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I had a lot of thoughts about this week's line-up.
What I Just Finished Reading
The Starless Sea – Erin Morgenstern
There are intriguing kernels of story in this book, but like a bad bag of microwave popcorn, most of them never pop. In The Starless Sea, Morgenstern has written a literary novel for readers she doesn’t trust are intelligent enough to get the references, or the jokes, or the metaphors, or the allegory, or even to follow the plot. It’s worse than a sitcom laugh track: it’s a sitcom in which the characters explain—point-by-point—every plot twist and joke from start to punchline. And just like having a joke explained to you, it’s irritating if you didn’t get it, and even more irritating when you did but the teller acts like they didn’t hear you laugh.
Morgenstern may also have been trying to write a love letter to fantasy but she produced the genre’s version of Ready Player One, successfully replicating that novel’s rote box-ticking and heavyhandness. References abound, to Clarke and Grossman and Sendak and Rowlins, and to movie and video game classics, but boy are they inept:
Or:
I read to lose myself in books, but the language in The Starless Sea is both jarring and largely falls into a few limited templates: one-sentence paragraphs, two-sentence paragraphs, or three sentence paragraphs, most of which would have been better combined into a single, large paragraph. Additionally, Morgenstern is enamored of run-on sentences, particularly run-on sentences constructed with comma splices. The comma splices. My gawd, the comma splices.
She’s of the camp that cramming as much description into as long a sentence as possible is beautiful, atmospheric writing, but it creates sterile paint-by-numbers scene-setting that leaves no room for the reader’s imagination to come into play. Some of this verbosity is just stupid. Who, aside from Morgenstern, has ever written the phrase “library of the public sort” with the expectation that readers take it—or its author—seriously?
It’s a shame, because The Starless Sea does get some things right: Morgenstern’s invented fairytales are eerie, atmospheric, and compelling. The moment when readers first perceive how the novel’s multiple storylines interweave is exhilarating, and Morgenstern’s sense of the fantastical—painted doors that open into other worlds, owl kings, the Kitchen, shrouds on which are inscribed the story of the deceased’s life, swords and bees and keys and cats—would have sung had she not drowned them in descriptive bloat. And always, always, there's her pervasive distrust of her readers’ perceptiveness, culminating in an entire chapter in which a heretofore minor character not only recaps the entire novel (Previously, on pages 1 to 464…) but also spells out its Big Themes:
TL;DR: it's a better book than The Night Circus but with a lot of flaws.
The King at the Edge of the World – Arthur Phillips
The King at the Edge of the World opens as Mahmoud Ezzadine, Muslim physician to the Ottoman sultan, is sent to England as part of a diplomatic mission to Queen Elizabeth. Through various twists of fate, he ends up serving the queen, a northern English noble, and King James VI of Scotland. He assumes this last role as a spy charged with determining whether James is truly Protestant or secretly Roman Catholic—a matter of life and death to Ezzadine’s handler—in return for a promise that he may return to Turkey should he succeed. This short novel's all star cast includes Elizabeth, James, John Dee, and several others whose identities I won’t spoil here; and it incorporates clever references to contemporary culture (e.g. Marlowe) that Phillips wisely leaves it up to the reader to recognize—or not—on her own. The novel brims with excellent period detail—to include the Muslim, Protestant, and Roman Catholic characters’ unvarnished opinions of one another, but also the tastes, smells, and social mores of 17th century Britain and Constantinople.
It also brims with capital-T Themes, particularly the nature of Identity and Fact, and who—if anyone—has the right or ability to define them. Phillips lets the narrative implicitly pose these questions, to far greater effect than, say, Morgenstern’s handholding. But in posing them so effectively he writes himself into a corner and the novel’s wishy-washy conclusion is its sole, but major, flaw. Still, it's well executed up to that point, making The King at the Edge of the World well worth reading, but perhaps not worth reading twice.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line – Deepa Anappara
This is possibly the best book I have read in the past year. I wholeheartedly recommend that everyone read it, soon. Nine-year-old Jai lives in a slum in an unnamed Indian city. When one of his classmates, the son of the slum drunk, disappears, Jai joins forces with two friends to try to find him using lessons he’s picked up from the police procedurals his mother sometimes lets him watch.
I don’t want to say anything else about the characters or plot, because Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line needs to be discovered and savored. It does everything right. There’s humor, drama, suspense, and sweetness, all deftly blended together and subtly depicted. The pacing is solid and consistent, and the characterizations nuanced and compelling. Like Morgenstern and Phillips, Anappara deals in Big Themes, but by showing, not telling, and without any authorial kid gloves or copouts. Read this book.
