A Clash of Kings - George R R Martin

George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire has received and maintained much acclaim in the past decade as being an outstanding series. I found the novel’s complexity and it’s many threads of narrative to be the most important theme, and Martin’s aversion to allowing any one character to become singular in their intentions something rewardable on the part of the author.

Each chapter of the novel focuses on a different character in the third person. Martin gives us in the space of what I guess to be about six months the lives of him many and varied characters to observe, love, hate, understand and mourn. He is unbiased in the people he chooses to examine. There are some who may seem to be goodies, and some seem baddies yet as we understand their motives to make the choices they do the story quickly becomes complicated. It forces you and I, the readers, to wonder ‘who exactly am I supposed to be rooting for?’ And this is a good thing. Morally, Martin forces us to examine the world in full colour. For example, the family of Starks are the traditional protagonists it would seem, but Martin shows them no mercy, and the heroism and honor of the family is often harshly rewarded. He is not at all afraid to kill off very likable and important characters. In contrast one of the characters we read about, the imp Tyrion Lannister, who comes from a particularly nasty family it would seem proves himself and his family, who are the enemies of the Starks, to be very irregular in the typical epic fantasy sense. They display many bonds and strengths the Stark have none of. These families encompass a large cast in them selves, yet Martin also holds many other characters important, such as the queen Daenerys from across the sea who is has hatched three dragon children at a great price, and seeks to invade the Seven Kingdoms, or Greyjoy, a young man full of hidden bitterness who was the ward of the Starks, and betrays them. All in all Martin pulls of a complex, twisted narrative which is slightly (post)modern in it’s approach to storytelling, and much more so than the much fantasy I have encountered previously.

Another thing that is vastly enjoyable about Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is the complexity and depth of the thing he has created. The heraldry system in itself is a complex piece of work, the politics within the Seven Kingdoms are complex and somewhat realistic, the battles and sword fights intense. Yet what I enjoyed most in this regard is the telling of Daenerys’ tale. Her desperate search for power and alliances, for safety of her dragons and for achievement of her goals to become a world power lead her to many strange places indeed.

On the walls of Quarth, men beat gongs to herald her coming, while others blew curious horns that encircled their bodies like great bronze snakes. A column of camelry emerged from the city as her honour guards. The riders wore scaled copper armor and snouted helms with copper tusks and long black silk plumes, and sat high on saddles inlaid with rubies and garnets, Their camels were dressed in blankets of a hundred different hues. (…)

Three thick walls encircled Quarth, elaborately carved. The outer was red sandstone, thirty feet high and decorated with animals: snakes slithering, kites flying, fish swimming, intermingled with wolves of the red waste and striped zorses and monstrous elephants. (…)

All the great of Quarth will come to see my dragons, she thought.

The diversity and exoticism in her part of the tale left my mouth watering for more.

Fans have been drooling for years now for the next installment, and it is hoped George will finish it this year. I find it hard to be as full of excitement as these individuals as I, recently completing the second part of the epic called A Clash of Kings, found the story to me mentally draining. I will wait a few months before starting on the third book, A Storm of Swords.

All the Pretty Horses review

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.
This is my second book by McCarthy that I have read, and I found it more enjoyable than The Orchard Keeper, more concrete and engaging, although the afore mentioned was still a very good read.

The story revolves around the lives of two boys who run away from their home in Texas to Mexico, and is the beginning of Cormac's Border Trilogy. It has a dramatic storyline, but that isn't why the book resounds so well upon complete. No, it is the author's craftsmanship. Really, if someone else had written the story, it would have felt a quite typical as 'hard-life coming of age story set in the real world'. It may have even been mediocre. But there is something different about McCarthy. Some would call it his style, but I think its more than that. It encompasses his passion for the land, for the strange lives of those lives which are born into the southern states, and into the mythic Central America.

The author quickly involves you with a lot of colloquial dialog and specialized vocabulary. The prose is sparse in punctuation. There is no punctuation to tell when someone is speaking, or who is speaking, but the characterization is so well done you quickly figure it out. Strangely the author juxtaposes this very real-life way of communicating between characters with detailed descriptions of surroundings, particularly the sweeping descriptions of landscape and setting. For example this is a prison scene after the two young Americans survive a day of fighting for their lives in the prison quadrangle. 'Scuse the language:

John Grady grinned crookedly. What the hell you think you look like?
Shit if I know.
You ought to wish you looked as good as a coon.
I caint laugh. I think my jaw's broke.
There aint nothin wrong with you.
Shit, said Rawlings
John Grady grinned. You see that big old boy standing yonder that's been watching us?
I see the son of a bitch.
See him look over here?
I see him.
What do you think I'm fixing to do?
I got no idea in this world.
I'm goin to get up from here and walk over there and bust him in the mouth.
The hell you are.
You watch me.
What for?
Just to save him the trip.
By the end of the third day it was pretty much over.

