Reckless vs Book of Lost Things

vs.

The Book of Lost Things had a lot of hype, but, as is the way with hyped up things, was somewhat disappointing.  For one thing, I kept comparing it with another book I read recently—Reckless.  The two are similar in that they’re both very dark fairytales.  They both feature a boy who has lost one of his parents and finds his way into another, more savage, world, where he has all sorts of exciting, near-death experiences.

But there the similarities end.  The Book of Lost Things prefers gore to mere darkness.  There’s a difference between gore and dark.  Dark is mysterious and transfixing and beautiful.  It draws you in, and you feel drunk with fascination.  Dark has you in its thrall.  Reckless is Dark.  Gore, however, is gross.  Gore is sometimes necessary, but only in moderation.  Too much gore is simply gratuitous. The Book of Lost Things was full of gratuitous gore. And after a while, I just got bored and skipped over the descriptions of people being torn to screaming pieces by wolf-men.

            

It wasn’t just Dark vs. Gore that made me prefer the world of Reckless.  The world of The Book of Lost Things was more like a traditional fairy tale.  Things just happened and didn’t make a whole lot of sense.  All the secondary characters were there for the express purpose of helping the main character out, and then they disappeared.  The whole world was breaking off at the edges, and it seemed more dream than reality.  Insubstantial.  It was like the author didn’t know enough about the world when he wrote the book.  The mirrorworld in Reckless was very well thought-out. Things may not be going very well in the mirrorworld, but at least there’s a discernible reason for the problem, not some nebulous nonsense about it being a manifestation of the king’s mind.  Bah.

            

The endings remain for me to complain about.  Endings make all the difference.  I’ve responded warmly to quite horrible books if they had good endings.  The reverse is true as well.  And in music, the last note, if played well, can redeem a botched song.  Endings are the most important element.  The lame ending is the cause of my distaste with The Book of Lost Things.  First, the author committed the sin of deus ex machina, and brought back a character that was clearly dead.  Then, he pulled the “was it all a dream?” and had the boy wake up in a hospital, where he’s been in a coma for days. This device is unoriginal and disappointing. It should be drawn and quartered and sentenced to the lowest level of hell.  I have never understood why writers make their characters return to their depressing real lives after having magical adventures and making lots of loyal friends and finally doing something worthwhile, and then not being able to talk about it because it may or may not have been real. Connolly’s final fuck-up was to stick in this awkward, semi-religious, all-in-your-head comment.  When the main character asks if he’ll ever come back to the magical land, the enigmatic Woodsman answers, “Most people come back here in the end.”  And then of course he does, after a depressing life of unproductiveness, and all the readers are wondering if it’s supposed to be heaven, and the Woodsman is Jesus or something.

            

Again, Cornelia Funke bests John Connolly in her ending, like flicking a Connolly fly off her Author-Goddess arm.  Her ending is the good kind of awful.  The kind of awful when you’re devastated the book is over, and you don’t know what to do with yourself, so you just sit there and hyperventilate.  Although, in the case of Reckless, there may be a sequel.  I’m hoping. She can’t just leave us like that!

            

Moral of the story: don’t compare things to Cornelia Funke; they will be found lacking.

The Mortal Instruments

I was avoiding this series for so long, because it looked so cheesy and Twilight-esque.  But you know, it wasn’t nearly so bad as I thought it was going to be.  I quite enjoyed them.  The Mortal Instruments was similar to the Twilight series in teen angst and the mythical creatures, but that’s where the similarities ended. 

I pondered for a long time, and I think the difference lies in the characters.  The protagonists, certainly.  Jace may be somewhat Edwardish, in his tortured seductiveness, but Clary is no Bella.  She doesn’t just lie down and take it.  She feels every bit as despairing as Bella, but does she curl up in a ball in the middle of a forest and wait to die? No!  She goes and kills demons!

The secondary characters, I discovered, are just as important.  In Twilight, the only people that matter are Bella, the Cullens, and Jacob.  All of Bella’s human friends fade into scenery because Bella and Edward don’t have time for anyone else.  They are the only two people in the books, and frankly, it terrifies me.  It’s like living in a world populated by characterless cardboard cut-outs, and the only two real live people on the planet are so consumed with each other they don’t even notice.  In The Mortal Instruments, there are plenty of secondary characters who actually have personalities and care about the protagonists, and the protagonists care about them.  And there are tertiary characters with personalities as well, and whatever one calls fourth characters, and whole hosts of characters after that.  This world is populated.

The Geurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

Horrors! Not fantasy! But I shall let that pass...

One reason this book was so very excellent was because it was correspondence.  I’ve always loved sending and receiving letters--it appeals to my romantic side.  One of my favorite books, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, is written entirely in correspondence.  Those letters, however, are only between two people; The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society manages to balance numerous different letter-writers without the reader becoming too confused.  It helps that there is one central character tying all of them together.  The only cavil I have with books written in letters is small: not everyone can write interesting letters.  If one wanted to make the book entirely realistic, one would have to put in at least one character who writes incredibly tedious letters, or has bad grammar, or can’t spell.  But then nobody would want to read it, so I’m not really complaining.

