Just a very quick post to say normal posting will start again hopefully soon! Just been very busy this week, and transitioning back to inconsistent internet service. Sigh. One day. One day, I will live somewhere with uninterrupted internet connection again…
Instead, here are a couple of silly pictures…
And Skeletor waxing philosophical…
First up, a hat-tip to Abhinav for sharing the link on Facebook, which is where I spotted it [everyone should check out his reviews on his blog, on Founding Fields, and follow him on Twitter].
Sophia McDougall has written a very good piece for the New Statesman, with an attention-grabbing headline: “I hate Strong Female Characters”. It’s an interesting article, and addresses what a lot of society views as a ‘Strong Female Character’, and the double-standards that exist when characterising a hero or heroine as ‘strong’. The whole article is well worth reading, so off you go and read it…
One paragraph in the piece got me thinking. Not really about the topic of the article, but something related to an example McDougall used to make part of her argument:
“Is, say, Sherlock Holmes strong? In one sense, yes, of course. He faces danger and death in order to pursue justice. On the other hand, his physical strength is often unreliable – strong enough to bend an iron poker when on form, he nevertheless frequently has to rely on Watson to clobber his assailants, at least once because he’s neglected himself into a condition where he can’t even try to fight back. His mental and emotional resources also fluctuate. An addict and a depressive, he claims even his crime-fighting is a form of self-medication. Viewed this way, his willingness to place himself in physical danger might not be ‘strength’ at all – it might be another form of self-destructiveness. Or on the other hand, perhaps his vulnerabilities make him all the stronger, as he succeeds in surviving and flourishing in spite of threats located within as well without.”
This made me wonder if there were any female characters that I’d read (recently or otherwise), who maybe adhered more to this archetype of (anti-)hero. And, I actually think I’ve come up with a speculative-fiction contender for the modern successor of Sherlock Holmes. There is, after all, a female character who can be described similarly to McDougall’s Sherlock. To reiterate:
“Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius.”
Who am I talking about? Chess Putnam, from Stacia Kane’s Downside Ghosts series (published by Voyager in the UK and Del Rey in the US).
Downside Ghosts UK Covers
Chess is an addict, she is a gifted (supernatural) detective, she can be alternately abrasive and vulnerable, she can handle herself in a fight (against ghosts and against corporeal antagonists). She sometimes manipulates those around – on the job, but also as a way of hiding her substance abuse. She’s certainly brave, charging ahead into situations that would make me bug out, screaming like a petrified kitten. Even regarding the more ‘mundane’ elements in the above description, Chess can tick them off: Bohemian (she lives in a converted church on the wrong side of the tracks), vain, neurotic, untidy, and fastidious (in her spell-making, for example). I haven’t yet seen anything that suggests Chess is quite a “polymath genius”, but she has a considerable breadth of skills. At the same time, sometimes Chess needs help from “sidekicks”, and has a couple of her own Watsons – most notably Trouble Terrible,* who she does not always treat well or fairly.
So. There we have it. Chess Putnam is our contemporary Sherlock Holmes. Anyone have any other suggestions who could fill that role?
Downside Ghosts Series: Unholy Ghosts, Unholy Magic, City of Ghosts, Sacrificial Magic, Chasing Magic
Downside Short Stories: Finding Magic, Wrong Ways Down, Home, Close To You
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* Update: The original version of this post got the name wrong. Apologies to Stacia!
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Incidentally, Sophia McDougall is the author of the Romanitas trilogy – Romanitas, Rome Burning, and Savage City (published by Gollancz) – which you should all be sure to read, as well.
I have been a fan of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles ever since I picked up Interview with the Vampire in 1999. I was living in New York at the time, and I went to Barnes & Noble on 51st & Lexington (in the CitiCorp Building), and came across the series. Even though I hadn’t read any of the novels, by this point I had seen the movie, starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, and a scene-stealing Kirsten Dunst. I really enjoyed it (and still do), so I thought I’d give the series a try. I proceeded to read all of the volumes then in print, and then bought each new book on day of release.
I didn’t think the first novel was perfect, and I found the fact that it was written as a conversation slightly strange – I was young and not very well-read or refined at the time. Nevertheless, it planted the seed that has had me eagerly await any new book by Anne Rice ever since. I consider the first two sequels, The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned, as one of my five favourite novels of all time (I can’t read one without immediately reading the next, so I consider them as a single book).