This is an example of a description of the prison:

The prison was no more than a small walled village and within it occurred a constant seethe of barter and exchange in everything from radios and blankets down to matches and buttons and shoenails and within this bartering ran a constant struggle for status and position. Underpinning all of it like the fiscal standard in commercial societies lay a bedrock of depravity and violence where in an egalitarian absolute every man was judged by a single standard and that was his readiness to kill.

One immediately notices the frequent use of conjunctions, particularly 'and', which create a certain flow and unity to each paragraph, and seems to serve to blend different elements in together, such as this passage which describes the way the underlying political system within the prison and the way bartering and violence have become a way of life are intertwined in two rather long sentences. This is just a simple example, and such examples could be seen on most pages of the book.

Links have been made between McCarthy and Faulkner’s work, and this seems like a fair statement from the little I've read of Faulkner's work, which sometimes has long detailed sentences filling many pages at a time. As other reviewers have observed this way of writing is almost biblical. Polysyndeton is the literary name of the technique, and I think it is a technique which really fits in with the mood of the novel. McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, didn't seem to use this technique to such a large extent, or at least I didn't notice it as a major stylistic in the text.

The novel has many moments of sudden violence which are very aptly described, such as the knife fight in the Mexican prison, which was powerful. the scene is long lasting in my mind. There are also many moments of impending violence, tense moments where McCarthy is hinting, through use of selected language and semantic connotations, of violence being very close at hand. Although nothing may result from these moments, there is a message of warning hinted at, often using certain lines of short dialog. These scenes seem to serve as premonitions of things soon to come in the narrative.

A powerful and personally moving book, which rewards the efforts of persistent readers, is highly recommenced.

Books to read + review

Its relatively early on in the year, and I just wanted to note the books I'm hoping to read this year, and do some (meager) reviews on. In a way this blog is for myself, to motivate myself to think and process what I read, and be something to look back on and reread.
Anyway.

Cormac McCarthy.
This author has really caught my interest. With his beautiful sense of setting, the colloquial dialog, and the broken narrative, all of which seem to allow a glimpse into an esoteric world of the southern USA. I have already read + reviewed The Orchid Keeper.
I am currently reading All the pretty horses and will review it when finished, which may be a while as I have so many deadlines coming up with study.
I have already purchased The Road, and will read that for sure.
I will probably want to finnish the border trilogy by the end of the year, which includes All the pretty horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the plain.

Iain M. Banks.
I own Use of weapons, Inversions and Matter which I aim to read + review this year. Consider Phlebas was too good, and I want to reread Look to Windward.

Jack Vance.
I really want to get my hands on the Demon Princes' series. It sound right up my alley.

Gene Wolfe.
Gene has been recommended again and again, and I read the first Book of the Long Sun novel, which I found intriguing, and full of mystery and depth. I am in the midst of buying The book of the new sun collection :) :) :)

TV series:
24
I must watch the next season of 24 (ses 2). I watched the first season while in Africa, and it was great. far fetched, but thats not a bad thing in my opinion.

The Club of Queer Trades Review

The Club of Queer Trades Review

The club of queer trades is a little known book by the influential, but relatively unimportant (in this day and age) author of essays, poetry and fiction, G K Chesterton. It is a small novella, and isn't one of his major works, but it perhaps should be.

Previous to this work I have only read the author's philosophical work Orthodoxy, which I found to be a rather intriguing view on Christianity and life on the whole. It really does deserve a reread, and I plan to purchase a copy of the work sometime soon.

As I see it G K Chesterton seems interested in destroying facts, or at least he (paradoxically) favours intuition, or fantasy over facts. He wrote rather famously, in Orthodoxy, a strange and interesting thing:

I am concerned with a
certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the
fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

In the Novella, The club of queer trades, the character Basil Grant, former judge who went mad in the middle of a court case, embodies this theology of Chesterton's in many ways. He is a interesting character, and works solutions upon impulse and seemingly unjustified judgments in spite of the presumed facts, and he, his brother and the narrator are involved in many strange cases of mystery, all of which are connected to the strange Club of Queer Trades.

The club is exclusive and seems to caricature the post-industrial revolution's upper class of spending their time involved in secret societies and clubs for lack of better things to do, but does so in a soft light. There is also a clear mocking of the modern spirit of the times in which the book was written, that being 1905. The club of queer trades is restricted to people who work in an area never before worked in, something totally new and unheard of, and the income of this occupation provides their full income. It must be something specifically new, not a variation of an existing trade. A few of the trades are explored in the novel, such as actors who detain people from dinner parties with wild stories, or organizers of adventures for the bored rich, this agency called the Adventure and Romance Agency, which creates a mystery around the customer who must solve it, involving many suspenseful and often violent circumstances.
For these inventive and fun adventures the novella is worth the read, but it is more than that also. It is a study of the upper class society of the time, and the way the lower class is paid to provide them entertainment and excitement. It is not a Marxist statement. It is a statement, though.

