Category Archives: Book Reviews

Fantasy of Excess

Posted by on February 4, 2013 No comments
Pictured: A Shardbearer bearing his Shardblade

Pictured: A Shardbearer bearing his Shardblade

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been reading Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, a doorstopper of a first entry in a series whose express purpose is to be a very long succession of doorstoppers. I’ll admit up front that I wasn’t sure if I’d finish it. Epic fantasy really isn’t my genre, and I only decided to try it in the first place because I was curious about what fantasy fans are into these days. Still, everything was going surprisingly well when I wrote that post. Sanderson’s writing has improved markedly since last time I tried one of his books (Elantris, if I remember correctly) and he seems to be actively avoiding many of the pitfalls so many fantasy authors blunder into on a regular basis.

That was around 50 pages ago. I’ve now set The Way of Kings aside, and I seriously doubt I’ll ever pick it up again.

What happened?

Some Background

First of all, I should explain the problems I’ve had with epic fantasy in the past.

I read The Hobbit way back in the day and liked it quite a bit. I read The Lord of the Rings shortly after that and didn’t entirely understand what all the fuss was about. (I will freely admit that I only finished the third one because I wanted to be able to tell people that I Had Read The Lord Of The Rings.) Then someone recommended the Wheel of Time books to me, and I, in my naiveté, decided to read four of them in a row.

I started to suspect that I had made a grave mistake around the point in the second book (or maybe the third, I forget) where two of the female protagonists are captured by insidious foreign types and forced into slavery via magic collars that enable the slavers to perfectly simulate the feeling of being spanked. There are long descriptions of how humiliating the characters find all of this. There is one particularly baffling scene where a character isn’t allowed to wash herself for an entire week and her dishevelled state is lingered upon for several uncomfortable paragraphs.

But wait, I thought, I must be misinterpreting this. There’s no way a respectable publisher of mature fantasy novels would ever agree to print millions of copies of someone’s thinly-veiled wank material.

Long story short, much of the Wheel of Time franchise is indeed thinly-veiled wank material. It features a seemingly infinite number of scenes where female characters are degraded or humiliated in an uncomfortably prurient fashion. All of the women wear dresses with ‘plunging necklines’. There’s one particularly hilarious moment where the hero’s love interest (one of three) is trapped in a dream dimension where her thoughts control reality. When she thinks about Hero Guy, her dress alters itself to show more cleavage. It is every bit as ridiculous and misogynistic as it sounds.

So there’s that. My other big problem with epic fantasy is the ‘epic’ part. The world or universe must always be in grave danger from some nebulously-defined ancient evil. The heros are destined to rise up and defeat this evil – not because they’re the right people to do it, but because there must be an epic hero to strike down epic evil in an epic Final Battle. In the Wheel of Time series, this is an ontological fact – the fabric of creation itself is structured in such a way that this needs to happen or the whole thing will unravel.

I find all of this incredibly tedious. A livejournaler named limyaael refers to this as ‘fantasy of excess‘, a label she applies to both Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind. Everything is cranked up to 11. Nothing is ever subtle. The bad guy in Wheel of Time is The Dark One, and he is The Most Evil. He lives inside a scary mountain and his minions make cursed swords using the blood of pregnant women. (Or something like that; it’s been a while.) His apostles are either evil, sadistic schemers if they’re women or evil, slightly-less-sadistic schemers if they’re men, sadism being a largely feminine trait in Jordan’s books for whatever reason.

In short, most epic fantasy novels tend not to take place in anything even approaching a realistic world. Well duh! you might say, but I’m not referring to magic or dragons when I use the word ‘realistic’. The last time I checked, reality does not order itself into neatly-partitioned categories labelled Good and Evil unless you’re some sort of ideological fanatic. The worlds of epic fantasy are teleological to such an absurd degree that they can only ever come across as flimsy caricatures of reality.

Or at least, that used to be the case. In recent times, fantasy authors have been throwing themselves gleefully in the opposite direction, creating worlds and characters that are intentionally devoid of inherent meaning or objective reality. They tend to do this with all the subtlety of a thirteen-year-old Nietzche fan: tons of violence, alarming amounts of rape and a general sense that heroism is pointless in the face of a bleak and meaningless reality. (One hopes their parents are appropriately shocked, or else fantasy’s gritty turn will have been a complete waste.)

The phrase ‘fantasy of excess’ still applies in all cases. It’s just a different kind of excess, that’s all.

And with that out of the way, we move on to The Way of Kings…

Three Prologues is Three Too Many

Prologues are a staple of the fantasy genre. I have no idea why.

The Way of Kings starts off with what is referred to as a ‘Prelude to The Stormlight Archive’. A prelude, then, is distinct from a prologue, and is presumably meant to act as the starting point for the entire series as opposed to just this book. (‘The Stormlight Archive’, remember, is the name of the epic ten-book cycle of which The Way of Kings is merely the first volume.)

I’m not buying it. Call it what you want, this is a prologue, and it serves the same function as most fantasy prologues: pointless window dressing. We are introduced to an ancient cyclical ritual in which powerful beings come into existence, fight in a battle, die, and wait for it all to happen again. There is no context for any of it; we don’t know who these people are, what they’re trying to accomplish or how their odd struggle is going to tie into the main plotline.

The real prologue comes next. Worryingly, it is set 4,500 years after the events of the Prelude.

It starts with this:

The love of men is a frigid thing, a mountain stream only three steps from the ice. We are his. Oh Stormfather…we are his. It is but a thousand days, and the Everstorm comes.”

–Collected on the first day of the week of Palah of the month Shash of the year 1171, thirty-one seconds before death. Subject was a darkeyed pregnant woman of middle years. The child did not survive.

Every chapter begins with one of these. They form a kind of miniature plotline in their own right, recounting the dying words of various people who speak a lot of prophetic nonsense just before they bite it. I started to skip them after the fourth chapter, mostly because I figured out what they’re doing but also because they can be a bit cringe-inducing. (‘WE ARE HIS. THE EVERSTORM COMES!’)

We’re then introduced to Szeth-son-son-Vallano, who is basically a cross between Altair of Assassin’s Creed fame and the guy from Dishonored. I didn’t choose videogame references randomly, by the way. The book invites them: Szeth is a superpowered assassin who wields magic that seems purpose-built to translate well into a gameplay mechanic.

Here’s a good example:

This was a Basic Lashing, first of his three kinds of Lashings. It gave him the ability to manipulate whatever force, spren or god it was that held men to the ground. With this Lashing, he could bind people or objects to different surfaces or in different directions.

[...]

A Full Lashing bound objects together, holding them fast until the Stormlight ran out. It took longer to create – and drained Stormlight far more quickly – than a Basic Lashing.

You can almost hear the mana bar depleting.

This is a particular quirk of Sanderson’s, one that he is alternatly praised and criticised for. For what it’s worth, I don’t have a problem with highly mechanistic magic systems, but I think we can all agree that the opening chapters of your book are not the best point at which to rob your setting of a lot of its mystery. The chapters immediately after this will treat magic as something wondrous and awe-inspiring, which doesn’t entirely work if you’re picturing ‘Shardbearers’ spending talent points to earn a 3% reduction in Stormlight drain every time they use a Full Lashing.

Szeth goes on to assassinate a king, which kicks off the main plot. At the point where I stopped reading, there was still no reason why all of this had to be described to the reader in such detail. ‘They killed our king, now we’re at war’ would have worked just fine.

Immediately after the prologue comes a page saying ‘Part One – Above Silence’, along with two names: Kaladin and Shallan. They must be our main characters, right?

But wait, the first chapter – set six years after the Prologue – stars a generic fantasy Callow Youth named Cenn. He’s in the army and is afraid of dying. Kaladin shows up (ah, there he is) and assures him that he will not die, because Kaladin is one of the good guys and never sends his men to certain death.

Then another magic-wielding Shardbearer shows up and Cenn dies anyway. Wonderful.

So there you have it: three prologues, only one of which calls itself a prologue. I have trouble justifying any of them. I guess you could argue that the first chapter/third prologue gets across Kaladin’s habit of trying to right the wrongs of the world, but I’m not sure it’s necessary given that he spends the next few chapters angsting about it.

I’ve just spent the last thousand words nitpicking The Way of Kings to death, so here are a few things I quite liked about the first five or six (real) chapters.

Passing the Bechdel Test

So there’s Kaladin, who goes from being shrouded in a protective cloak of good luck to being weighed down by doom and ill fortune after a nasty betrayal. He’s interesting enough, I guess, although I was disappointed when it turned out that he isn’t gay despite the book going out of its way to make it seem like he is. (In short: he obsesses over the death of a boy he knew when he was a teenager. It’s written exactly the way most people would write someone grieving over the murder of their first love, but we find out around page 130 or so that it was his brother. I have no idea why Sanderson holds off on revealing this for so long.)