Time to get to the point of the post: I have also been reviewing books for almost seven years, and movies and music for a few years more than that. I therefore found this post on Anne Rice’s Facebook feed, attached to a link, rather interesting:
Interview with the Vampire was actually a flop when it was published, severely hurt by a negative New York Times review by Leo Braudy. I’m not sure a review can kill a book today. But this was 1976, a different world. And a first novel, especially a very unusual one, was I think tragically vulnerable to the power of the Times… Now 37 years later Interview is (I’m grateful to say) an unqualified success and is still in print in hardcover as well as in paperback…
Sadly, the review is behind the New York Times pay-wall (which I still couldn’t read, despite supposedly having access to a specific number of articles per month…). Nevertheless, and perhaps a little strangely, Barnes & Noble’s listing for the book has the following quotation from Leo Braudy, apparently from “Books of the Century, The New York Times, May, 1976”:
“Anne Rice’s publishers mention the Collector and the Other, but it is really The Exorcist to which Interview with the Vampire should be compared, and both novelist William Peter Blatty and filmmaker William Friedkin, whatever their faults did it much better... The publicity tells us Rice is a ‘dazzling storyteller.’ But there is no story here, only a series of sometimes effective but always essentially static tableaus out of Roger Corman films, and some self-conscious soliloquizing out of Spider-Man comics, all wrapped in a ballooning, pompous language.”
I thought it was interesting that Rice said she’s “not sure a review can kill a book today”. I think she’s probably right. Not only is the internet allowing critiques, criticism and praise to spread all over the world, but also the fact that negative reviews only seem to generate extra interest in books. Take two (admittedly unusual) examples: 50 Shades of Grey, or Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (which got, effectively, a bad review from the Vatican = publisher’s Holy Grail).
I also think Braudy is wrong his statement that “there is no story” in the novel. There’s quite a lot, actually. Yes, it’s “static”: it’s a book-length interview. What was he expecting? I don’t understand the Spider-Man connection, but it stands out, no? I don’t know the other references he presents, so I can’t speak to those. The connection to The Exorcist is an interesting one, but I don’t know either the book or movie version of that story well enough.
I’m sure this would have been a more interesting post if I’d had access to the review, but there we go [and if I hadn’t been writing it during a bout of insomnia, at 3:30am]. I’ll keep trying to get the text, and see if it adds anything to the discussion. Or, at the very least, offer some interesting quotations from it as/when I find them.
What do you think? Can negative reviews kill books today? If not, why not?
A victim to my unsettled mind
Arrested by the Ald, scholar Bon Ugane and merwoman Leki Borle find themselves on a prison ship bound for the island of Skythe – a barren land and the site of long-ago wars. Warped and ruined by the ancient conflict, survival on the island is tough and its original inhabitants are neither friendly nor entirely still human. But something else waits on the island, a living weapon whose very existence is a heresy. Destroyed many years ago, it silently begins to clutch at life once more.
I’m afraid I didn’t actually finish this novel. Not because it was bad, by any means. It just wasn’t clicking for me while I was reading it, and I ended up putting it down in favour of something else after just 100 pages. Here are some initial thoughts on what I did read.
It’s actually a novel that seem to revel in its world-building, without being too dense or excessive. I loved a lot of the elements that Lebbon has incorporated into his world, and his characters are readily likeable and sympathetic. I particularly liked Bon Ugane’s son, who is a genius but also slightly like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory in his single-minded thirst for knowledge and slight awkwardness. The opening scenes that detail Bon Ugane and Leki Borle’s trip to Skythe are great, and to begin with I was hooked. But, sadly, I’m just too distracted at the moment to dive into an entirely new world, I think.
The Heretic Land is just the right amount of dark, which is certainly my preferred ambience. It has everything from a devastated prison island surrounded by lethal seas, religious and political persecution, illegal magic, a hidden history, and plenty of other shenanigans going on to slake the thirst of any fantasy fan. The author’s prose is fluid but not exactly quickly-paced, which may have been why I didn’t feel like I was engaging with it.
Anyway. I will most likely come back to this novel in the future, and will hopefully write a proper review when I do. But, at this point in time, I’m just not in the mood for it. Maybe I need some more variation? A couple of novels outside of the fantasy genre (which has dominated of late). Some thrillers and sci-fi, perhaps.
I haven’t seen anyone else mention it on their blogs or anywhere else, really – if you’ve read it, feel free to add some of your own comments below.
I recently read the first volume in Brian Michael Bendis’s first run on New Avengers. I have also read the first couple of issues in his new Avengers Assemble series. Nevertheless, I have no frikkin’ clue which to read next, or even if I should bother reading more of Bendis’s various Avengers-related series.
This is not a statement on their quality – I really enjoyed both New Avengers (the premise, writing and especially artwork are pretty great) and Avengers Assemble (a lot of fun and a really interesting lead-off story and villain). It’s just, well, I have no idea how I’m supposed to read them all. There are just so many, and they seem to be a bit of a mess for new readers…
New Avengers Volume 1 (2005) & Volume 1 (2011)
