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So Many Books... - June 18th, 2006
Jun. 18th, 2006
12:44 pm - The Gift Boat, Peter Dickinson (if not officially)
Right, so my Challenge should have finished at 10 this morning - an hour and a half ago, for those on different times. At that point I'd finished four books (Caddy Ever After, Ingo, The Gift Boat and Mondays Are Red), reviewed two, obviously, and read 178 pages of the fifth, Kate Thompson's The Fourth Horseman. As I'd to do errands and then go up to my mother's earlier, there was no time to do the last two reviews, but I decided I'm just going to keep on with the Challenge anyway. I'm doing the alternate version as it is, and have just made a clear disclaimer about when my official time ended, so what harm? I reckon there were 9 hours on Friday night and Saturday morning I'd have been reading (if with the usual amount of time out for the girls, cooking, talking in whatever way (phone, email, IM) to my essential people), so I'll keep on challenging myself until 7 this evening.
Right, so, The Gift Boat. This had been sitting around in one of the piles of TBRs for quite some time, as it had been offered me without any kind of fervent enthusiasm, although some writerly admiration. I actually enjoyed it much more than I'd expected to, with a few reservations, which tended to work their way to the front of my mind later.
Almost 11-year-old Gavin lives with his Mum, his Gran and Grandad in Stonehaven, a fishing village in Scotland. His dad is first mate on a 'big container ship' and away most of the time, his Mum and Gran both work, so he's closest to his Grandad who's taken care of him most since he was very little. The two of them are alone in the house and Grandad is working on the beautiful model boat he's making for Gavin's birthday, when he has a massive stroke. The last thing he's just said is that Gavin should ask permission before naming the boat Selkie. Gavin had got the idea when they fed a seal in the harbour a mackerel a few hours earlier, and his grandfather told him about the seal-people and legends of their marrying farmers and having children with them, before returning to the sea.
One of the most interesting panel discussions I attended at Worldcon last year was the one with Graham Joyce and Kelly Link, among very impressive others, talking about what John Clute called equipoise novels. I'm never sure my version is totally his, but I do like a well-done equipoise book, and this is almost one of them. The real-life, non-supernatural strand follows Gavin's worries over his grandfather, and his determination to do whatever he can to reach through to his grandfather, in order to help him find his way back. The people in the stroke unit are all very kind to him, and the physiotherapist teaches him the exercises to do that may help re-establish the neural connections. Gavin also has to do a bit of work to get his mother and grandmother organising things so he can get in to the hospital by himself, which he knows is important. The other strand of course involves the selkies - with Gavin at first afraid his grandfather was given the stroke because he hadn't asked their permission to name his boat Selkie. He later makes a combined propitiation/sacrifice/free gift to them, hoping they will help him reach his grandfather, who he feels is lost and trapped inside his body, not knowing what's happened to him.
Gavin is a very engaging boy, and it's extremely easy to sympathise with him (although I do wonder a bit at how the presumably intentionally slow passages in the hospital would read to a 10 or 11 year old). My first reservation is that I found the passage setting out the 'two ways of looking at it' surprisingly clunky (to use a good literary term!). The resolution was quite powerful, I thought, and the impact was only lessened by a rather earnest explanation of how everything might have been a dream plus coincidence or might have been the selkie's doing. The other reservation was triggered by this sentence very near the end: '[Gavin] was surprised to realize that he really meant that hug, and that actually he was very fond of [Mum].' Opinions might vary, but that doesn't strike me as a very likely 11 y.o.'s thought, especially as he's just been very grateful to her for getting it all very right in the hospital a short time before. And it made me think back to the rather extraordinary way this boy, just having had a most horrendous thing happen, and in the midst of trying to take on too much responsibility for fixing everything, can also be very self-analytical, even to the extent of quite accurate self-criticism. Assuming an inappropriate amount of self-blame, of course, would be a typical child's reaction, or going somewhere to the other extreme and just being frustrated that he isn't able to manipulate the others without regard for their feelings, but this extraordinary emotional maturity seems a bit excessive. That said, it wasn't nearly enough to ruin the book for me.
03:49 pm - Mondays Are Red, Nicola Morgan
Have now finished The Fourth Horseman, for which my review may just be 'Oh dear', and half wondering whether to start on another book or not after doing this review...