What I Am Currently Reading
The Mercies – Kiran Millwood Hargrave
The first chapter sees a freak winter storm wiping out the entire male population of an isolated fishing village in 17th century Norway. As the epigraph is a contemporary decree vowing to mercilessly persecute witches, I don’t imagine the novel is going to end well for anyone other than church sadists.
Deadpool vol. 1 – Daniel Way et al.
Because I couldn’t handle additional seriousness after Anappara, Hargrave, Hatakenaka Morgenstern, and Phillips.
おまけのこ – 畠中 恵 (Omake no Ko – Hatakenaka Megumi)
Arinsukoku opens with Ichitaro suddenly declaring that he’s going to help an apprentice whore escape the Yoshiwara. The Yoshiwara was a major prostitution district in pre-modern Tokyo, and many—predictably male—writers trot out a parade of standard descriptions including words like “courtesan,” “entertainment,” refined,” and “pleasure quarter” to describe a place that enslaved nearly 10,000 individuals whose treatment did not appreciably differ from the sexual slavery that at least non-Japanese authors decry when practiced by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.
Hatakenaka offers a subtle criticism of said tendency in this chapter. Ichitaro’s guardians react to his—in their view, woefully naïve—declaration with shock: “If either of you is caught, you’ll be beaten bloody, or pilloried in a hairshirt, or even worse! And all the expense of finding and retrieving the girl will be added to the money she must pay to buy her freedom,” an ordeal that takes a decade—at least—to satisfy if all goes well. They point out that while men can come and go freely, no woman is allowed in or out—for no matter how short a time—without an official license that’s extremely hard to come by. They mention the walls, the moats, the guards, the armed patrols.
Under pressure, Ichitaro reveals that he’s part of a plan to free the whore concocted by his father and his father’s favorite ranking prostitute-cum-madam. The madam unofficially adopted the whore when her mother died of disease before her sexual servitude was complete. The apprentice is just now old enough for someone to buy her virginity, but she’s just been diagnosed with a serious heart disease. “The district’s whores were terrified of pneumonia, and syphilis, and convulsions, and the many communicable diseases” that kill most of them before they manage to buy their freedom, Hatakenaka writes, and with her disease, the apprentice has even less chance of survival. But the madam can’t free her because the favoritism would anger the other women and girls she keeps captive, and create bad blood between the madam and the other brothels in the district. A man has already offered to buy the apprentice, but that’s not an option because he could abandon her as damaged goods once he found out about her condition.
Thus, Ichitaro et al. concoct a plan to have a youkai enter the district with official documentation, transform into a cat, and sneak out while the apprentice whore uses the documentation to escape. It all comes to naught when another whore the madam orders to help with the conspiracy secretly alerts the john who wants to buy the apprentice, whom he abducts before the conspirators can smuggle her out.
“Do you know Shiratama,” the fellow apprentice asks Ichitaro. He doesn’t, but the madam does. “Oh, so you did deign to remember her name,” says the fellow apprentice. “Even though you can’t even be bothered to say it anymore. Especially given you didn’t let her leave the brothel when she got sick or even let a doctor see her.” Shiratama, predictably, died of disease. “I couldn’t let you sit back with a smile and let [the other whore], alone of all of us, go free and be healed. And when I think that if I got sick, you’d just sit on your hands and let me die just like Shiratama…”
It’s a brutally effective scene. The chapter concludes with the whore’s successful escape, Ichitaro’s mother choosing to suffer in silence after learning about his father’s expensive dalliances with the madam, and no one knowing what becomes of the prostitute who pointed out the massive hypocrisy of the whole endeavor. It’s not surprising given that Hatakenaka’s publisher probably mandated that everything end on an upbeat note, but it falls conspicuously (and I think, quite possibly intentionally) flat.
What I'm Reading Next
No new books this week, as I’ve got enough to work my way through for the time being.
これで以上です。
What I Just Finished Reading
The Starless Sea – Erin Morgenstern
There are intriguing kernels of story in this book, but like a bad bag of microwave popcorn, most of them never pop. In The Starless Sea, Morgenstern has written a literary novel for readers she doesn’t trust are intelligent enough to get the references, or the jokes, or the metaphors, or the allegory, or even to follow the plot. It’s worse than a sitcom laugh track: it’s a sitcom in which the characters explain—point-by-point—every plot twist and joke from start to punchline. And just like having a joke explained to you, it’s irritating if you didn’t get it, and even more irritating when you did but the teller acts like they didn’t hear you laugh.