(Also yes, I am aware that Sanderson has not been great about homosexuality in the past – see for example that infamous Dumbledore blog post of his. However, I’ve always gotten the impression that he’s a bit more open-minded than you might think at first glance and would probably be a lot more progressive if he could just untangle himself from whatever belief system it is that made him say homophobic things even though his heart clearly wasn’t in it. But that’s getting into the territory of psychoanalysing authors, so let’s move on.)

Kaladin gets sold into slavery and eventually ends up on a Bridge Crew, which is a lot more unpleasant than it sounds. He comes close to throwing himself off a cliff in a fit of despair, but pulls himself back from the edge both figuratively and literally so that he can be a hero again.

Shallan is much, much more interesting than Kaladin – so much so that I would have happily read an entire book about her and nobody else. Her first viewpoint chapter opens with her tracking down Jasnah Kholin, the princess of some nation or another (I lost track of the various countries and empires fairly quickly) and also the world’s most respected scholar. Shallan wants to be this woman’s ‘ward’, which basically entails becoming her apprentice and benefiting from her vast knowledge and experience.

This would have been interesting enough on its own (I will happily accept more fantasy novels about academics), but it becomes even more compelling when we learn that Shallan has an ulterior motive. She genuinely respects and admires Jasnah, and is obviously torn over the fact that her true reason for wanting to become her ward involves screwing her over royally. Er, no pun intended.

If you’ve been watching the genre for any length of time, you’ll probably have noticed a resurgence in critiques of how fantasy authors handle female characters in their books. As I said in the beginning of this post, a disturbing number of authors choose to join the Cult of Grit by writing lurid rape scenes. “But it’s realistic!‘ they will cry, even as their teenage killing-machine protagonists become cyclones of flashing steel and dismembered limbs five times per chapter. Sanderson appears to be making a conscious effort to avoid that with Shallan. She isn’t motivated by some past trauma, sexual or otherwise (at least not in the part I read), and is given a huge amount of agency by the text. Her conversations with Jasnah also pass the Bechdel Test with flying colours, which is nice.

The prose in these chapters is also much better than what I’ve come to expect from Sanderson. I remember reading on his blog once that he works on two or three books at a time, and boy does it show. There are still some rough spots here and there, paragraphs or scenes that read like unpolished first draft material, but in general I didn’t have a problem with the writing.

Let’s go back to where I was in my previous blog post: 100 pages in and quite enjoying myself. I had every hope of actually finishing this thing and leaving open the possibility that I might check out the sequel when it comes out. Then I finished Part One and moved on to Part Two, and promptly lost all interest.

This Fantasy Cycle is Spinning Its Wheels

Here is a chronological summary of everything that happens to Kaladin, starting from his first POV chapter and ending with the final chapter of Part One of the book:

Betrayed and Enslaved –> Sits in a wagon and angsts about his departed optimism –> Sits in a wagon –> Sits in a wagon –> Arrives in hellish military camp –> Angsts about his departed optimism in a hellish military camp –> Decides to commit suicide –> Regains sense of optimism

His character arc for Part One isn’t difficult to spot: he is betrayed, becomes bitter and nihilistic, hits rock bottom and then rises from the ashes of his despair intent on saving himself and the other slaves at the military camp. The first part happens between chapters: we do not see the betrayal. Nor do we see his faith in the inherent goodness of the world slowly fall apart. What we’re left with, then, is an awful lot of the middle stuff: angsting, despair, more angsting, and some frankly silly ‘I AM CURSED WOE BETIDE ME’ inner monologues. By the time he finally rallies himself and decides to fight back, I had mostly stopped caring, because it was always obvious that that was going to happen. I don’t usually like to tell authors exactly how they should write their books, but Kaladin’s entire arc could have been handled with far fewer pages than it actually gets.

But that’s nothing compared to the amount of padding in Shallan’s initial chapters. Here’s a summary of what happens:

Arrives in Fantasy City –> Finds Jasnah and is rebuffed –> Decides to petition Jasnah again –> Petitions Jasnah again and is once again rebuffed –> Goes off to brood –> Is inspired to petition Jasnah a third time–> Puts in motion a plan to convince Jasnah to accept her –> Plan goes nowhere, but Jasnah accepts her anyway

Most of those sentences summarise an entire chapter. The first time Jasnah tells Shallan to take a hike, I assumed she’d probably try again. The second time, I looked forward to seeing how Shallan would achieve her goals without becoming Jasnah’s ward. When she decided to take a third stab at convincing Jasnah, I wondered why the hell she couldn’t have just become her ward the first time around.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of description and worldbuilding and all the rest of it happening between those action summaries, but it doesn’t make up for the fact that Sanderson has Shallan take such an incredibly circuitous route to the conclusion of her initial arc. Nothing in the story would have changed if Jasnah had simply accepted her the first time – or, I guess, the second time, since I can at least see the value in delaying the acceptance once so we get to see more of Fantasy City.

Even feeling like the book had led me around in circles for no good reason, I was willing to push on to Part Two. I wanted to see more of Shallan, and I was interested in reading about Kaladin freeing himself from slavery and (I’m guessing) gaining magical Stormlight powers.

Part Two opens with a completely new viewpoint character, in a completely new location, talking to people who have no discernible connection to anything that happened in Part One. Well, all right, that’s not too bad. It’s probably just a single chapter.

Part Two, Chapter One stars Shallan’s brother, who is far less interesting than her. He probably has his own plotlines and motivations and character arc. It doesn’t matter; I was done.

This right here is why ‘scope’ is not an inherent virtue. Fantasy authors and fans have this tendency to behave as though making a book massive in every sense of the word is in itself an achievement. ‘Look at this book,’ they will say. ‘Look at how many characters it has! Look at how many nations and cultures and generations its plot encompasses. This is a towering achievement, a monumental work. How can you be anything but impressed?’

Very easily, as it turns out. Part One of The Way of Kings is perfectly readable and entertaining, but that’s all. The writing is just okay. The characters are interesting enough, but they’re not likely to stay with you once you close the book. The worldbuilding, while intriguing, consists largely of a succession of stereotypes: men from this country are identifiable by their coats (they all wear the same style, I guess), women from this country are taught these particular ‘feminine arts’, these guys all have weird eyebrows, and so on. It is massively broad but shallow as a puddle.

There is nothing challenging in the first 150 pages of The Way of Kings. It is bog standard fantasy writing, notable only for the fact that it goes on for quite some time and promises to continue going on for an even longer time. To belabour the point slightly, a mediocre song does not become an achievement just because it happens to be an hour long; it may be notable, certainly, because hour-long songs are quite rare and must take a while to make, but that doesn’t mean that they have the same inherent worth as a four-minute song that completely rewrites the rules of its genre.

Or, to use a real example: this might be worth discussing and even putting in a museum, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a great work of art.

Epiphany

So I’ve given up on The Way of Kings, mostly because I really don’t want to read 900 pages of it. If it was a third of its current length I’d probably have kept going, but another three book’s worth of content is too much if it’s all going to be decompressed to the same point as the first 150 pages.

I did have something of an epiphany while writing this blog post, though. (And I’d like to point out now that this post is, somewhat ironically, far longer than it needs to be. Whoops.) I’d always wondered why people were drawn to massive fantasy novels, and now I feel like I know: it’s because they represent an absurdly good return on investment if you like them. Had I been completely enamoured of The Way of Kings (and I sort of was, at least in the beginning) I would now be looking forward to hundreds more pages of it and then a new book of equal length every few years. For Sanderson’s fans, The Stormlight Archive is a safe bet – potentially for decades, assuming it doen’t go off the rails and that he doesn’t stop writing it for whatever reason.

I’m certainly not immune to the appeal of being given lots and lots of what I like. It’s the reason why I marathoned my way through several seasons of Mad Men and Breaking Bad when I first discovered them. (And, uh, True Blood, but let’s not talk about that.) It’s the reason why I read the first Wheel of Time book and then immediately got three more rather than playing it safe and just getting the second volume – because there was so much of it, and I had every reason to expect that I’d enjoy it all.

In the end, reading a small fraction of The Way of Kings gave me more respect for its genre. It’s still very much Not For Me, but I can now see the appeal where I couldn’t before. Maybe that’s enough to say that I’ve given the genre a fair chance.

…or maybe I should go to the opposite end of the grittiness spectrum by reading this. Let’s see how I feel next time I turn on my e-reader.

Reading List – 29/01/2013

Posted by on January 29, 2013 No comments

Some more books I’ve been reading, in no particular order:

Adaptation by Malinda Lo – This one came recommended by Phoebe. That alone is usually enough to get me to read something, but in this case I also felt as if I was making up for the fact that I skipped over Lo’s other books.

Adaptation takes old-school SF plot points (Area 51, aliens, X-Files shenanigans) and drags them into the modern day. The opening chapter starts off incredibly strong: the main character is waiting for a flight home to San Francisco when a news report comes on informing the entire airport that planes are falling out of the sky for unknown reasons.

Nothing else that happens after that quite lives up to the promise of those first few pages. The ending in particular feels rushed and insubstantial. It leaves things on an interesting note, though, and I like Lo’s writing, so I’ll probably check out the sequel.

