …

at Slate.com, Ta-Nehisi Coates turns in an unsparingly logical essay about racism that no one should miss;

the Marginal Revolution community discusses Border’s decision to stock fewer books;

at wood_s lot, there’s another fortnight’s worth of gorgeous poetry, prose, and photography (scroll down to see Jerry Spagnoli’s exquisite picture of Central Park);

William Deresiewicz describes in The Nation how college English Departments have begun looking for “apples, machine parts, sadness, the square root of two”;

taking a tip from Open Letters, perhaps, moreintelligentlife has a feature reviewing the reviewers who review new books;

at The Millions, Garth Risk Hallberg casts a cold eye on Charles Bock’s debut novel Beautiful Children; although, seeing that Hallberg is himself a debut novelist, his review is far more sympathetic than Sam Sacks’ in the current Open Letters;

the always-wonderful Marina Warner writes about writers who have written in languages not their own;

at the Copyeditor General, pedant extraordinaire Carolyn Grantham hilariously edits Steven Seagal;

stevereads takes a peep at Pepys;

and, for dessert, at Moving Picture Trash Brian Kirker alerts us to “possibly the best picture from the 1980s.”

Predictably Gibberish

David Berreby, in the 16 March 2008 New York Times Book Review, offers readers a polite, mild-mannered assessment of Dan Ariely’s new book Predictably Irrational, saying the book’s polite, mild-mannered exterior masks hidden depths:

But Predictably Irrational is a far more revolutionary book than its unthreatening manner lets on. It’s a concise summary of why today’s social science increasingly treats the market-knows-best model as a fairy tale.

For a slightly less well-mannered assessment of Ariely’s book, click over to Steve Donoghue’s March 2008 review and see how the other half criticizes.

In the same issue (The Times once again playing catch-up with Open Letters, and don’t think we’re not flattered), Walter Kirn writes something about Richard Price’s new novel Lush Life. Even on fourth and fifth readings, it’s not clear exactly what Kirn has written; it’s not a book review, that much is certain. Parts of it seem vaguely medical, so perhaps it’s a natural history essay:

If fiction writing were a fairer profession, the price of such hearing [Price’s, possibly?] would be blindness, but the hell of it is that Price can see also – even in the dark and at great distances – and not only with his ordinary two eyes but with a wider, clearer third one that’s set between them and an inch above them.

There’s a picture of Price accompanying the piece – he is not, in fact, the circus sideshow freak described here, so Kirn’s ultimate meaning remains obscure. Perhaps an attentive reader might find it elsewhere in the whatever it is, if the remaining text were in English. Alas, it is not:

Keeping such bloody collisions of class and color to an acceptably inconspicuous minimum is the job of the so-called quality-of-life squads that Price – a consummate stalker-realist who seems to have written the book from stoops and doorways; his gaze is that pathologically focused, his ear that tuned – portrays as a nincompoop nouvelle constabulary whose stakeouts are so light on lock-and-load moments they’d put even the Hardy Boys to sleep.

Bits and pieces of that swim almost to the surface of comprehensibility: given the piece’s breathlessly adulatory tone, ‘stalker’ had no doubt already entered the reader’s mind, and so too certain pathologies. Of the nincompoop part there can be no question.

For an insightful review of Price’s latest that is in English, turn to Sam Sacks’ February 2008 piece on Lush Life, but be sure to shade your third eye: it’s just that good!

Microreview: Eight Lives Down

Eight Lives Down:
The Story of the World’s Most Dangerous Job
in the World’s Most Dangerous Place
Chris Hunter
Bantam Dell Books, 2008

One of the most bitter ironies of the ongoing war in Iraq is speculative only: at this point we cannot know the bounty we’ll reap in literature from the cost we’re paying in blood and disillusionment. Chris Hunter’s account of being a bomb-disarmer in Iraq’s Basra province falls decidedly in the latter camp. There is no literary merit here at all nor is any sought by the book’s author, who learned his way with bombs back home in Britain fighting the IRA and now finds himself in a brutal, weird land doing the same incredibly perilous job: walking up to live explosives with the intent of rendering them harmless before they blow him apart. The obvious historical parallel, the Vietnam War, was forty years in the past before it had yielded all its treasures (The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War, Dispatches, Meditations in Green, and of course the greatest of them all, Going After Cacciato). Innumerable other accounts have lacked in literary merit what they made up in verisimilitude.