Morgenstern may also have been trying to write a love letter to fantasy but she produced the genre’s version of Ready Player One, successfully replicating that novel’s rote box-ticking and heavyhandness. References abound, to Clarke and Grossman and Sendak and Rowlins, and to movie and video game classics, but boy are they inept:
”…After a long, wordless conversation, she lowers the sword and hands it to Zachary. “Take this.”Don’t worry, readers. Morgenstern will make sure to highlight that the dialogue is a reference (in case you didn’t recognize it) and to reassure you that she knows she’s not using it correctly (if you did). As a bonus no one asked for, she’ll recycle the same quote a few chapters later.
“'It’s dangerous to go alone,'” Zachary quotes in response as he takes it, even though the completed quote is out of order, addressing it partly to her and partly to himself and partly to the sword in his hand.
Or:
Before Zachary can reply a bee nudges him over to a small table upon which now sits a frosted coupe glass filled with lemon-bright liquid and a small cupcake decorated with a much smaller bee.Of course.
Out of curiosity Zachary picks up the glass and takes a tiny sip, expecting it to taste like honey and it does but it also tastes familiarly of gin and lemon. A bee’s knees. Of course.
I read to lose myself in books, but the language in The Starless Sea is both jarring and largely falls into a few limited templates: one-sentence paragraphs, two-sentence paragraphs, or three sentence paragraphs, most of which would have been better combined into a single, large paragraph. Additionally, Morgenstern is enamored of run-on sentences, particularly run-on sentences constructed with comma splices. The comma splices. My gawd, the comma splices.
She’s of the camp that cramming as much description into as long a sentence as possible is beautiful, atmospheric writing, but it creates sterile paint-by-numbers scene-setting that leaves no room for the reader’s imagination to come into play. Some of this verbosity is just stupid. Who, aside from Morgenstern, has ever written the phrase “library of the public sort” with the expectation that readers take it—or its author—seriously?
It’s a shame, because The Starless Sea does get some things right: Morgenstern’s invented fairytales are eerie, atmospheric, and compelling. The moment when readers first perceive how the novel’s multiple storylines interweave is exhilarating, and Morgenstern’s sense of the fantastical—painted doors that open into other worlds, owl kings, the Kitchen, shrouds on which are inscribed the story of the deceased’s life, swords and bees and keys and cats—would have sung had she not drowned them in descriptive bloat. And always, always, there's her pervasive distrust of her readers’ perceptiveness, culminating in an entire chapter in which a heretofore minor character not only recaps the entire novel (Previously, on pages 1 to 464…) but also spells out its Big Themes:
”…this hidden kingdom was underground and had a seaport, if I’m remembering it right. It probably did because it was on something called the Starless Sea and I know I’m not misremembering that part because it was definitely underground, thus the no stars. Unless that whole part was a metaphor.And on and on and on, despite that fact that if readers are still with her after 467 pages they either get what’s going on or don’t but are enjoying the story anyway; either way, the only thing this handholding will accomplish is to make readers wish Morgenstern had forgone the story to focus on the fairytales.
…
I remember wondering if this story was an analogy about people who stay in places or relationships or whatever situations longer than they should because they’re afraid of letting go or moving on or the unknown, or how people hold on to things because they miss what the thing was even if that isn’t what that same thing is now.
TL;DR: it's a better book than The Night Circus but with a lot of flaws.
The King at the Edge of the World – Arthur Phillips
The King at the Edge of the World opens as Mahmoud Ezzadine, Muslim physician to the Ottoman sultan, is sent to England as part of a diplomatic mission to Queen Elizabeth. Through various twists of fate, he ends up serving the queen, a northern English noble, and King James VI of Scotland. He assumes this last role as a spy charged with determining whether James is truly Protestant or secretly Roman Catholic—a matter of life and death to Ezzadine’s handler—in return for a promise that he may return to Turkey should he succeed. This short novel's all star cast includes Elizabeth, James, John Dee, and several others whose identities I won’t spoil here; and it incorporates clever references to contemporary culture (e.g. Marlowe) that Phillips wisely leaves it up to the reader to recognize—or not—on her own. The novel brims with excellent period detail—to include the Muslim, Protestant, and Roman Catholic characters’ unvarnished opinions of one another, but also the tastes, smells, and social mores of 17th century Britain and Constantinople.
It also brims with capital-T Themes, particularly the nature of Identity and Fact, and who—if anyone—has the right or ability to define them. Phillips lets the narrative implicitly pose these questions, to far greater effect than, say, Morgenstern’s handholding. But in posing them so effectively he writes himself into a corner and the novel’s wishy-washy conclusion is its sole, but major, flaw. Still, it's well executed up to that point, making The King at the Edge of the World well worth reading, but perhaps not worth reading twice.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line – Deepa Anappara
This is possibly the best book I have read in the past year. I wholeheartedly recommend that everyone read it, soon. Nine-year-old Jai lives in a slum in an unnamed Indian city. When one of his classmates, the son of the slum drunk, disappears, Jai joins forces with two friends to try to find him using lessons he’s picked up from the police procedurals his mother sometimes lets him watch.