The Doll Who Hate His Mother by Ramsay Campbell - The Grin of the Dark, also by Campbell, is one of the few genuinely scary horror novels I’ve read in the past year. This one isn’t quite as good (it’s his first novel, and it shows), but it’s still miles better than most of what’s clogging up the Horror shelves right now. Campbell knows when to lay it on thick (the book opens with somebody stealing the arm from the corpse of the main characters’ brother) and when to rein things in, a balancing act that surprisingly few horror authors are capable of. Campbell has got a huge back catalogue that I’m looking forward to mining, so expect him to show up on these lists if I keep doing them.

The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger – I read The Time Traveler’s Wife back when I was a teenager and thus had horrible taste in everything. Now I can see that the book has a lot of problems, although I still think it’s a good early example of that literary SF thing everyone is so big on these days. But Niffenegger doesn’t just do boring word-only books! No, she also does comics (sorry, ‘graphic novels’). The Night Bookmobile is one of them.

I decided to buy this on a whim after seeing her name on it. The artwork is very attractive, and it’s got that ‘meditations on what it means to read’ thing going, which is always a plus, but I’m not entirely sure it’s worth the £17 I paid for it in a London bookshop. See if you can pick it up somewhere a bit less expensive, maybe.

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi – This is a peculiar book, part magical realist allegory and part short-story collection. The titular ‘Mr. Fox’ is one of those casually misogynistic authors so beloved of the western literary establishment. He doesn’t hate women (good heavens, no), it’s just that all of his female character have to die in ironic or ‘poetic’ ways. I imagine he and Cormac McCarthy would get along like a house on fire.

Mr. Fox’s muse is Mary Foxe, an imaginary-but-maybe-not woman who pulls him (and by extension, the reader) through a series of stories in which she and he constantly switch roles. Sometimes it’s easy to tell who is supposed to be who, as in the brief vignette in the book’s opening pages, and sometimes it’s a lot more difficult. Overall I enjoyed the book a lot, but it could have done with a bit more cohesion. Some of the stories feel as if they need more room to breathe, and would perhaps have been better served in a more conventional collection.

Currently Reading:

Shades of Earth by Beth Revis – According to my Kindle, I’m 15% of the way through this. I’m not entirely sure if I’ll keep going.

It’s not that the book is offensively bad or anything, but I suspect that I know exactly what’s going to happen from here on out. The main characters have crash-landed on an alien planet and the cryogenically frozen Earth settlers are awake – cue inevitable conflict. This stuff was boring when it came up in the increasingly ill-advised Rama sequels, and I’m not sure it’s going to be any more interesting here.

Actually, I’ve grown a bit weary of YA trilogies overall. People often complain (rightly, in many cases) that some popular YA authors can barely fill one book with engaging material, let alone three. Across the Universe was a perfectly good YA SF yarn in its own right. Did it really need to be stretched out into three volumes?

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson – Wait! Let me explain myself.

I’m writing something fantasy-ish at the moment, so I thought I’d see what the genre has been up to since I stopped forcing myself through the Wheel of Time books. I initially ruled out Brandon Sanderson as a re-entry vector, mostly because I wasn’t overly fond of Elantris and because he was the one who finished the aforementioned Wheel of Time books after Robert Jordan’s death. That left a few options: Gritty gritfest fantasy from the likes of Joe Abercombie (no thanks), fringe stuff courtesy of someone like Catherine Valente (disqualified because I wanted to try mainstream fantasy) or going into the Fantasy section of Chapters and buying whatever had the silliest/least silly (depending on my mood) cover. That last strategy sounded like a recipe for disaster, so I defaulted to the most juvenile/masculine form of arbitration available: size.

And thus we return to Sanderson. See, The Way of Kings is big. I don’t just mean it contains a lot of pages, although it’s got that going for it as well. I mean that it’s big in every sense imaginable: it’s stuffed with characters; has not one, not two, but three prologues (one is called an ‘Introduction’ or something and the other is technically the first chapter, but they’re both prologues in disguise), and I’m 10% of the way through and have already identifies around eight different plotlines. The book’s world is huge, at least in the sense that it contains a lot of stuff.

Oh, and Sanderson has said that this is the first volume in the Stormlight Archive ‘cycle’, which is intended to be 10 books long. Given the usual rate of fantasy-series inflation, that means he’ll finish sometime around 2050 on volume thirty-six, the last of which will be split into fifteen separate novels.

Having said all that, The Way of Kings is perfectly readable and entertaining. There is so far not a hint of the dreaded Grit, although it may well be hiding somewhere in the remaining 900 pages (oh god). We’ll see how it goes.

Up Next:

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín – This is called ‘Brooklyn’ and is written by an Irish author, so I’m guessing it’s about an Irish person emigrating to New York during the period between 1950 and 1970. Oh look, I was right!

(For real though, Tóibín is pretty great.)

Some Books I’ve Been Reading

Posted by on September 30, 2012 3 comments

Some books I’ve been reading that weren’t for review over at the Academy, in no particular order:

Darkmans by Nicola Barker – My brother has an irrational hatred for three kinds of literary novels: anything about Nazis, anything about someone returning to their hometown after a mid-life divorce, and anything about a large cast of diverse characters connect by Thematic Elements.

Darkmans is the latter, although it thankfully doesn’t stray too far into ‘character as irony-delivery vector’ territory. I thought I had a fairly good idea of what to expect going in, but the book pulls out a few surprises in the first chapter and then never quite goes in the direction you’d expect from then on. It also manages to be creepier in places than most horror novels I’ve read lately, so that’s nice. I’ll be checking out Barker’s latest, The Yips, as soon as it’s available in any format other than hideously-expensive-hardback or ebook-priced-as-hideously-expensive-hardback.

The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman – Below are three things that annoyed me in the first 40 pages of this book:

  1. The two main characters act like caricatures of B-list Hollywood celebrities. This is ironic because they’re involved in the theatre business in Berlin in 1931.
  2. A character talks about how strictly historical historical fiction is a waste of time. This is ironic because the book is set in an intentionally historically-inaccurate Berlin in 1931. 
  3. A character asks ‘what is to be done’ with ‘six million unwanted people’. This is ironic because the book is set in Berlin in 1931.

The cumulative effect is akin to having Beauman nudge you in the ribs going ‘Eh? Eh? Get it?’ every few minutes.

The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt – My first Leavitt, and one I enjoyed a lot for the first two-thirds or so. I think it’s safe to say that I’ve read my fair share of novels about gay men in Oxbridge at the turn of the century, but this one stands out a bit by virtue of having a few decent female characters (yes, that is worth mentioning when dealing with a book like this) and by never degenerating into a huge angst fest.

It’s ostensibly about the relationship between G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, both famous mathematicians  but it ends up being more about G.H. Hardy and a cardboard cutout with ‘Ramanujan’ scrawled across it. Even by the end of the book, I never felt as though I knew who Ramanujan was or what achievements he made. We’re only told about him publishing a few papers before he takes ill and proceeds to spend the next eighty pages going in and out of various hospitals.

Still, the writing is good, and it made me want to read more Leavitt.

Sweeth Tooth by Ian McEwan – Also about Cambridge (sort of), also not entirely what you’d expect. The ‘young woman recruited into MI5′ thing is really a backdrop for a story about the Cold War-era literary scene, which is…interesting, I guess?

McEwan is one of the those odd writers who seems to be a lot more famous than he should be given how many people seem to hate him. I don’t hate him, exactly, but after trying this and Atonement I’m not sure I’ll be queueing up for whatever he writes next. (Although I still want to read Solar, for some reason…)

Hounded by Kevin Hearne – My latest, possibly last attempt at finding a mainstream urban fantasy series that I enjoy. It’s better than I expected (it helps that Kevin Hearne can actually write), but not by a wide enough margin to make me go running out for the rest.

Oh, but there is one particularly ludicrous scene that I feel the need to bring up. Atticus, the main character Druid guy (who lives in some generic part of America, because God forbid an urban fantasy novel be set elsewhere), is friends with this old Irish woman. He gets attacked by some god or another in front of her house, and defends himself by cutting the god’s head off with his Sword of +15 Power Fantasy. The old lady is understandably shaken by this, since she doesn’t know there’s anything supernatural going on, so Atticus explains that the guy he just killed was British and kind of an asshole or something. The old Irish lady who is Irish then gets over the fact that Atticus decapitated someone on her driveway and happily becomes an accessory to murder by helping him deal with the body.

Hounded is not a very good book, is what I’m saying.

A Hunger Games Hater Watches The Movie

Posted by on September 15, 2012 2 comments

Uh. So it’s been a while since I blogged here and not on that other place. To be honest, I didn’t have much reason to post here seeing as how the IGA has been keeping me busy. That changed when I decided to finally watch the Hunger Games movie.

