Second Breakfast

Alan got turned on to Neil Gaiman’s fiction a while back, and has enjoyed everything he’s read from him. He had mentioned to me that he had read some of the Sandman comics, or thought they were cool, so I got him the big bound “Ultimate Sandman: Volume 1″ for Christmas.

Amusingly I had a geeky-but-cute young guy working at Borders say to me “Wow, you give nice presents. Will you buy a present for me?” I told him that he’d have to be married to me to get such nice presents, and that I already had one husband and wasn’t looking for another. Hey, if you’re gonna ask…

I very much enjoyed Gaiman’s “Good Omens” (co-authored with Terry Pratchett), although I found the ending to be somewhat unsatsifying. But his narrative style is reminiscent of the best moments of Douglas Adams, and his humor is laugh-out-loud funny.

Neverwhere actually started as a television project for the BBC, and was crafted into a book later. This is somewhat of a landmark in the urban fantasy sub-genre, and can be placed alongside “Little, Big” by John Crowley (a book that I passionately love but haven’t reviewed here because I haven’t re-read it apparently since I started this project) and Mark Helprin’s “Winter’s Tale” (also beautiful but one I haven’t read in many years). Gaiman’s style is a bit “edgier” and darker than Crowley or Helprin though.
The basic conceit of the book is that there is a world of “London Below” living alongside (or underneath) “London Above”. “Above” is the world that you and I know, while “Below” is a fantastic world peopled by people who fall through the cracks of the everyday world: the homeless, the destitute, the mad. Our entrance into this world is through our hero, Richard Mayhew, who through an unexpected act of kindness finds himself thrust into this dangerous netherworld, and suddenly invisible in the world above. Through acts of heroism and self-sacrifice he is able to reclaim his former life, but must ultimately decide whether it is a life worth reclaiming.

While none of this material is revolutionary in its originality (I felt lots of inspiration from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “Beauty and the Beast”) Gaiman definitely makes the ideas his own, and the result is the kind of writing that is satisfying and begs for a continuation. His best invention is probably Croup and Vandermar, the pair of relentless assassins whose actions drive the book forward. While a short book, there’s a lot here to like.

Similarly, Stardust is Gaiman’s recasting of the “fairy story” in his own terms.  This is another heroic quest novel, told with the mordant, detached wit that is the hallmark of Gaiman’s writing.  Young Tristan Thorn makes a rash promise to his young love to bring back the fallen star they both observe, and to fulfill that promise sets off to Faeire, only to discover that the star is actually a young woman.  This sets him on a dangerous quest, at the end of which he must make an important choice.
Actually both books are quite similar in tone and content, although Stardust has a slightly more “Victorian” air in the prose and the plotting, appropriate for its time period.  These could be read together as two incarnations of the same idea.  Alan liked Neverwhere better than Stardust, and I think I agree.  Stardust didn’t leave me wanting much more, although I think Neverwhere could have an entertaining sequel.

My husband bought this for me for Christmas (”something not on your list”), so I felt compelled to want to like this book. I had of course seen it in the bookstores, and heard the story of the precocious teenage author Paolini. For that reason alone (yes I’m that petty) I avoided it (excess precociousness gives me a headache).

And of course recently the movie version of the book was produced, and the reviews have been mostly awful (as one child viewer reportedly asked his father in tears “Daddy, why did they do that to my book? I liked the book!”).
Within the first few pages what struck me most was the terrible quality of the prose (almost as bad as Terry Brooks, for whom every noun must be matched with an adjective) and the dialog. There’s a reason that good writers 1) read a lot of literature, 2) write a lot, and 3) tend to be old. It takes time and lots of practice to develop the ability to generate good prose, much less beautiful prose. Genre authors have to be doubly careful, and should read outside of their genre. It feels to me like Paolini has had none of those benefits so far.

The other problem he has is that he’s struggling with the “Tolkien problem” in the large. How do you write heroic fantasy without being too derivative of the wonderful (and not-so-wonderful) exemplars that have likely inspired you? Of course its seemingly-impossible to write anything new under the sun, so you need a double measure of skill to make the material your own, and inform it with your own ideas. I don’t see a lot of that going on in Paolini’s books.

So in Eragon we find a lot of George Lucas, a measure of Anne McCaffrey, a heaping helping of Tolkien, and a good bit of LeGuin. Stir well and there you go.  While this would have made a very impressive high school creative writing project, as a piece of commercial fiction its pretty bad.
So I just read some of the Amazon review before finishing this review. I swear I didn’t read them before I wrote this.

This is the second half of the Serpentwar Saga, the first half of which I commented on previously. The last two books in the series provide a fitting and exciting conclusion to the action, and I mostly enjoyed the plotting. Feist never wraps up all of his loose ends (there’s too much going on in Midkemia for that to be practical), and there’s of course another series in the wings.

The big themes here are typical to heroic fantasy - overcoming adversity, adventure, war, and resisting evil. In this case the unprovoked war that was impending in the first two books is finally unleashed, but we learn that there are far larger, darker powers at work, and Midkemia itself is once again in peril (this particular world seems to be on the verge of obliteration on a yearly basis). While there’s nothing incredibly original going on here, Feist’s writing is fun, absorbing and he knows what he’s doing.