Recently Read, part I
Feb. 26th, 2005 06:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coalescentI have not been reading as much as I'd like recently. Still:
Neuromancer by William Gibson
I think I read this novel too late. I knew it had been pillaged and plundered by subsequent storytellers unto the nth generation; I wasn't quite prepared for how blatant some of them been, or how thoroughly the general tone of the novel has been assimilated into the cultural consciousness. It all resulted in a thoroughly distorted reading experience, though. Specific examples: despite the fact that the text was telling me that Armitage is a blond caucasian guy, for fifty pages or more after his introduction I was hearing Morpheus when he spoke. Or when Wintermute phones Case ("Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind"), I hear Ambassador Kosh. And, of course, there's the Matrix itself, which is almost impossible to visualise in any way other than the Wachowski brothers version. This is a failing in myself rather than in the novel, and deeply frustrating.
Intellectually I know what this book represents, in terms of newness; emotionally I didn't feel any of it, to the point where it was a real struggle to maintain my interest, and I'm struggling now to think of interesting things to say.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ninebelow's discussion on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
instant_fanzine is good, though, and links to this essay by Paul Brians, who perhaps sums it up best: "If [Gibson's] plots and characters are shallow and trite, that mattered little, for it is not the tale but the manner of its telling that stands out." That's certainly true, although the writing is perhaps not always as stylish as the scenery; there are some shockingly blatant infodumps (Case tuning in to a TV show that just happens to provide background the reader needs, for instance).
As a result, it took me the best part of a month to read, mostly because I kept stopping to read other things instead, and I wouldn't say that I enjoyed it as such, although I'm glad to have (finally) read it (I can cross it off the list). Pattern Recognition, I think, is better in most respects.
A Handbook of American Prayer by Lucius Shepard
This is one of two short novels Shepard published last year, the other being Trujillo. That story offered a challenging and engrossing examination of masculinity; in contrast, A Handbook of American Prayer casts a broader net.
Wardlin Stewart is convicted of killing a lowlife in a bar fight and locked up for ten years in the state penitentiary. There he begins to pray, emphatically not out of devotion to any particular god, but out of selfishness and a need to understand and improve his circumstances; and remarkably, it seems to have an effect. It seems to work. Fairly quickly he formalises this discovery into something he names 'prayerstyle', a denomination-independent form of aspirational writing somewhere between catechism and poetry. It allows Wardlin not just to survive prison, but to benefit from it.
He begins a correspondence with Teresa, a single thirtysomething who owns a shop in Pershing, Arizona, and on his release he moves there to marry and live with her. At the same time, prayerstyle, or at least the means of control it seems to offer over life, becomes a hit. Wardlin is asked to write prayers for other inmates, and eventually attracts the attention of a publisher, who puts out a volume of his work entitled A Handbook of American Prayer. Initially only a moderate success, by a twist of fate it becomes a publishing phenomenon, and sets him on a course for confrontation with some of the more traditional American Christians.
It's easy to believe in the success of prayerstyle. Wardlin's editor ascribes it to his genuine reluctance to play the messiah; he's no shyster, he's genuine, and he's not saying that he does have the answers, only that he might. But there's more to it than that: by suggesting that you really can remake the world for yourself, prayerstyle offers a seductive twist on the American Dream, and Shepard plays all the angles, satirising the absurdity of celebrity prophets and much else besides.
This is at heart a moral fantasy, a story about how to be a good person, or about the value of religion compared to the value of faith compared to the value of spirituality compared to the value of selfishness. Shepard's writing is as disciplined as in any of his best work, and as a result Handbook examines its chosen questions in a depth far greater than its modest page count might suggest.
Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart
There is a point in this novel where one of Will 'Dead' Kennedy's relatives finds out what he does. 'Kinda cool,' she thinks, 'sort of trailer-park southern gothic.' It's a fair description; Will lives in the Lone Star State, and he's a ghost hunter ... or at least a wannabe ghost hunter, or at least he sees ghosts and would quite like to make some money out of it, because frankly the rest of his life ain't adding up to much.
Perfect Circle is the story of this business venture, and also of Will's complex relations with his large family--living and dead. It's about the past, of course, how you come to terms with it and how it influences the present. It's very stylised (the ghosts appear in black and white) and highly quotable ('one of the big drawbacks with being left wing is that you aren't supposed to want to blow shit up'). In fact, it's a lot of fun to read all around, full of catchy references, particularly to music. The title comes from an REM track, and there are other lyrics liberally scattered through the book; 'even on my bad days, my numb days, I always loved music,' says Will.
It's a great little book (only 243pp) that deserves its place on the Nebula ballot; why it's only appeared from Small Beer Press is a mystery to me. There's a good longer review here, and you can read excerpts at Salon here. Many thanks tozarabee for the loan.
Neuromancer by William Gibson
I think I read this novel too late. I knew it had been pillaged and plundered by subsequent storytellers unto the nth generation; I wasn't quite prepared for how blatant some of them been, or how thoroughly the general tone of the novel has been assimilated into the cultural consciousness. It all resulted in a thoroughly distorted reading experience, though. Specific examples: despite the fact that the text was telling me that Armitage is a blond caucasian guy, for fifty pages or more after his introduction I was hearing Morpheus when he spoke. Or when Wintermute phones Case ("Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind"), I hear Ambassador Kosh. And, of course, there's the Matrix itself, which is almost impossible to visualise in any way other than the Wachowski brothers version. This is a failing in myself rather than in the novel, and deeply frustrating.