I’ve been pretty vocal about my dislike of the books (I hated them before the third book came out and everyone jumped on the Hunger Games revisionism bandwagon), but I had high hopes for the movie. The trailer made it look pretty slick, and I thought that most of my issues with the novels would be alleviated by adapting the story to another medium. With that in mind, I thought it was about time I watched it.

But I wasn’t just going to watch it, oh no. For reasons that now elude me, it seemed like a great idea to document my thoughts on a minute-by-minute basis as I watched. At first I was going to liveblog the whole thing, but then I realised that was far too much effort and decided to just compile it all into one big blog post. With, like, a billion screenshots.

Read on to find out if The Hunger Games lived up to my expectations or if it ended up being a retread of everything I disliked about the book. Feel free to grab your copy and join in! I’m sure it will be nothing but unmitigated fun.

This is the title screen, believe it or not. Are you excited? I’m excited.

00:00:37 – And we’re off! Some expository blocks of text fade in to explain the backstory:

The Treaty of the Treason

In penance for their uprising, each district shall offer up a male and female between the ages of 12 and 18 at a public ‘Reaping’.

These Tributes shall be delivered to the custody of the Capitol.

And then transferred to a public arena where they will Fight to the Death, until a lone victor remains.

Henceforth and forevermore this pageant shall be known as The Hunger Games.

TITLE DROP.

I’m pretty sure this wasn’t in the books. Also, ‘henceforth’? ‘Pageant’? What, did they find this in a time capsule?

00:01:08 – Hahaha woah, the Capitol guys are going to be hard to take seriously.

I’m kind of disappointed that he doesn’t change his hairstyle constantly like in the book. Dude on the right is a new character for the movie.

00:01:21 – ‘I think [The Hunger Games] has grown from that. It’s something that knits us all together.’

Except for the people whose children you’re murdering. This whole set up made no sense in the books, and tacking on some exposition at the beginning isn’t going to help.

00:01:35 – District 12 looks really good.

00:02:40 – I’m liking Jennifer Lawrence already.

00:03:10 – I like that they’re showing District 12′s poverty better than Suzanne Collins ever did in the books, but it’s kind of jarring how much this looks like people roleplaying Depression-era America.

Also no more shakey cam please ಠ_ಠ

00:04:22 – Katniss takes aim at a CGI deer.

I believe this is one of the deer that starred in The Ring Two.

00:05:00 – I realise I’m in the extreme minority when it comes to Collins’ writing, but this is already infinitely improved by the absence of Katniss’ narration.

00:05:14 – ‘Catnip’

Ugh jesus I hoped they’d leave that out. Also Gale looks far too old to be around Katniss’ age.

00:05:45 – Gale must be great at finding post-apocalyptic hair stylists.

00:05:59 – Hovercraft thingy. This wasn’t in the book, but I heard they removed the whole Avox subplot
(thankfully), so I guess it’s a reference to that.

00:06:00 – Gah, Effie.

This actress, in that makeup, playing a vampire in a really bloody horror movie. That one’s on the house, Hollywood!

00:06:28 – ‘You root for your favourites, you cry when they get killed. It’s sick.’

And yet you’re all going to go along with it anyway.

00:07:00 – ‘Cut out our tongues, or worse.’

Oh wait, there’s the Avox thing. Hopefully that’s the end of it.

00:08:28 – The fateful Mockingjay pin. In the book she gets it from the Mayor’s daughter, here
the black market lady just gives it to her. Because it’s the Reaping day, I guess? That’s a nice
touch.

You’re gonna be real sick of this thing in three year’s time.

00:09:38 – Why do they want to look good for the Reaping? It’s like an innocent person dressing up
for their own wrongful execution.

00:10:34 – I think I’m seeing a motif in the color of the kids’ clothing.

Or maybe I’m just imagining it.

00:11:51 – The shaky cam is making me nauseous. That’s a first.

00:12:32 – So, one of my main problems with the books is that it’s never made clear whether or not
the Capitol actually believes that the kids want to be in the Games or if they just act like that
to distance themselves from what they’re doing. Here, the actress playing Effie at least seems to have
decided that she knows full well that the whole ‘Happy Hunger Games’ thing is a farce, which makes the
scene far more unsettling.

Also she’s scary as shit.

In the book, her speech is largely played for laughs. Talk about a wasted opportunity.

00:13:32 – Aaaaand the explanation for the Hunger Games still makes no sense whatsoever.

00:15:01 – Prim’s name being called is SO much more affecting here than in the book.

00:17:01 – Peeta looks hilariously gormless when they call his name.

Also that actor still looks nothing like the way I imagined the character.

00:17:35 – The quick-fire flashback to Katniss and Peeta’s first meeting would make no sense to anyone who hadn’t read the book.

00:18:39 – Jennifer Lawrence is really knocking it out of the park.

00:20:22 – And the characters are  already gearing up to play along with the Games without any
hint of rebellion whatsoever. I’m going to harp on this endlessly, just to warn you.

00:21:01 – I would show you how annoying the shaky cam is, but I’m not sure how to take a
screenshot of blur.

00:22:26 – Peeta has completely checked out, mentally.

00:22:59 – Oh boy, it’s Haymitch. I remember thinking he was kind of fun.

I can see why people thought the actor was a bad fit for the role, but to be honest, he’s no more miscast than the guys playing Peeta and Gale.

00:25:25 – So they’ve got graphic footage of one kid beating another kid to death from a previous
Games, and nobody is bothered by this. Again, you really need to explain what the deal is here. Are they all
psychopaths, or is there some cultural norm that makes the Tributes seem less than human to the
Capitol citizens?

00:27:17 – Here we go with the ‘You have to get people to like you so you have sponsors’ thing. In other words, the excuse for why Katniss goes along with the Capitol at every single stage of the Games.

00:28:34 – Peeta, when faced with the people who are gleefully complicit in planning his violent death:

Friends! :D

00:28:52 – The Capitol looks like a city from one of the Civilization games.

Except the CGI is less convincing.

00:29:46 – I really can’t take the Capitol people seriously.

00:30:04 – And here’s Cinna. ‘I feel sorry about you getting picked, but I’m still going to voluntarily work as an integral part of the institution that wants to kill you.’

Keep in mind, this character is supposed to be one of the good guys.

00:31:34 – Ahahahahaha.

Yikes.

I will be extremely disappointed if this scene has never been parodied.

00:31:26 – President Snow as played by Daniel Day-Lewis playing Abraham Lincoln:

00:31:50 – I failed to get a decent screenshot, but the Game Maker’s beard makes him look like he’s in a Dr. Seuss adaptation.

00:32:26 – I’m not sure ‘wtf’ quite does it justice.

My god, they’re covered in terrible CGI! We’ve never seen anything like it!

Keep in mind that in the books, the characters are already fully willing to go along with the popularity contest aspect of the Games. They actually care that their outfits look better than everyone else’s (uh, supposedly), and not just because it might win them a few sponsors. At least here, Katniss clearly doesn’t give a shit what the audience thinks of her.

00:34:05 – ‘We salute your courage.’ What courage? They were forced into it. Why are people cheering?

WHAT HE’S SAYING MAKES NO SENSE.

00:35:13 – The swank Tribute apartment. How many kids do you think offed themselves in here?

Good to know that fashion in interior decorating over the next ~200 years will just loop back around to 2012 sensibilities.

Oh wait, none, because apparently nobody ever figured out that killing themselves would be a greater act of rebellion than going along with the Games and dying in the name of entertainment.

00:36:19 – This is a nice touch. There’s a big TV-window thing that shows different outdoor scenes.
Katniss switches it to a forest, obviously wishing she could just step through it.

00:36:54 – The training scene. Cheeesy.

00:38:13 – It’s Rue! There was an ugly, racist shitstorm when her actress was announced, because
apparently some people can’t handle the idea that not everybody is white.

What are those straps across the ceiling supposed to be for? Did they figure some of the kids would want to practice this particular, bizarrely-specific skill?

00:39:43 – Peeta is getting his woobie on.

00:40:13 – Oh, and his mom is evil. I forgot that women in this are either bad mothers or bad people.

00:41:05 – Throwing knives don’t work like that.

00:41:47 – Peeta proves his skill by tossing around a heavy thing.

00:42:18 – And now he’s painting his arm in a setup for what I’m told is the most ridiculous scene in the movie.

00:42:57 - Hey, Capitol kids. I’m not sure there was ever any direct contrast between the District
children and the Capitol children in the books.

Imagine this being your only acting credit. And what the hell is that thing on the right?

You know what would really, really help at this point? If Katniss got to talk to those kids so she could find out how they think of the Games/the Districts. I mean specifically, not just ‘They’re rad/they suck’.

00:43:31 – And we’re coming up on on a worldbuilding oversight so huge it count as a plot hole. Just wait.

00:43:54 – ‘Katniss. Shoot straight.’ That’s not how bows work over any sort of distance.

00:46:47 – Okay, see if you can spot the problem here. The Tributes are supposed to demonstrate their
skills in front of the Game Makers, which can and does include using projectile or long-range weapons
like bows and spears. The Game Makers, who will be DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for trying to kill these
kids in a few days, are watching all of this from a completely unprotected viewing area.