Check out these blogs if you're interested:

http://thewardrobeandthewhitetree.blogspot.com/2006/02/chesterton-goodies.html

http://chestertonandfriends.blogspot.com/

Also if you want to read this book on PDF you can, just download it here:
http://manybooks.net/titles/chestertetext99tcoqt10.html

The Orchid Keeper review

To say that Cormac McCarthy’s first novel The Orchard Keeper is an interesting novel, is to say the least. It is also a so-called literary novel and could be quite hard going for some. It encompasses the lives of several interlinked characters who each serve to show us the life and wildness of the southern west of America presumably between the two world wars.

The basic plot involves a bootlegger and alcohol smuggler fostering a young boy whose father he has killed previously, unknown to either of them. Cormac’s prose is really beautiful in it’s descriptions of nature and events, and he seems to pull his vocabulary out of everywhere, and some words he used weren’t even in my Oxford dictionary. Yet there are many parts of the novel which are bleak and almost empty, with conversations and seemingly important events being very plainly told. In fact, when referring to characters and in conversations Cormac uses vernacular language, which seems in stark contrast to the elaboration of the other parts of the text. He doesn't use quotation marks, and likes to start a paragraph with little context, and lets the sentence lead you into the next scene.

There are many sudden events, sudden violence, and these are intertwined with dreamlike observations of different characters. I just don’t know what other way to put it. There was one section describing the boy John Wesley Rattner ‘s time spent sleeping on the porch of his house after his father’s disappearance, his wanders at night after his mother has gone to sleep and observations of the world around him, which was so calm and beautiful that I immediately reread it, and later went back to read it again.

In all honesty I read this book out of curiosity, having no idea it was McCarthy’s first book, or having any idea what it would be like. I recommend this novel. But be ready for something a little more sublime, subtle and careful than your typical impulse read.

Consider Phlebas excerpt

An excerpt from Consider Phlebas, a stunning scene where Horza does away with the man the changer has been slowly transforming his body into. Kraiklyn was not a nice guy at all, but the fight is brutal and reveals the viciousness of the assassin.

‘Fine. Stop,’ Horza said. The Hover stopped, sinking on its skirts. ‘Thanks.’ Horza got out, still facing the man and the white-haired woman.

‘You’re just lucky you didn’t try anything,’ the man said angrily, nodding sharply, his eyes glistening.

‘I know,’ Horza said. ‘Bye now,’ he winked at the white-haired woman. She turned and made what he suspected was an obscene gesture with on finger. The hover rose, blasted forward, then skidded round and roared off the way it had come. Horza looked back at the sub-plate shaft entrance, where the three people who had got out of the car stood silhouetted against the light inside. One of the might have looked back down the dock towards Horza; he wasn’t sure they did, but he shrank back into the shadows of the crane above him.

-

He got to his feet, ducking as he thought of whirling impeller blades just overhead. He felt like a puppet being controlled by a drunk. He swaggered forward, his arms out, and hit Kraiklyn. They started to fall again, and Horza let go, punching with all his might at the place he guessed the man’s head was. His fist crashed into bone, but he didn’t know where. He skipped back, in case there was a retaliatory kick or punch on its way. His ears were popping; his head felt tight. He could feel his eyes vibrating in their sockets; he thought he was deaf but he could feel a thudding in his chest and throat., making him breathless, making him choke and gasp. He could make out just a hint of a border of light all around them, as though they were under the middle of the hovercraft. He saw something, just an area of darkness, on that border, and lunged at it, swinging his foot from low down. Again he connected, and the dark part of the border disappeared.

He was blown from his feet by a crunching down-draught of air and tumbled bodily along the concrete, thumping into Kraiklyn where he lay on the ground after Horza’s last kick. Another punch hit Horza on the head, but it was weak and hardly hurt. Horza felt for and found Kraiklyn’s head. He lifted it and banged it off the concrete, then did it again. Kraiklyn struggled, but his hands beat uselessly off Horza’s shoulders and chest. The area of lightness beyond the dim shape on the ground was enlarging, coming closer. Horza banged Kraiklyn’s head against the concrete one more time, then threw himself flat. The read edge of the skirt scrubbed over him; his ribs ached and his skull felt as though somebody was standing on it. Then it was over, and they were in open air.

The big craft thundered on, trailing remnants of spray. There was another one fifty meters down the dock and heading towards him.

Kraiklyn was lying still, a couple of meters away.

Horza got up onto all fours and crawled over to the other man. He looked down into the eyes, which moved a little.

‘I’m Horza! Horza!’ he screamed, but couldn’t even hear anything himself.

-

note: Blogspot really stuffs up the formating, but it really can't be helped...or at least I don't know how to stop it doing so.