I'd fairly high expectations of Mondays are Red, as both daughters had read and approved it, and the theme of synaesthesia seems a brilliant one for a YA novel. And it was good - excellent in some ways - though I can see its not being everyone's cup of tea quite easily. In a purely idiosyncratic way, I see three stories in the book: that of Luke's newly-developed synaesthesia, the result of his nearly dying of meningitis; a very creepy fantastic story, of power and its abuse; and that of Luke's discovery of the power of language. In the 'About the author' page at the start, Nicola Morgan says 'Mondays are Red is about the power of language and power itself', and I guess many novels are in some way about the power of language. It seems to me that she's set herself quite a job though, in having those three stories woven together. Not only does she have to use language in all kinds of unusual ways to convey what synaesthesia feels like (which of course is part of the appeal to a writer, as she says in an author's note at the end), but she has at the same time to use that language to create a very frightening story and show Luke's growing power to affect people through language. The problem with the latter is that others' response to his language is crucial to the story - and it's not always quite credible. For example, there's a time when Luke has written a story (which, we as readers know is the story all-too-likely to come true) of a 'metal man without a face' watching and following a girl, and finally calling her to her presumed death. And yes - it's scary, and gripping. But is it really scary enough to cause one girl to have an apparent epileptic fit (which she's never done before), and a boy to be white-faced, shaking and unable to speak because he sees a figure like that in the story outside the school? Or the 'poem' Luke writes when describing the girl he wants to create - 'Her skin is cinnamon in the sun, cake-warm, her hair long as honey. She flows like cream, blows candy-floss bubbles in the air. Runs like tomorrow, whispers one day, promises never. Her distant touch is soft as smoke, deep as a breath.... ' Hmmm. Well, okay, maybe unusual for a teen boy who'd never even have considered writing a poem before, but powerful enough to make people see her in their minds (including his mocking and pissed-off older sister)?
I'd much rather a book which tried something (or somethings) quite different and didn't succeed completely than one which didn't try much of anything, of course, and Mondays are Red certainly did the former. And it packs an ominous punch in there with its supernatural thriller story, too. Wonder why the 'a' in 'are' isn't capitalised though...
05:18 pm - The Fourth Horsemen, Kate Thompson
(A swollen gland (daughter's) can be added to the list of medical woes around here now. Enough is too much!) (Also my eyes aren't focussing today for some reason. Some reason other than the reading, of course.)
Haven't yet read a single review, response or babbling about Kate Thompson's latest, and having very much liked The New Policeman, expected nothing less from The Fourth Horseman. I've as yet no idea whether I'll be alone in shaking my head and wondering just what went wrong. It's not the story, which is a decent and potentially great mix of fantasy, science and thinly disguised Real World politics. But the writing seems so bad in comparison to that in The New Policeman it's truly surprising. Instead of trying to write coherently about it, I'll throw out a few quotes, younger daughter's response to same, one apparent scientific error, two character plot-holes and one line I just don't know how to categorize. Slight spoilers inevitable.
Narrator is a 15 year old girl. In the first quote she's talking about her brother Alex, who's two years younger, and is practicing aikido with his friend.
'There was a beautiful discipline about their actions. They were both shooting up like nettles on a dung heap and coming into their adolescent strength, but they had none of the awkwardness of other boys their age. The aikido kept them both as supple and graceful as dancers.'
Next one is Laurie talking about being busy so she hasn't time to worry about having seen the horsemen.
'In any event, time blunts the sharpest edge and, no matter how momentous the visions had been at the time, they were fading in importance with each day that passed.'
There are lots and lots of heavier-than-my-taste allusions to fate: 'On that day in early summer when I'd decided to be a warrior, my fate was already pointing to this moment.'; 'And sometimes I believe it was more than that. I believe that our extraordinary fate was already written on our palms or stamped across our brows.', just a few examples.
To verify that I wasn't completely mad in finding this stuff heavy, heavy slogging, I read them to Younger Daughter when I was about two-thirds through the book. She snorted in disbelieving disgust, and said 'How did you even get that far?', which was enough to convince me.
The scientific error involves the father's project, which is genetic engineering, to find a virus which will affect grey but not red squirrels. He develops a programme to compare human and squirrel genomes, discards any that are shared, and so 'all that was left at the end were the genes that were peculiar to the squirrels'. Just sloppy, and not crucial to the story, but it's pretty sloppy indeed, I'd have thought. The first plot hole is the fact that this project is super, extra-specially, top secret. He's got to sign the Official Secrets Act, while reporting to only one other person - the extremely elusive Mr Davenport of constantly changing mobile phone numbers and no known address. But he discusses the whole thing, not only with his wife, but also his two children, and comes to let Laurie serve as his only lab assistant, with Mr Davenport's knowledge. Umm - right. The second involves the plan for Laurie, Alex and his friend Javed to go to Shasakstan with Javed's father - a plan which is repeatedly said to be totally safe ('You don't think I'd let -- go if I didn't know it was safe, do you?'), though this country is an unstable Middle Eastern country with a growing fundamentalist Islamic element - oh, right, and nuclear weapons. And when the boys and Javed's father do go, a coup occurs and Javed's mother says she knew it was coming, just not that soon. Excuse me?
And finally, the baffling:
'I don't know why it was that Mum was never there when the most momentous things happened. ... that was what her fate seemed to have planned for her: to be the one who heard about it all after it had happened, and who had to help pick up the scattered pieces of her family's lives. Perhaps it was her punishment for having been away from us so much.'
??? Punished for taking a job (physio to the England cricket team) which takes her away from her family (which consists of a father who can arrange his job to be at home a lot, and two independent teens)? Granted, I'd hate that kind of life with a passion myself, and was thinking that shortly before reading the line. It's entirely possible that Thompson intends it to be read as Laurie's resentment only, though it seems less than likely from the rest of the book, and could have been written to show that more clearly if that was the intention. Would the sentence - whatever it's 'supposed' to mean - even have been written about a man whose job took him away from his family though?
EDA a 'gah' to the non-workingness of tab in Xjournal, which I keep forgetting.
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