Katniss, annoyed that they’re ignoring her, shoots an apple out of a pig’s mouth, which she can do because the place they’re all standing is, again, COMPLETELY UNPROTECTED.

Sadly, this is not a Game Maker’s spleen.

Has nobody ever decided to go down in a blaze of glory by shooting one of the Game Makers? None of the older teens ever thought it through enough to decide that slaughtering as many of the Game Makers as possible before killing yourself with a knife would be a better death than being hunted down for the amusement of the capital?

These are the kinds of things you need to think about when you’ve got a premise like this. I realise that most kids would probably be terrified enough that they’d go along with the Games for a remote chance of surviving, but surely someone be willing to fight back?

00:46:55 – On the other hand, Katniss’s sarcastic bow at the end is the best. Jennifer Lawrence continues
to be awesome.

00:47:27 – ‘Nice shooting, sweetheart.’ No, ‘nice shooting’ would have been if the giant steel arrow ended up lodged in Game Maker Suess’s throat.

00:48:19 – I want to shave off what’s-his-name’s hair.

How likely do you think it is that they’ll get this guy to do a fake opening for the next Oscars? Because that would be amazing.

00:48:37 – Of course, Katniss gets the highest score, which is a good thing because it makes the murder games more entertaining for the Capitol I guess? And everyone whoops and toasts her like she just won a spelling bee.

00:49:35 – The scenes focusing on Game Maker Seuss really help to flesh things out. His beard continues to annoy the shit out of me.

00:50:12 – Also President Snow looks and sounds like Santa Claus.

00:51:42 – Apparently it’s just now occurring to Katniss that she might have to kill Peeta.

Also Cinna is still not lending any evidence whatsoever to the idea that he’s better than the rest of the Capitol’s population.

00:51:55 – I really can’t take the talkshow sections seriously.

Holy shit, I’ve figured it out: the Hunger Games is what Eurovision will eventually become. IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW.

00:52:35 – ‘I’m here for you, Katniss. I mean, I’m still going to happily prepare you for a more entertaining death just like the Capitol wants, but seriously. Here for you.’ – Cinna, who is supposed to be a good guy.

00:54:43 – I think the TV interview is where I started to seriously lose interest in the book. The whole thing is just surreal, and not in a good way. Why are the kids all going along with this?  Why doesn’t anyone get up on stage and scream obscenities at the audience until the guards drag them off?

00:56:40 – “And what did you say to your 12-year-old sister before you were dragged off to be killed in a brutal process with which I am completely complicit?”

“I…told her I’d try to kill the other Tributes, just like you all want me to.”

“Well that’s just super.”

00:57:44 – And now Peeta is flirting with what’s-his-name presenter guy in an attempt to be charming.

FOR SOME REASON.

00:59:30 – Then he says he’s in love with Katniss, because god forbid we don’t have a romance subplot.

Also the idea of him being forced to murder his true love doesn’t seem to be making anyone think twice about this whole death games thing.

01:00:00 – We’re at the hour mark, and I’ve lost any investment in the premise I might have had.

01:00:43 – You know, I’m sure you could figure out how to kill yourself with something in that apartment if you tried hard enough. Which, need I remind anyone, would most likely be better than gettinghorribly murdered in the arena.

01:01:37 – ‘I don’t want to be another piece in their game.’ Then maybe stop going along with their game at every turn? Just a thought.

00:01:55 – ‘I wish I could think of a way to show them that they don’t own me.’ If only you had a chance to go on live TV and say whatever you want to the entire Capitol.

Movie, you’re killing me here.

00:02:50 – I like how neither of them makes any sort of plan about what they’ll do once if they face each other in the arena.

00:03:01 – This looks uncannily like a bridge in Dublin.

In fact, you could ay it’s enough to strain my SUSPENSION of disbelief.

01:04:02 – ‘Katniss. Look at me. Look at me! You can do this. I think. Maybe. I dunno.’

01:04:31 – The subdermal tracker literally glows as it goes under their skin. We have smaller tracking devices than that right now.

01:05:12 – Katniss, why are you hugging Cinna. He is complicit in your impending death.

He is a bad person.

01:06:04 – ‘I’m not allowed to bet. But if I could, I’d bet on you.’ That’s…uh, nice?

01:06:24 – What happens if she just doesn’t get in the elevator? There aren’t even any guards in the room.

You’d have to force me into that thing at gunpoint.

01:07:12 – The Games themselves begin halfway through the movie. This is actually better than in the book, when they start something like two thirds of the way through.

01:08:15 – Gale is actually committing an act of mild rebellion by not watching the Games.

Also he is a sad panda :(

:(

01:08:50 – Oh hey, people are dying. I want an R-rated version with more blood.

01:09:10 – Again, does it never occur to anyone to NOT play into the Capitol’s hands? Was there never a single year where all of the kids (or just the remaining few after some died) flat-out refused to ‘compete’?

01:10:08 – My last hope for staying invested in this thing was the dead kids, but the PG-13 violence means it’s kind of hard to care.

01:11:15 – Katniss’ backpack comes with a survival slinky.

There is never any explanation for what this is or why it’s in there.

01:11:20 – The cannon firing to mark people dying is pretty neat, although it just occurred to me that they really should have shown this earlier – maybe in a recording from another Hunger Games?

01:12:17 – Katniss is getting her survival on, and I don’t care because I know it’s just a long, boring slog from here to the predictable ending.

(SPOILER: Katniss and Peeta survive.)

01:13:04 – I bet sleeping in a tree would be really uncomfortable.

01:13:17 – Okay, so here’s one of the things that made no goddamn sense in the book. The Tributes are constantly watched wherever they go, to the point where whoever’s controlling the camera feeds seems capable of getting any shot or angle they want at any time. That means there must be cameras all over the place, yet Katniss never actually sees one. The cameras are basically magic, in other words. They’re everywhere, can record anything, and are completely invisible.

Here, Katniss actually sees one of the cameras hidden in a tree knot, so they’re nto quite as outlandish as in  the book. That introduces some other problems, though, since there couldn’t possibly be enough cameras to cover the entire arena.

(EDIT FROM THE FUTURE: Never mind, the cameras are just as omnipresent here as they are in the book.)

01:15:35 – Peeta is apparently working with the evil ‘professional’ Tributes, who are evil because they…er, do their best to kill the other kids? Just like everyone else?

Whatever, it’s a patently obvious misunderstanding.

01:17:08 – Katniss is attacked by some CG fire and also an honest-to-god fireball. How the Game Makers are doing this is anyone’s guess.

The regular fire looks quite nice. The fireballs, not so much.

They can also make trees fall on command, apparently.

01:18:39 – Huh, that’s odd. In the book, there’s a huge deal made about the fact that Katniss can’t find water. Here, she stumbles into a lake by accident. That’s kind of a shame, since her agonizing search for a water source before she dies of dehydration is one of the more visceral moments in the book.

01:19:53 – The actors playing the eeeeevil Tributes are really bad.

01:21:15 – Wait, why didn’t Peeta take that opporunity to signal to her that he’s just faking the evil act. He was looking right at her and there was nobody else around.

01:23:00 – So, here’s one of my major problems about the pacing in this, and it’s a direct carry-over from the book. The Evul Tributes have Katniss surrounded, but they can’t get to her because she’s up a tree. So what do they do? They just leave here there. Despite the fact that they have a bow. I mean, they stay within visual range, but they’re still just sitting there waiting for her to come down even  though they could easily reach her or shoot her if they tried for long enough. It would be like if I locked myself in a room and the four armed people outside who were trying to kill me went and took a nap rather than continuing to break the door down.

01:23:15 – Here’s the emergency medicine on the magic balloon. I like that you actually see Haymitch negotiating for it in this version.

01:24:55 – It’s Rue! She can climb like nobody’s business and is going to die in the most blatantly manipulative way imaginable.

01:25:18 – The Capitol co-hosts clumsily exposit about Tracker Jackers, which is a really stupid name for genetically-engineered wasps that can kill you. Katniss prepares to knock one of their nests on top of the evil sleeping Tributes, who are asleep…even though they’re waiting for her to come down from the tree so they can kill her.

Nice going, guys.

01:27:10 – Here’s the first time Katniss kills somebody. In this case, it’s death by wasps. Nasty.

Although, again, she’s doing exactly what the Capitol wants by making orchestrating a particularly grusome/ entertaining kill.

01:29:17 – Woah, I recognise the music that plays when Katniss is having her wasp-hallucination. It’s by an Icelandic musician named Olafur Arnalds, and you can listen to it here:

01:30:05 – This whole scene is pretty cool, although I can’t entirely get over the weirdness of it being set to a piece of music that I’ve listened to like five hundred times.

01:30:31 – Katniss wakes up with medicinal leaves on her arm. It’s Rue again!

01:31:49 – WOULDN’T IT BE SAD IF RUE GOT KILLED BY ONE OF THE ASSHOLE TRIBUTES?