Another reason this book was brilliant was because of the main character’s writing style.  So wonderfully sharp and witty!  She may not want to be a “light-hearted journalist” anymore, but she certainly excels at it.  I was slightly reluctant to read this book at first, but then I got to the end of her first letter and read the postscript about “that dismal woman” and Jane Carlyle’s “charming little notes.”  I started sniggering loudly and was very disappointed when I had to stop reading and listen to the visiting Dalai Lama.

Not many books can manage to be funny and deadly serious at the same time without being campy, but The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society did.  The main character was engaging and amusing, but she still took everything seriously.  She never laughed at the islanders’ war stories like some journalists.  The islanders themselves never made a huge deal out of it.   They didn’t describe the horrors of the occupation overdramatically, but told it simply as it was, and that’s what made it so effective.  This book was the perfect mix of serious and funny.

All of these reasons add up to make a marvelous novel, and the happy ending made it a perfect read.

The Great Goddess Diana (part II)

Yet another reason DWJ is such a bloody genius: her plots are giant chaotic messes and sheer insanity, and things just keep getting thrown into the disorder and making it crazier, but the whole time she knows exactly what she's doing, and by the ending, on the last few pages, everything makes sense.  She untangles all the plot threads, reveals the mysteries, and tidies up all the loose ends.   She's like one of those super intense jugglers from Cirque du Soleil, who effortlessly hurl twenty fragile plates in the air and catch every single one.

I love tidy endings.  They just make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and I can't stop smiling.  If the ending is a particularly good one, I tend to make noises like a happy guinea pig.  DWJ makes me do that a lot.

The Great Goddess Diana

I was reading one of her older books for the first time recently, The Time of the Ghost, and I realized another reason her books are so good.  She has such strange ways of describing feelings, and they shouldn't make any sense, but they do.  They make such perfect sense it's uncanny.  In her own words:

"Some people get stiff and unhappy writing because they think they can’t manage to write how it feels to have an adventure, or to be in the middle of very fast, exciting action. This is nonsense. Everyone knows. What you have to do, if you are stuck this way is to stop thinking in words and then shut your eyes and think how it would be if you were the one having the adventure, falling down the cliff or being attacked by a vampire, or whatever. You’ll know at once. Then you simply put down what you know. It may come out queer, but queer is good where actions and feelings are concerned."

--from her website.

A Brief Addition to the Muddling

Actually, there's a brilliant book by the even more brilliant Diana Wynne Jones that's just a big spoof of stereotypical fantasy.  Unlike Piers Anthony's Xanth series (a never-ending spoof series set in a world called Xanth, in which the author uses every single element of fantasy), however, it is a guide.  The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.  A work of genius.  It's basically an encyclopedia to all things fantasyland, complete with the occasional gnomic utterance.  

And then she apparently liked the idea so much that she turned it into a novel.  

It's set in a fantasy world, but everything is so...practical.  That's the great thing about DWJ--it's fantasy, but it makes so much sense.  None of this mystical nonsense that you're supposed to instinctively understand.  An example that comes to mind is from Howl's Moving Castle, when the main character has a rant at a suit of clothing she's mending, and the suit then gains magical powers and does exactly what she was accusing it of doing.  It just seems such obvious and no-nonsense way to do magic.  

DWJ is brilliant that way.  Perhaps my favorite line of hers is "He left the room like a very long procession of one person." I believe that's from Howl's Moving Castle, although it may be from The Lives of Christopher Chant.  If anyone cares.

Muddling Through Why Fantasy Occupies My Shelves

Most of the books on my shelves are fantasy.  And when people ask, I tend to say this defensively.  All too often, fantasy is frowned upon. Scoffed at.  I frown upon the scoffers' scoffing.

I mean, if I think of the stereotype of fantasy literature, it's all muscly barbarians hefting swords and white-robed priestesses with heaving bosoms, and grumpy dwarves, willowy elves, disguised royalty, a large amorphous mass of pure evil, and at least two apostrophes in each name.

So I get where they're coming from.

But not all fantasy is like that, thank the gods.  Barely any, if you stick to children and teen fantasy.  Which I do, despite being plenty old enough to read about heaving bosoms.

The thing about fantasy--and sci-fi, the two of which one should NEVER CONFUSE--is that it opens you up to possibilities.  Faeries may not be real, but what if they are?  How would you know what to do if you were taken below into their faery kingdom and offered food?  Or take science fiction.  Think how much less surprised and panicky you'd be if you were an avid sci-fi nerd and suddenly encountered an alien.  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Basically, it prepares you for the unlikely.

It makes life more magical.  You read enough fantasy or sci-fi, and you start believing it--while you're reading, of course, but some of that belief stays with you even after you've finished the book.  Just enough sparkle that you're wary around mushroom circles, or that you're more open to the idea of sentient life in space.

Sci-fi and fantasy explore possibilities that no other genre can.  Other fiction is bounded by a tedious thing called "reality," and non-fiction is constrained by not only this "reality," but also truth.  But sci-fi and fantasy are completely free.  Reality? Pssh. They make their own reality.  And truth? It is true in that reality. They're sort of a problem-solving exercise as well...the author thinks up the craziest scenario possible and then tries to fix it.

And of course: it's the best escapist literature offered.  I have to live in reality, so why would I want to read about it as well?  Dull.

So really, don't ever feel embarrassed about reading fantasy or sci-fi.

(Unless you're reading the one with the muscly barbarian.)