A Gem!

Stephen King has deceived me again. How can the man write an entire book on what makes a good novel and still not be able to recognize a bad one when he sees it?

"I'm not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they're wearing (I find wardrobe inventory particularly irritating; if I want to read descriptions of clothes, I can always get a J. Crew catalogue.)"

"It's also important to remember it's not about the setting, anyway - it's about the story, it's always about the story...In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it "got boring" the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling."

 "In medias res necessitates flashbacks, which strike me as boring and sort of corny...As a reader I'm much more interested in what's going to happen than what all ready did."

"The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn't very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don't get carried away with the rest. Long life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour before closing time, and if you are buying."

He wrote all that in On Writing back in 2000 but apparently that's too far back for him to remember since King's the reason Ron McLarty's awful, flashback ridden, The Memory of Running crawled out of the dark bottom drawer where it had been shoved years ago and into the light of day. McLarty writes like a man who's just downed five double sugar coffees. He can not complete a scene without interrupting it with another scene that gets interrupted by some pointless recollection. Have you ever tried to watch a movie on TV but had to give up because of the commercial breaks every five minutes? That's The Memory of Running  in a nutshell. I won't summarize it for you; really there's nothing to summarize.

I listened to this book in audio format while at work. I had surgery two weeks ago and am just getting back into being on my feet for 8 hours straight instead of huddled on the end of my bed and could really have used a distraction. I got one in a way. After four and a half hours of McLarty's tedious reading my brain tuned out his latest sex dream and I started thinking about why it is I like Fantasy so much better than "mainstream literature".

Real life is not boring. This is something Fantasy knows but which Literature strives to deny. Literature consists of a character sitting around on park benches and in cafes reminiscing about their repressed sexual desire for their dead sister. If there is anything going on like a plague, war, tsunami, fire, flood, anything at all it is downplayed in favor of exploring the character's "inner life". Since real life is allegedly boring and dreary we need the endless yammer of this self-absorbed conscious to make it all "meaningful", "inspirational" and "poetic" in the face of life's inherent pointlessness.

Sometimes, if the Literature is trying to be "mainstream", it will address an Issue (with a capital "i") such as Race or Gender or Obesity. Then thousands will flock to Amazon and Audible to write hundreds of eerily similar reviews about this "Gem!" or "This undiscovered Jewel!" (The book somehow remaining an undiscovered gem after 24 pages of reviews.) Reading these things always makes me wonder if these are paid guerrilla advertisements (how else can a review like "A Gem!" be posted and then instantly have a "4 out of 4 people found this review helpful" rating) or if people have just read so many bad reviews they've absorbed the formula without thinking.

I hear Fantasy criticized sometimes for being over dramatic, "read enough Fantasy and it seems like the world's about to end every day!"  I can see their point but I can't help thinking "Isn't it?" I can't visit a website without seeing a notice to donate to the tsunami victims in Japan or the tornado survivors in Alabama or the fund for people hit by record high flooding along the Mississippi river. In good Fantasy characters are part of a world, subject to all it's turmoil and striving to have an effect upon it. They don't have to struggle to make life interesting and meaningful, they're to busy trying to survive it. Fantasy is about what a person, a nation, a world needs to survive.

Literature is supposed to be about contemplation. It comes from a self satisfied culture where there is no question of basic needs like safety or food being met and random Catholic priests will pull your dumb fat butt out of the river if you happen to take a wrong turn and crash your Raleigh into a waterfall (don't ask). Since there's no hope of having any effect on the world there's nothing left to do but coast along and contemplate the deeper meaning of an obsession with large titties and the tedious tragedy of day to day life.

One of these genres always strikes me as dangerously detached from anything resembling the world we actually live in and it's not the one with dragons in it.

The Scavenger Hunt Quest

My favorite local used book store had a sale last weekend. I managed to stop by in between doing the grocery shopping and going to pick up my dad up at the airport. I bought basically any book I could lay hands on before rushing out again, time constraints not allowing for proper book browsing procedures. 

One of my purchases was a book for children I'd admired at work. We have a poster of the cover hanging up in Cataloging. It's a striking cover that I've noticed every time I've run across it on one of the shelves so when I saw it in the store last weekend I decided to buy it and find out what it was about. It's a kids' book, that's the best way I can think to describe it. It was written by a father who originally thought it up as a serial to entertain his two daughters. It's not bad but it was written by someone without a lot of experience with writing or the genre so it uses a lot of cliches.