“I exist solely to fill an obvious role in the plot!”

Yes, that sure would be a downer.

01:32:29 – The actress playing Rue is also really good.

And I do believe this is yet another song that I’ve heard before, although I can’t place it.

01:33:13 – Rue does the Mockingjay birdsong thing. CAN YOU FEEL THE IMPENDING TRAGEDY?

01:34:26 – The evil Tributes have a massive pile of supplies. At what point would that alliance start to get tense? I mean, they’re all going to want to be the one who betrays the others and claims the element of surprise.

01:35:40 – More sideline exposition from the Capitol weirdos. Normally I’d say this sort of thing is just a necessary part of adapting a book to film, but they completely ruin the tension of the scene by spelling out the nature of the trap around the Tributes’ supplies.

01:37:11 – Katniss intentionally blows up the supplies…while standing really close to them.

Possibly not the best idea. Also they had a mine directly under the pile of stuff, apparently?

01:38:29 – Here we go, Rue’s death scene is coming up. Let’s see if it’s as maudlin as it was in the book.

01:39:55 – There she goes, spear to the stomach. Dying like that would probably involve a lot more screaming, but I guess that wouldn’t be ‘Too good for this Earth’ enough.

Joking aside, Rue is one of the only interesting Tributes and she just got permanently removed from the plot. It’s all downhill from here, folks.

01:40:26 – Oh god no, don’t sing.

DON’T DO IT.

01:40:50 – I know this is harkening back to Katniss’ sister, but still. Cheese neverending.

01:41:18 – You know what would have been a LOT more effective here? If Katniss and Rue had teamed up, only for Rue to turn on her out of desperation and/or fear, forcing Katniss to kill her in order to save her own life. That would have been a great ‘What the hell would I do if I was her?’ kind of situation.

Because that’s one of the major problems with this story: Katniss is never forced to do anything
genuinely awful to survive. Everyone she kills is either a vicious murderer or an asshole.

01:43:20 – Oh yeah, here’s the part where Katniss triggers a riot by doing that goofy salute thing. Because I guess seeing a twelve-year-old girl get speared in the stomach wasn’t enough?

The riot scene is nicely shot, though.

01:44:51 – Again, some context on how the Capitol people feel about this would be nice.

More flowers! MORE GRAVITAS!

01:45:55 – This incarnation of Snow seems to be aware that the division of labour in the Districts makes no goddamn sense.

(For those who never read the book: each District produces one commodity that is vital for the Capitol’s survival. So District 12 produces coal, for example. The obvious problem with this is that if any District rebels, the Capitol will instantly lose access to that commodity for however long it takes to get things back on track.)

01:46:30 – Two people can win if they’re from the same district, false hope, blah-de-blah. We  all know how this is going to go down.

01:47:43 – Ahaha, what the HELL.

I can’t even.

Seriously, just look at that. In the book he just covered himself with mud. How did he even do that? Was there a convenient indent in the rock where he could fit his head? Did he dig it out himself? Did a sponsor fly in a professional make up artist?

01:48:05 – How long is this movie.

01:49:30 – “We’ll figure something out.”

“Like what?”

“Something.”

You could just hide there until the others kill each other. Also how in God’s name did they get cameras in the cave?

01:50:22 – Haymitch sends Katniss a voyeuristic note telling her to kiss Peeta more convincingly. Creepy to the nth degree.

01:51:30 – “I watched you going home every day. Every day.”

Why does YA romance always have to be weird??

01:52:03 – HOW LONG IS THIS MOVIE.

01:52:52 – The Game Makers stage a transparent ploy to get everyone in the same place for a bloodbath. Gale continues to be a sad panda because Katniss kissed Peeta on national TV. This will be the setup for a big stupid love triangle.

(SPOILER: She chooses Peeta.)

01:53:10 – Please tell me there’s a Rifftrax for this.

01:53:21 – Actually I hope there isn’t, because that would mean I’m spending several hours of my life trying to replicate a superior product.

01:54:00 - Amazingly, they have yet to do a Hunger Games Rifftrax. Dodged a bullet on that one.

01:54:10 – So Peeta’s got an infection, which means Katniss has to go to the obvious trap and gethim some medicine. I’m sure this won’t backfire.

01:54:49 – Why does she only take the bag with the 12 on it? Just take everything.

01:55:22 – There’s knife fight music playing over this knife fight.

01:55:55 – Once again, the people who Katniss has to fight directly are huge assholes.

01:56:10 – No, take EVERYTHING. Jesus.

01:57:22 – That must be the most powerful antibiotic imaginable.

01:57:36 – There’s nothing quite as romantic as smearing medicinal gel onto your love interest’s forehead.

01:58:01 – The Game Maker control people are getting all choked up. Given that they work DIRECTLY to kill the kids every year, you’d think they’d be particularly desensitised. That means the general  Capitol population would be even more inclined to react badly to the thought of the star-crossed lovers biting it at the last minute.

So why does everyone enjoy the Hunger Games so much?

2:00:00 – Two hours in. This is the part where they create and grow massive genetically-modified dog
monsters in less than 24 hours.

In the book, they had the faces and eyes of the dead Tributes. No, seriously.

02:03:08 – Uh, so they can literally make more dog monsters spring up out of the ground at will. This is Star Trek technology we’re dealing with here. If the Capitol can do all of this, I’m sure they could afford to give everyone a cushy lifestyle without risk of scarcity.

02:04:18 – Okay, so Cato the asshole Tribute is fighting Katniss on top of the Cornucopia, which in this version looks like a modern art sculpture.

02:05:10 – Cato, if you’re dead anyway, why do you want to take Peeta with you?

02:05:59 – Cato gets torn apart by monster dogs, presumably while the Capitol citizenry chortles at the ingenuity of it all. Do they put psychopath serum in the water or something?

Also Katniss mercy kills him, meaning that once again, she is spared having to kill anyone who doesn’t either deserve it or is about to die anyway.

02:07:17 – Surprise, Katniss and Peeta have to kill each other after all. Make with the berries already.

Wait…we’re in the HUNGER GAMES? Well, shit.

02:07:51 – ‘One of us has to die. They have to have their victor.’ Or you could both just sit there and refuse to fight.

02:08:19 – Yes, poisonous berry double-suicide gambit. Thank Christ, we’re almost done.

02:09:00 – And they both won, because watching them kill themselves wouldn’t be interesting enough
I guess.

That was seriously anti-climactic.

02:09:42 – ‘It didn’t go the way they planned.’

No, it went EXACTLY the way they planned. You all killed each other for their amusement, there’s just two winners this time.

02:10:09 – Hurray, Seuss-beard is going to get killed.

02:10:55 – Now Katniss has a really contrived reason to have to pretend to be in love with Peeta
FOREVER.

Once again, she and Peeta go along with the interview like they just won a season of Big Brother. No anger at what just happened? Some bitterness over all the death and PTSD, maybe? No, just going to go along with everything the way they want you to?

Okay then.

02:12:25 – “So what happens when we get back?” There’s a sequel that just repeats the same plot again.

02:13:18 – Uh oh, Santa is pissed.

“My naughty list this year is going to be HUGE.”

02:13:29 – Credits. There’s a really bad song playing.

IT’S OVER.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go batch resize several dozen screenshots.

Final Thoughts

I was afraid that I might be disappointed by this movie. I expected it to be mediocre.

I did not expect it to be genuinely bad. And make no mistake, it is bad. The pacing is bizarre, the characters’ personalities are largely inconsequential, the acting is uneven as hell (barring Jennifer Lawrence and Amandla Stenberg), the special effects occasionally suck and the plot makes almost no sense. Some of these problems are specific to the film. The last is entirely the fault of the book.

I assumed, naively as it turns out, that streamlining The Hunger Games would make some of the holes and inconsistencies in the worldbuilding disappear. But those issues aren’t something you can get around by keeping up the pace and hoping nobody will notice. The plot depends entirely on the cohesion of the setting, which falls apart just as quickly here as it did in the book. What that leaves you with is a lot of very tepid action and a central relationship that struggles to even be called ‘shallow’. Katniss and Peeta’s romance is goddamn evanescent. It begins to disperse into nothingness almost as soon as it comes into being on the screen.

Of course, most people seem to feel differently about this. It’s made billions of dollars, got 84% on Rotten Tomatoes and apparently made a lot of fans very happy, so what the hell do I know?

Man, 5,000 words and that’s the most profound conclusion I can come to. Remind me never to do this again.

My Top Five Books of 2011

Posted by on January 3, 2012 1 comment

Another year has just been savaged to death by the wild Dogs of Time (that’s how it happens), and you know what that means – lists! Hundreds and hundreds of lists! I’d like to add my voice to the raucous chorus by divulging my Top Five Books of 2011, mostly because I just realised that I can’t actually remember most of the books I read in 2011 and will use the following list to reassure myself that I don’t have early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Off we go!

5. Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma

2011 was sort of a Trope Overdose year for YA, in that an awful lot of YA books that came out in the past twelve months have felt as if they were cobbled together from a bucket filled with parts of other books. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, mind you, it can just get a little wearying after a while. Eventually you start to want something genuinely fresh and original.

For me, Imaginary Girls was that something. It’s both fresh and original, while also being delightfully weird. Looking back, I can’t say it hit me on as emotional a level as I originally thought, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a very, very good book. There are a few scenes in particular that still stand out in my memory as being utterly brilliant in both conception and execution, which is rare indeed. If you missed this one when it came out (and I suspect a lot of people did), please hang your head in shame and then buy it. You won’t be disappointed.

4. Liar by Justine Larbalestier

Keeping in mind this is a list of the top five books I read in 2011, even if they came out years earlier, we have Liar as number four.

Everything I said about Imaginary Girls above, with the head-hanging and the shame and the horrible, crushing guilt? You can go ahead and re-experience it all again if you haven’t read Liar. It’s one of those books that you can’t really say anything about for fear of spoiling the twist (and what a twist!), but suffice to say it works on several different levels, by which I mean it works on every level. Go and read it now before you give yourself a herniated spinal disc from the strain of that hanging head.

3. Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor

Star of the Sea gets the third spot for two reasons: it’s brilliantly-written, and it’s one of the few literary novels based on Irish history I’ve ever read that can’t be easily reduced to ‘Oh those terrible English people, how very terrible and English they were’. It has a huge cast of viewpoint characters, jumping between the ‘present’ of a passenger ship en route to America and the past lives of several of the people on board, and watching all of the threads come together is extremely satisfying. It’s also, weirdly, something of a potboiler, since the genre seems to fluctuate wildly depending on what’s happening in the plot. Is one character making a violent escape from a nightmarishly gothic prison? Then let’s have him write out a line from Paradise Lost using the blood of a murdered guard even though it clashes completely with the tone of the rest of the novel, because why the hell not. It’s glorious.

Apparently tons of people bought this when it first came out in 2004 and then never read it, so just have a rummage in behind your couch or something. Who knows, maybe there’ll be a copy in there.

2. The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

For some reason, I gave this a fairly middling review when I reviewed it back in February. I think I was under the overly optimistic assumption that we were about to be buried under an avalanche of mind-blowingly awesome YA science fiction, which…uh, never happened. So yes, a book published before the current ‘renaissance’ of SF in teenage lit manages to be more intelligent and intriguing than most of its modern peers combined. Find it, read it, and then read the thoroughly unnecessary sequel and tell me if I should get around to picking that up. If it’s good, it might make my Best of 2013 list!

1. The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

Surprisingly, the top spot goes to something I read for a college class. The Wasted Vigil is set in modern-day Afghanistan, a country in the midst of one invasion while still struggling with the aftermath of a previous war against the Soviet Union. It tells the story of a group of people searching for answers amid the rubble of Afghanistan’s recent history – a man hoping to find his daughter, a woman looking for a relative who fought in the Soviet army, and an amoral CIA operative trying to redeem himself after committing one horrible act too many in the name of his country. As the title suggests, their collective ‘vigil’ (and the much longer vigil of a half-buried Buddha statue) will eventually come to nothing.

So it’s depressing, and ridiculously violent on top of that, but it’s also really good. I read it right at the beginning of the year, and I can still remember most of it as though I only put it down yesterday.

Introducing Litstack

Posted by on July 31, 2011 No comments

Wow, it’s been quiet around here. Part of that is because I’ve been busy (with both writing and other, much less exciting things), but if you keep track of my Goodreads profile, you’ll see that I’ve been reading and finishing books at about the same rate as before. The reason why you haven’t seen any reviews going up here is because I’ve been sending some of them to Litstack, a new website that’s launching tomorrow.

It looks like it’s going to be pretty great, so go and bookmark it now! Here’s the press release, just in case my involvement alone isn’t enough to instantly hook you:

 

LitStack is a new reviews site dedicated to readers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, short stories, literary magazines, ebooks, manga and graphic novels. (We’ll probably even be posting some spoken-word stuff for the super-artsy types.) The site also features indie bookstores and literary landmarks across the world (one city at a time), and cool bookish finds and news we run across online.itack’s diverse staff comprises writers and reviewers with MFAs and various advance
In addition to daily book reviews and regular spotlights on indie bookstores we love, LitStack also features regular segments to promote current titles and build appreciation for older works.

LitStack’s Featured Author- This month-long series of posts includes reviews of previous releases by our Featured Author, along with a current interview and review to coincide with the author’s upcoming release.

LitStaff Picks- Once a week, we feature a collection of books new and old–the favorites of our staff within a specific theme.

ShortStacks - Original short stories and essays by established authors.

Footnotes - Multiple weekly posts highlighting literary events in history, including the birthdays of famous authors, publication and award dates of classic titles, and memorial posts for beloved figures.

Author Interviews - Launch week will feature interviews with Adam Schuitema and Hannah Moskowitz. In the coming weeks, Locus winner Cherie Priest, NYT BestsellerTerry Brooks and Irish Book Awards winner Marian Keyes are scheduled to appear.

The Book Club - Every month LitStack will have a couple of featured titles; a review, open-thread discussion and author Q&A (when available) will be posted for each book so you can read along and share your thoughts.

REVIEW: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Posted by on July 7, 2011 4 comments

Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I started reading Catching Fire in the hopes of gaining a qualified opinion on the Hunger Games series as a whole. Yes, I hated the first volume, but I was willing to believe that I just wasn’t quite ‘getting’ what everybody else sees in these books. Alas, I’m still wondering.

I should say, though, that Catching Fire is better than the first book. It gets to the point more quickly, the writing flows better (although more on that in a minute), and the characters develop nicely. I still feel as though I should have liked it.

So what went wrong?

First off, let’s get the obvious out of the way: the writing might be better, but it’s still far too languidly-paced for a story like this. Katniss, our erstwhile narrator, still grinds the action to a halt in order to deliver paragraphs of largely-useless exposition. (Try reading through any middle chapter of the book while skipping paragraphs that look onerously long. I can guarantee you’ll miss nothing of importance.) The story is still bogged down by descriptions of strange clothes and food and training that do nothing except delay the inevitable – we know Katniss will return to the arena, because that’s what the book is about, but it takes a painfully long time for her to get there and nothing that happens prior to that is particularly engaging.

The romance subplot could have been interesting, with Katniss being forced to continue her fake affair with Peeta because of President Snow’s vaguely-defined machinations…except that I never card about Peeta. Or Gale. Or any of the supporting cast.

The biggest problem, though, is that I still don’t believe in the world Collins has created here. I still don’t find the society plausible, much less compelling, and I still don’t think that this series is entirely certain of what it’s trying to do. There are two separate stories here, one a condemnation of the ‘reality’ television society taken to its logical extreme and the other a fairly typical story of dystopian oppression, and they just don’t fit well together.

To understand why, just picture your average reality TV abomination. ‘Frivolous’ doesn’t even begin to describe it: you’ve got what is really a zero-stakes competition in which the audience is made to feel invested through blatantly obvious emotional manipulation (which is why the X-Factor producers have ‘O Fortuna’ playing on a continuous loop during most recap scenes). The only ‘winners’ are the people at the top of the pyramid making ridiculous amounts of money for doing essentially nothing.

In The Hunger Games, the reality TV equivalent involves children murdering each other against their will for an audience that is apparently composed entirely of sociopaths. If the children chose to compete for a shot at fame and glory, then I could understand it all a bit more, but as it stands I could never accept the idea of the Games as a credible analogy for the kind of spectacle we see on television today.

And then there’s the ‘dystopian oppression’ plot, which…man, maybe I’m just burned out on dystopian fiction, but I honestly think the series would be better without it. Why not set it in the Capitol, with the characters each having their own reasons for joining and/or watching the Games? Why not explore that culture in a bit more depth, rather than just presenting a cartoonish parody of a hedonistic society?

That could have been interesting. What we got instead is most certainly not.



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‘Catching Fire’ and First Person: Some Thoughts

Posted by on July 1, 2011 No comments

As you may or may not be aware, I’m one of the few reviewers on the internet who didn’t like The Hunger Games…by which I mean the first book in the series, not the series as a whole. (Incidentally: authors, please stop naming your trilogies after their first constituent volumes. It makes it difficult to write about them.) Before now I didn’t have much of an opinion on the rest of the books because I hadn’t read them. The first volume was enough to kill any interest I might have had, and I felt no compelling reason to revise my opinion of them even as they became ‘The Next [x]‘, where [x] may be Harry Potter, Twilight or some other series that isn’t even remotely like The Hunger Games.

Well, that was before the YA industry started pumping out one depressingly mediocre ‘dystopian’ novel after another. These days The Hunger Games is not just a bestselling series – by some sort of book-reviewer alchemy whose mechanisms I’ll probably never understand, it has become the gold standard by which all other dystopian YA is measured. Given that I like to complain about bad YA fiction here (as you may have noticed), and given that bad YA dystopian (which is to say YA dystopian) is sort of my pet peeve du jour, I thought I’d better check out the rest of the series so as to have an opinion on hand should somebody desperately come seeking it. Which happens exactly…never, but still. There was always a chance I just didn’t ‘get it’ the first time around.