Intellectually I know what this book represents, in terms of newness; emotionally I didn't feel any of it, to the point where it was a real struggle to maintain my interest, and I'm struggling now to think of interesting things to say.
ninebelow's discussion on instant_fanzine is good, though, and links to this essay by Paul Brians, who perhaps sums it up best: "If [Gibson's] plots and characters are shallow and trite, that mattered little, for it is not the tale but the manner of its telling that stands out." That's certainly true, although the writing is perhaps not always as stylish as the scenery; there are some shockingly blatant infodumps (Case tuning in to a TV show that just happens to provide background the reader needs, for instance). As a result, it took me the best part of a month to read, mostly because I kept stopping to read other things instead, and I wouldn't say that I enjoyed it as such, although I'm glad to have (finally) read it (I can cross it off the list). Pattern Recognition, I think, is better in most respects.
A Handbook of American Prayer by Lucius Shepard
This is one of two short novels Shepard published last year, the other being Trujillo. That story offered a challenging and engrossing examination of masculinity; in contrast, A Handbook of American Prayer casts a broader net.
Wardlin Stewart is convicted of killing a lowlife in a bar fight and locked up for ten years in the state penitentiary. There he begins to pray, emphatically not out of devotion to any particular god, but out of selfishness and a need to understand and improve his circumstances; and remarkably, it seems to have an effect. It seems to work. Fairly quickly he formalises this discovery into something he names 'prayerstyle', a denomination-independent form of aspirational writing somewhere between catechism and poetry. It allows Wardlin not just to survive prison, but to benefit from it.
He begins a correspondence with Teresa, a single thirtysomething who owns a shop in Pershing, Arizona, and on his release he moves there to marry and live with her. At the same time, prayerstyle, or at least the means of control it seems to offer over life, becomes a hit. Wardlin is asked to write prayers for other inmates, and eventually attracts the attention of a publisher, who puts out a volume of his work entitled A Handbook of American Prayer. Initially only a moderate success, by a twist of fate it becomes a publishing phenomenon, and sets him on a course for confrontation with some of the more traditional American Christians.
It's easy to believe in the success of prayerstyle. Wardlin's editor ascribes it to his genuine reluctance to play the messiah; he's no shyster, he's genuine, and he's not saying that he does have the answers, only that he might. But there's more to it than that: by suggesting that you really can remake the world for yourself, prayerstyle offers a seductive twist on the American Dream, and Shepard plays all the angles, satirising the absurdity of celebrity prophets and much else besides.
This is at heart a moral fantasy, a story about how to be a good person, or about the value of religion compared to the value of faith compared to the value of spirituality compared to the value of selfishness. Shepard's writing is as disciplined as in any of his best work, and as a result Handbook examines its chosen questions in a depth far greater than its modest page count might suggest.
Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart
There is a point in this novel where one of Will 'Dead' Kennedy's relatives finds out what he does. 'Kinda cool,' she thinks, 'sort of trailer-park southern gothic.' It's a fair description; Will lives in the Lone Star State, and he's a ghost hunter ... or at least a wannabe ghost hunter, or at least he sees ghosts and would quite like to make some money out of it, because frankly the rest of his life ain't adding up to much.
Perfect Circle is the story of this business venture, and also of Will's complex relations with his large family--living and dead. It's about the past, of course, how you come to terms with it and how it influences the present. It's very stylised (the ghosts appear in black and white) and highly quotable ('one of the big drawbacks with being left wing is that you aren't supposed to want to blow shit up'). In fact, it's a lot of fun to read all around, full of catchy references, particularly to music. The title comes from an REM track, and there are other lyrics liberally scattered through the book; 'even on my bad days, my numb days, I always loved music,' says Will.
It's a great little book (only 243pp) that deserves its place on the Nebula ballot; why it's only appeared from Small Beer Press is a mystery to me. There's a good longer review here, and you can read excerpts at Salon here. Many thanks to
zarabee for the loan.
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no subject
Date: 2005-02-26 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-26 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-26 09:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-27 01:35 pm (UTC)Even leaving aside similarities to Count Zero, Pattern Recognition is no great shakes in the plotting department either - indeed it's rather meandering and cliched. But like Gibson's earlier work the point of the novel is not so much the plot as the ideas and connections that swish around as a result of the plot. I found Pattern Recognition vastly more engaging than Neuromancer. What's great about Pattern Recognition is that it has a genuinely rounded protagonist who is unique, and yet empathetic. It also has all sorts of interesting ideas about individual identity versus national identity versus global identity, and the profound human tendency to seek patterns and connections in everything (whether trivial or important, personal or cultural). In a lot of ways Neuromancer was about technology and the ways it changes identity, and so is this, but in a much softer, more socially-oriented way. It certainly *feels* very different from Count Zero.
Another thing that Pattern Recognition has in common with Neuromancer is that it earns distinction simply by taking a fresh slant on something, and its uniqueness will probably diminish over time. Having said that, it's slightly more future-proofed than Neuromancer because it is deliberately of its time. There are explicit ideas in the book about past, present, and future - the way the beliefs and attitudes of the present become increasingly lost to us as they recede into the past, and the way our interpretation of the past and the future is continually evolving, viewed through the distorting lens of the present. (An idea it shares with Cloud Atlas, I think). Part of the point of the book is to sketch a fleeting moment in history.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-27 09:12 am (UTC)