Consider Phlebas by Iain m. Banks book review

Review of Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

I haven’t read a vast amount of science fiction, but Ian Banks, the science fiction writer who originally, to much acclaim, forced his hand to popular fiction mixed with a soggy sample of the strange and surreal to (as he says in an interview on you tube) ‘get published’, has created something vast and loud in his culture novels.

A story about a political assassin and Special Op expert named Horza, a Changer who can transform himself to look like any humanoid, and his desperate attempt to capture a secret weapon in a highly protected, neutral planet in the midst of a galactic war which has already cost the lives of millions, you would think Consider Phlebas would be hard going, stuffed with scientific propositions and a huge cast of characters. In fact, it was not. Instead it let us slowly into the current state of the galaxy, while also introducing clearly and carefully each character and often gave revealing insight to the views of different individuals fighting in the war. It was well placed, I thought, and I never felt lost or confused, except when I was supposed to feel that way. Dialog, scenic descriptions and stream of consciousness prose seem to be Bank’s specialty, and he flawlessly steps between thoughts, actions and eventful description of the complex main character Horza.

On the back cover the novel is keyed as a space opera of great imagination, and Banks certainly seems to play along with this idea, using interludes, and breaking the book up into separate parts labeled, for example, state of play: two. I am not sure if he does this to parody the space opera genre, or if he is toying with something else, and my lack of encounter with space opera limits my critique of the structuring.

The Universe Banks has created is vast, filled with advanced civilizations, and is at a stage of development which could easily be considered utopian. The society most delved into is the Culture, an extremely advanced version of our world society, where technology has gotten to a point where everyone within the culture relies on highly intelligent and apparently benign artificial, sentient minds, which are vastly more intelligent than regular human beings, with a few exceptions of course. Thousands of Orbitals, immense flat planets, have been created by the Minds to allow the species under it’s protective arm limitless space and opportunity for pleasures and hedonism for all their days. Horza, on his many plights and attempts to manipulate himself out of dire situations he continually finds himself in gives us a glimpse of the Cultures huge power, creativity and intelligence, as well as the reasoning behind his own hatred for the civilization.

The impetus to the events of the novel is the huge galactic war which has erupted between the Culture and the Idirans, a war which measures it’s casualties in the billions. It is an interesting reflection on the political philosophies of our time I think. The Culture is the epitome of what I think the Post-Modern movement (for lack of a better title) our academic world is in will eventually produce if not stopped in some way, a system of extreme openness which is ultimately self-contradicting, yet still functions and though in the denial of absolute truths or moral law, it claims this denial itself as truth, and is willing to defend it no matter the cost. It is a culture similar to what our western cultural critics seem to want our culture to become.

The Idirans are very different, but could also been seen as a reflection of certain political/religious groups, an alien race, millions of years old and totally devoted to their religion, which includes enslaving other planets and systems to honor their God. I couldn’t help but note the name Banks gives the Idirans: id-IRANs, and although Horza, along with the rest of his species, is affiliated with the Idirans, in spite of the thoughts of hate and outrage Horza has towards the Culture, I got the sense that, in a way, Banks was really siding with the Culture and despising the Idirans and although the Idirans seemed to be winning the overall war when it came to statistics, it is fairly clear who Banks will eventually allow victory.

The galactic war is really not the main focus of the book, although it is important. Instead we are focused on Horza’s many plights and misadventures through the maze of strange worlds, settings which include huge flat planet-like structures called orbitals, desert islands, games of carnage organized for the criminally insane of every species, ancient temples on small moons, fights under hovercraft and fights in ancient train stations. Horza’s many struggles against the culture and it’s creations seem to be the microcosm of the larger war going on around him. Horza is granted an amazing amount of luck, and his body seems to be able to take a lot of punishment. Yet, even this important mission’s failure is only a small part of the war and one culture Mind calculates that its success would only prolong the war by a few months at the most. Likewise, at the end of the novel, it is stated that on a scale of the war’s effect to the whole universe, the war rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume. The magnificence and vastness of space reminds us once again how small we are, how seemingly insignificant the death of millions can be for sentient beings watching from outside our narrow lifetimes.

There are many memorable moments in Consider Phlebas, and the characterization is often spot on. The different points of view of the war are interesting. The many internal struggles of the morally questionable Horza’s struggles to survive and complete his mission, which in itself has many motives, are often unexpected. He is rather mysterious in many senses, his actions sometimes contradicting his state of mind, but always ensuring him survival, no matter the cost of others around him. I loved the book for its variety, its many settings, many characters, and many twists and tensions of espionage and manipulation on all levels. Only the last few scenes and the ending were overstretched and drawn out, I thought, but the conclusion was also interesting. Banks, a writer of furious speed, has me hungry for more of this exotic place, which is our so called galaxy.