It has one of those contrived puzzle quests you might remember from when you were a kid. The kind where the protagonist stumbles across a historical artifact or factoid that starts them on a hunt to find a series of puzzles and riddles hidden around the old and mysterious building/town/forest they live in. The clues are recovered from hiding spots using a combination of kitchen science ingenuity and advice from wise elders in spectacles. Over the course of the hunt the protagonist will unearth a conspiracy/invasion/theft that will provide the suspense and danger. Both plots can only be resolved by the piecing together of the clues in time to thwart the conspiracy/invasion/theft and solve the ancient mystery. They make these for adults too only with more sex and international travel.

The point of these kinds of quests is to add suspense and make the reader an active participant in the story. The problem is that the clues and eureka moments often feel either too obvious or improbably convoluted. The reader, even a young reader, can be left wondering just why anyone would bother to do all this? If you really wanted to hide a dangerous magic artifact why would you leave a series of clues at all, let alone ones simple enough for a 12 year old to solve? Why can't any of these bad guys figure out these grammar school scavenger hunts themselves? The key from the author's perspective is to move the story along too fast for the reader to get around to asking any questions until the book is finished.

My favorite puzzle hunt book is Redwall by Brian Jacques. I can almost buy the basic premise of it too. Riddles were in fashion during the heyday of abbeys and I can see why an aging ex-warrior monk might amuse himself hiding clues around the abbey he was helping to build. My least favorite (leaving aside Dan Brown's books which I don't even want to talk about) is Harry Potter. I read the first one when I was eleven and really enjoyed it up until the end. Part of what I'd loved about reading that book was the sneaking around and defying the teachers (I was never a big fan of school). The way the defense of the sorcerer's stone was setup so specifically for each kid made it obvious to me that they had been manipulated into confronting Voldemort all along. Dumbledore's last minute awarding of the House points confirmed it. Not only was he awarding them like good lapdogs he was fomenting conflict between Gryffindors and Slytherins for his secret vendetta. It amazed me that Harry seemed to miss this. Obviously he was being trained all along to destroy horcruxes or whatever they were (I quit reading after book 6) from day one.

Which got me thinking after I finished reading this latest addition to contrived scavenger hunt literature. If you were a mystical hero of old caught in the web of fate and you knew there was going to be a little kid coming along to follow in your footsteps and you wanted to ease them gradually into the role you might decide to leave them a scavenger hunt. Kids love scavenger hunts, that's precisely why they're used so often in grammar school. It's a way of simultaneously exciting their interest in the topic, increasing their geographic and historical knowledge, and building their self confidence. You could leave clues under tables and above mantles and have adults miss them for years and years because adults generally don't look in those kinds of places whereas they're the first place a kid would look. That was how I discovered all the enlightening messages my uncles had left in magic marker in my grandparents' house when I was little. If you allow for the idea of fate then these puzzle hunt stories actually make perfect.

I still don't buy it in a Dan Brown novel though.

Note: You've probably noticed it's not Monday. If you've read my previous entry you might recall that I decided to update new posts every Monday. Well last week there was a family crisis that kept be busy Sunday and Monday and I don't have a lot of time during the rest of the week. Fortunately that's wrapped up and now everyone's more or less healthy. I'm still changing the schedule to whenever I do have time.

Preamble

Well I've never been wonderful at introducing myself but I will do my best. I make my living shipping books to libraries all over the world but my passion is reading them and discussing them. I know my tastes do not fall along any established pattern which makes it hard for me to find book reviewers I can trust. The trouble with reviews is that stars and numbers can't explain the power of a narrative and user reviews on Amazon and Audible are posted by many people with a wide variety of tastes and expectations. The only way to judge a review is to get to know the reviewer, whether you are weighing the opinion of your friend or the guy who writes the side bars for your local paper. I am looking for more people to discuss books with, fantasy novels in particular but really anything odd will do. To that end, I am going to make my tastes known by posting a short essay every Monday. At least that is the plan for now, we'll see how it goes. I shall have to find time to read a book this week.