Now I’m coming up to the halfway mark on Catching Fire, and I can safely say that I’ve been missing very little. I actually prefer this one to the first, possibly because there’s less time devoted to descriptions of outlandish clothing this time around, but it’s still a struggle to maintain any sort of interest. When you find yourself skimming heavily at the twenty page mark, you know you’re in for a rough time. Part of my boredom comes from the poor worldbuilding, which I’ll get to in a future post (insert sound of sharpening knives here), but most of it is down to the writing.

Like its predecessor, Catching Fire is narrated in first-person present tense by series protagonist Katniss Everdeen. Her voice is crushingly, unrelentingly bland. What kind of person is she, exactly? I still haven’t the foggiest idea. I get the feeling she’s supposed to come across as a reluctant heroine, the kind who doubts her own ability even while others treat her a paragon of courage, but every decision she makes is buried under so much mental throat-clearing that it’s difficult to tell one way or the other. I’ve read a book and a half from her perspective, and I still have no idea how she differs (or doesn’t differ) from the people around her. Her descriptions of the world in which the series takes place are delivered to the reader as if they were air-dropped into her head by an omniscient narrator; there is never any real sense that we’re being shown her world as opposed to the world.

But how could that be? Isn’t first-person supposed to bring the reader closer to the narrator? Well yes, but it doesn’t automatically do that. It is surprisingly easy to write first person as though it was third person, which is exactly what Collins does here. Take any random paragraph or even a whole chapter, and replace every instance of ‘I’ with ‘she’. In almost all cases, that paragraph or chapter will still make perfect sense. It probably won’t even read all that differently. This is not how you should use first person. If you’re going to write like this, use third person and give yourself the opportunity to switch perspectives (I’d kill for a few chapters from Gale’s point of view) or to disengage the narrative from a single character altogether and show the reader what’s happening on a wider scale. Imagine ‘Salem’s Lot if it was told in first person – all of those brilliantly-written scenes of a town slowly succumbing to a vampire infestation would be gone, replaced with endless filler of the viewpoint character sitting around in his underwear and struggling with writer’s block. The Hunger Games is not the story of Katniss Everdeen’s personal struggle to piece her life together after the Games. It’s an adventure story about a rebellion, and it would be infinitely better if it was written as such.

(Oh, and speaking of Stephen King, he’s brilliant at doing the opposite of what I’m talking about: writing third person as though it was first. The difference is that he uses this to open up narrative opportunities rather than letting it them off.)

Another common myth about first person is that it lets the reader more easily relate to your narrator. Not true, alas! It can do that, but your narrator needs to be fleshed-out and compelling to begin with. If they aren’t, using first person will only make those weaknesses all the more obvious. The longer I spend in Katniss’ head, the more I’m convinced that there isn’t a whole lot in there. Which isn’t to say that she’s stupid, just that Collins doesn’t seem to have any more idea what she’s like as a person than I do. Which would be fine, because this is an adventure story about a group of people fighting for their freedom and not the Testament of Katniss (see above), except that every single moment of the entire trilogy is told from her point of view. Even the most brilliantly-conceived characters have trouble carrying a story for that long, and Katniss certainly can’t be counted among their ranks.

Of course, I’m not saying that the series would automatically be better if it had been written in third person, – only that doing so would, at the least, not have detracted anything from it. So writers, take heed: don’t just treat first person as the default narration. Really think about whether your story is best suited for it, because if it’s not, you probably won’t be able to change your mind two third of the way through a trilogy. And it will show.

REVIEW: The City & The City by China Miéville

Posted by on June 18, 2011 No comments

The City & The CityThe City & The City by China Miéville

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve had mixed experiences with China Miéville. I read Perdido Street Station shortly after it came out (‘before he was famous’, to employ a tired supposed-Hipster cliché) and enjoyed it immensely up until its famously unsatisfying conclusion. I enjoyed The Scar a lot less, probably because I read it straight after Perdido Street Station and was feeling slightly burnt out on encountering a dozen outlandishly fascinating concepts every chapter. Un Lun Dun, on the other hand, read so much like an adult author talking down to a young audience that I dropped it after thirty pages.

So you can imagine why I was a bit nervous going in to The City & The City. I had decided that this was my final chance to ‘get’ Miéville, a last-ditch effort at trying to see what everybody else apparently sees in him. I’m happy to report that it was a resounding success.

The City & The City is as finely-honed and meticulous in its worldbuilding as something like Perdido Street Station is vast and sprawling. It takes a handful of utterly brilliant concepts, themes and insights about urban life and proceeds to turn them into a genuinely unique work of literature. What Miéville does here is audacious, but he manages to pull it off so well that you’ll likely never question its plausibility. (Nor should you, since doing so would be missing the point.)

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the premise, because you really should experience it for yourself. In brief, The City & The City is (unsurprisingly) about two cities – Besźel, where main character and narrator Tyador Borlú works as a detective for the Extreme Crime Squad, and Ul Qoma, its uneasy neighbor and more prosperous rival. Both cities occupy the same physical location – more or less. The boundary between them is sometimes physical (in that there are streets which are entirely Besź or entirely Ul Qoman) but more often mental, with citizens of both countries rigorously trained to ‘unsee’ anything which is not in the same city as themselves.

If that sounds confusing…well, it is, which is why you should really just go and read the novel if you’re curious. Miéville takes enormous care to make the worldbuilding here work, an impressive feat in itself, and within fifty pages or so you’ll find yourself completely at ease with the invented lingo of the dual city.

The plot kicks off with an old-fashioned murder mystery, after a woman’s body is found dumped in Besźel despite the fact that she lived in Ul Qoma. It maintains suitable tension throughout, aided by a respectable number of twists and complications, but the real point is to further explore the concept of the divided cities. Characterization takes a complete back seat here (Borlú isn’t quite as much of a cipher as many of the side characters, which is about all I can tell you regarding him), but this is one case where you’re not likely to care. The city (cities?) is/are the real main character, to employ another cliché.

If you’re sick of predictable speculative fiction, you really owe it to yourself to check this out. It’s definitely the best of Miéville’s work that I’ve tried, along with being the best book I’ve read full-stop all year.

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REVIEW: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

Posted by on June 11, 2011 No comments

The Tiger's WifeThe Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It took a while for The Tiger’s Wife to grow on me. Any book that comes with the amount of hype surrounding this one (not to mention the hype around its author) is going to have a lot to live up to, and for the first 100 pages or so I was convinced that The Tiger’s Wife would end up being a huge disappointment. Thankfully it wasn’t – not by a long shot – but it still never entirely lived up to my hype-inflated expectations.

The novel’s structure treads familiar ground for literary fiction: in the present, our ostensible protagonist Natalia is on her way to deliver a batch of vaccines to an orphanage when she learns that her grandfather has died. More importantly, he died on a mysterious trip to a remote village that his family was entirely unaware of. Cue flashbacks to Natalia’s childhood and adolescence.

The opening chapters set up a compelling mystery – what was Natalia’s grandfather doing in that village? – but it’s one that never really goes anywhere. This central narrative quickly becomes subordinate to a series of admittedly fascinating diversions. Lapsing into an almost omniscient voice, Natalia relates several key events of her grandfather’s life. The most important of these are his meetings with the seemingly-immortal ‘deathless man’, who comes to define his later years, and the titular ‘tiger’s wife’, who does the same for his early childhood.

The novel’s structure manages to keep itself together up until this point, but begins to fall apart as soon as Natalia starts describing the early lives of people her grandfather knew when he was a young boy – people who are, in most cases, long dead by the time she gets around to telling their stories. There’s a flimsy justification for this, with Natalia occasionally dropping back to the present (after the main vaccine-delivery plotline) to describe how she interviewed the people of her grandfather’s village, but I suspect this was probably a late addition to the story. In fact, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if The Tiger’s Wife started out as a series of interconnected short stories, with Natalia as an ever-present narrator being hastily-added conceit intended to bring it all together.

Thankfully, most of the stories (chapters?) are interesting enough that you won’t care. Obreht plays with the reader’s sympathies like a pro, in one case introducing a character as a brutish thug who savagely beats his wife (the same woman who later becomes ‘the tiger’s wife’) before moving back in time to paint a far more endearing picture of his adolescence. It helps that Obreht’s prose is incredibly self-assured but never overwrought; it manages to effortlessly carry the story through three generations of characters, a fairly incredible feat in itself.

Ultimately, however, The Tiger’s Wife ends up being slightly less than the sum of its parts. It should be thought-provoking, with its subtle ruminations on illness and warfare and its hints of the supernatural, but a few days after finishing it I’d be hard pressed to say what impression it left on me. It’s certainly an enjoyable read, even if only for the quality of the writing, but I’m not sure it’s quite as brilliant a debut as everybody is claiming.



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