I don’t want to say anything else about the characters or plot, because Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line needs to be discovered and savored. It does everything right. There’s humor, drama, suspense, and sweetness, all deftly blended together and subtly depicted. The pacing is solid and consistent, and the characterizations nuanced and compelling. Like Morgenstern and Phillips, Anappara deals in Big Themes, but by showing, not telling, and without any authorial kid gloves or copouts. Read this book.
What I Am Currently Reading
The Mercies – Kiran Millwood Hargrave
The first chapter sees a freak winter storm wiping out the entire male population of an isolated fishing village in 17th century Norway. As the epigraph is a contemporary decree vowing to mercilessly persecute witches, I don’t imagine the novel is going to end well for anyone other than church sadists.
Deadpool vol. 1 – Daniel Way et al.
Because I couldn’t handle additional seriousness after Anappara, Hargrave, Hatakenaka Morgenstern, and Phillips.
おまけのこ – 畠中 恵 (Omake no Ko – Hatakenaka Megumi)
Arinsukoku opens with Ichitaro suddenly declaring that he’s going to help an apprentice whore escape the Yoshiwara. The Yoshiwara was a major prostitution district in pre-modern Tokyo, and many—predictably male—writers trot out a parade of standard descriptions including words like “courtesan,” “entertainment,” refined,” and “pleasure quarter” to describe a place that enslaved nearly 10,000 individuals whose treatment did not appreciably differ from the sexual slavery that at least non-Japanese authors decry when practiced by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.
Hatakenaka offers a subtle criticism of said tendency in this chapter. Ichitaro’s guardians react to his—in their view, woefully naïve—declaration with shock: “If either of you is caught, you’ll be beaten bloody, or pilloried in a hairshirt, or even worse! And all the expense of finding and retrieving the girl will be added to the money she must pay to buy her freedom,” an ordeal that takes a decade—at least—to satisfy if all goes well. They point out that while men can come and go freely, no woman is allowed in or out—for no matter how short a time—without an official license that’s extremely hard to come by. They mention the walls, the moats, the guards, the armed patrols.
Under pressure, Ichitaro reveals that he’s part of a plan to free the whore concocted by his father and his father’s favorite ranking prostitute-cum-madam. The madam unofficially adopted the whore when her mother died of disease before her sexual servitude was complete. The apprentice is just now old enough for someone to buy her virginity, but she’s just been diagnosed with a serious heart disease. “The district’s whores were terrified of pneumonia, and syphilis, and convulsions, and the many communicable diseases” that kill most of them before they manage to buy their freedom, Hatakenaka writes, and with her disease, the apprentice has even less chance of survival. But the madam can’t free her because the favoritism would anger the other women and girls she keeps captive, and create bad blood between the madam and the other brothels in the district. A man has already offered to buy the apprentice, but that’s not an option because he could abandon her as damaged goods once he found out about her condition.
Thus, Ichitaro et al. concoct a plan to have a youkai enter the district with official documentation, transform into a cat, and sneak out while the apprentice whore uses the documentation to escape. It all comes to naught when another whore the madam orders to help with the conspiracy secretly alerts the john who wants to buy the apprentice, whom he abducts before the conspirators can smuggle her out.
“Do you know Shiratama,” the fellow apprentice asks Ichitaro. He doesn’t, but the madam does. “Oh, so you did deign to remember her name,” says the fellow apprentice. “Even though you can’t even be bothered to say it anymore. Especially given you didn’t let her leave the brothel when she got sick or even let a doctor see her.” Shiratama, predictably, died of disease. “I couldn’t let you sit back with a smile and let [the other whore], alone of all of us, go free and be healed. And when I think that if I got sick, you’d just sit on your hands and let me die just like Shiratama…”
It’s a brutally effective scene. The chapter concludes with the whore’s successful escape, Ichitaro’s mother choosing to suffer in silence after learning about his father’s expensive dalliances with the madam, and no one knowing what becomes of the prostitute who pointed out the massive hypocrisy of the whole endeavor. It’s not surprising given that Hatakenaka’s publisher probably mandated that everything end on an upbeat note, but it falls conspicuously (and I think, quite possibly intentionally) flat.
What I'm Reading Next
No new books this week, as I’ve got enough to work my way through for the time being.
これで以上です。
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But I will put the next two on my to-read list. Thanks!
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Djinn Patrol sounds intriguing!
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And do read Djinn Patrol! It really is a great book, one I'm still mulling over a week later.
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A book that lingers is a book with merit indeed! I'm downloading the Kindle sample right now so I don't forget it.