Along the way, Hunter is candidly good at illuminating some of the strange sights and sounds of his new theater of war, as in this creepy description of so-called camel spiders:

Members of the Solpugid family, they are a cross between a spider and a scorpion. They’re extremely aggressive and only come out to hunt at night. When they bite, they inject you with a chemical that instantly numbs the skin and the surrounding tissue. If it happens when you’re sleeping, you can’t even tell you’ve been bitten. If the photos are to be believed, you wake up to find part of your leg or arm missing, because the camel spider’s been feasting on it all night. Worst still, they’re the size of a man’s hand and can run about 10 mph and jump several feet. They’ve been known to chase people.

But the real heartache of this worthy, engrossing book is of course the heartache of the war itself, the way it shatters whatever dreams it might once have fed, as in this passage immediately after a particularly daring enemy assault:

But beneath the joviality, we all know that the rules have been changed. The insurgents have crossed the line. Soldiering is about fighting. It’s about killing people before they kill you. But until last night, we weren’t here to kill. We were fighting to keep the peace.

Hunter’s book is bluntly honest about the daily realities of the Iraq War, a worthwhile book to read despite how tough its setting is. The reader simultaneously welcomes the book and deplores its genesis.

–Steve Donoghue

Microreview: Tony Earley’s “The Blue Star”

The Blue Star
By Tony Earley
Little, Brown and Company, 2008

Words such as “unassuming” and “humble” are likely to attach themselves to Tony Earley’s second novel, The Blue Star, and these words are accurate—if, by humble, one means Earley’s ability to put his ego aside and simply tell a moving and memorable story. This novel is about the adolescence of Jim Glass (who first appeared in Jim the Boy, although you don’t have to have read that to enjoy The Blue Star), a charmed and charming high school upperclassman in a North Carolina small town in 1941. Jim’s life is overturned when he falls in love with Chrissie Steppe. Chrissie’s background is predictably messy for Jim—she lives in the mountains, which is also a way of saying that she’s poor—and in their tangled courtship, Earley beautifully captures the hyper-perceptive thrill of young love:

Beside the house stood a black walnut tree already devoid of leaves, save for a few yellow stragglers clinging to the topmost branches. The upstairs window of the house was open to the weather, and one of the tree’s limbs reached through it as if feeling around for the lock. Jim imagined that the house, or someone or something inside it, was listening to them as they approached, and he caught himself stepping through the weeds as quietly as possible, almost tip-toeing. He stopped on the top step and checked the soundness of the porch before venturing onto it. When Chrissie stepped onto the porch behind him, the boards creaked deliciously, and he felt gooseflesh scamper up his arms.

But Earley is just as tactilely alert to the birth pangs of adult responsibility, and it’s a tragedy—the death of another student—that brings out some of Jim’s most mature perceptions:

They drove toward the mountain beneath one of those winter skies that made Jim wonder why he didn’t study it more, why he didn’t bother to learn why and when the planets made their appearances, and the names of the constellations. So vivid and bright were the stars that the great mechanisms which moved them across the sky seemed almost understandable while remaining incomprehensible, like a familiar Bible story read aloud in a foreign language, or the ticking guts of a watch.

World War II darkens and accelerates Jim’s coming-of-age, yet the The Blue Star remains to its touching end grounded in its characters, committed to illuminating true feelings with a simple tale. It may be a humble book, but it’s also a triumph.
–Sam Sacks

more Gems from the Web!

lots going on in the infinite pages of the internet this week, a few especially caught our eye:

Marlon James gives a feisty reassessment of “Pride and Prejudice”;

Sam Anderson tries a hand at pastiche in his entertainingly stylized review of a book Sam Sacks examined just as entertainingly (and a lot more thoroughly) in Open Letters;

Ron Charles hilariously skewers Ann Rice’s new Jesus opus in The Washington Post

Christoper Hitchens has more books than he can handle;

New York Times blog Paper Cuts gets an outpouring of favorites literary lines from readers (the real interest here is in the comments field);

book critics don’t have it nearly so rough as dance critics;

Jeff Sypeck continues the search for Charlemagne at Quid Plura?

and, in advance of our forthcoming piece on Evan S. Connell’s new collection of stories, Steve Donoghue reminds us of why Connell is so worth reading in the first place…