Monthly Bookpost, February 2015
You Suck (A Love Story), by Christopher Moore
Being the chronicles of Abby Normal: Completely Fucked Servant Of The Vampire Flood
OMFG W00T! I have failed, left my duty undone, like so much dog poop on the gloaming sidewalk of the tragedy that is my life. Even as I sit here at the Metreon Starbucks, writing this, the froth slaves seem to move like silver-eyed zombies and my nonfat soy Amaretto Mochaccino has gone as bitter as snake bile (which is like the bitterest bile you can get). If there wasn't a totally hot guy two tables away acting like he doesn't notice me, I would weep--but real tears make your mascara run, so I'm staying chilly in my despair. your loss, cute guy, for I have been chosen. Suffer, bitch!
I read this one out loud to The Redhead on the road to and from a convention (having read its predecessor, Bloodsucking Fiends (see Bookpost, January 2014) during the same con the previous year).
The series continues, picking up the morning following the end of Bloodsucking Fiends. SPOILERS: Now Tommy and Jody are both vampires, and their relationship reminds me a bit of Chuck and Sarah on Chuck, where he's guilt-ridden and perpetually flustered and dramatic about The Beast Within, while she's completely in her natural element, feeling for the first time in her life what it's like to go down a city street at night without fear, knowing herself to be the most powerful being in the immediate environment.
there's more involvement with the Safeway night shift "animals"; a prostitute nicknamed "Blue" for the color she's dyed her skin; and a teenage Goth Girl named Abby Normal who is less baddass than she thinks, but who fangirl-squees at the thought of being Tommy and Jody's new minion.
It's everything I've come to expect from Christopher Moore, with the added attraction that, the more of his books I read, the more I get the inside jokes and references to other books that get salted throughout. Very high recommendations.
The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, by Garrett Mattingly
"It's very simple. It is well known that we fight in God's cause. So, when we meet the English, God will surely arrange matters so that we can grapple and board them, either by sending some strange freak of weather or, more likely, just by depriving the English of their wits. If we can come to close quarters, Spanish valor and Spanish steel (and the great masses of soldiers we shall have on board) will make our victory certain. But unless God helps us by a miracle the English, who have faster and handier ships than ours, and many more long-range guns, and who know their advantage just as well as we do, will never close with us at all, but stand aloof and knock us to pieces with their culverins, without our being able to do them any serious hurt. So," continued the captain, and one fancies a grim smile, "we are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle."
As Descartes is often called the "first modern philosopher", the epic battle between the English and Spanish in 1588 is often called the "first modern sea battle". Most histories I've read about it are anglocentric and portray the conflict as David slaying Goliath, the miraculous victory by can-do heroes over an overwhelming military force.
Mattingly, by contrast, depicts Spain's very effort as an act of pig-headed lunacy by the Spanish King Philip, in which the leader of the Armada did pretty much everything right and still never had a chance. Most of the Armada, says Mattingly, was barely seaworthy, had shorter-range guns, and was crowded with soldiers who wanted to board the enemy, and who sank like stones when the enemy shot the ships down from afar. Not to mention that the English were by their own shores and had the weather gauge. And that the Spanish ran out of ammunition and fresh water, and lost more ships due to freak storms before and after the battle. As Mattingly describes it, the Spanish rout was a foregone conclusion, described with relentless inevitability from the death of Mary Queen of Scots to the assassination of the duke de Guise by Henry III (whose weakness and ultimate loss of Paris, as well as Parma's campaign in the Netherlands, make intriguing subplots).
In fact, a lot of Mattingly's efforts are devoted to telling us that what we learned in school about the Armada is wrong. It did not mark "the beginning of the end of Spanish political dominance" (which apparently remained about the same through most of the 17th century) or "the transition of sea power from Spain to France"; the Spanish who returned via the Irish coast apparently neither were murdered in droves after being wrecked, nor did they rape hundreds of Irish women resulting in dark-haired, aquiline-profiled "black Irish" people. And so forth.
It reads almost like an exciting historical novel. Very high recommendations.
Objections to the Meditations, and Replies, by Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, et al
I thought that what I had before me was not just one man's essay but the balanced and careful assessment that your entire Society had formed of my views. When I read the essay, however, I was astounded to realize that I would have to revise my view completely. For if it had come from an author governed by the same spirit that animates your whole Society then I would have found within it more--or at least, no less--kindness, gentleness and modesty than I have found in the comments of those laymen who have written to me about my work. But instead, anyone comparing it with other people's objections to my Meditations would be sure to think that it was these other critics' work that had been composed by those in holy orders, and to regard this essay as having been written with such bitterness as would be unseemly even for a layman, let alone one whose vows require him to be more virtuous than ordinary men...I found no learning at all (unless we count familiarity with the kind of Latin used by the pleds of ancient Rome as learning), no reasoning (except what was either invalid or false), and a sharpness of intellect more suited to a bricklayer than to a Jesuit priest.
See last month's Book post for more Descartes and Gassendi. As I wrote last month, Descartes' Discourse and Meditations are two short works which, for Western Humanities purposes, encompass Descartes. But he also invited critical responses to the Meditations, which he collected and published, with his replies, in a much longer work which really does seem like the first comments section ever, with about as much nose-tweaking and other snark. Death threats are mercifully absent, but you can almost see between the lines the most learned men of the age saying "You suck, and I hate all the bands you like!"
At issue is the alleged supremacy of mind over body, the importance of the "I think, therefore I exist" doctrine, the unconvincing "proof" of the existence of God from which the entire decision to trust other things is derived, and the many opportunities for willful misrepresentation and ridicule in Descartes' experiment with doubting all things. Most of Descartes' critics choose to interpret his momentary "suppose for the sake of argument that sensory input cannot be trusted' as if it were a permanent renunciation of trust in the senses, whereas Descartes was really searching for, and believed he had found, a reason based on pure thought, that would enable him to go back and re-establish the senses as a basis for learning. It seems to me that the critics were being fatuous. Similarly, there is a lot of taunting about what constitutes a "clear and distinct idea" and whether an atheist is allowed to think. All of these deliberately miss the point, and so the critics come out looking bad. On the other hand, Descartes' replies, which range from patient repetition of the obvious, to snark, to appeals to mysticism, still fail to convince, particularly where the existence of God is concerned. As with most comments sections, everybody loses.
Also, unless you're much of a philosopher, your reaction as a reader is likely to be, "Why should anyone care about this?"
The section with Hobbes is the most back-and-forth; the section with Gassendi, in which they are reduced to sticking out their tongues and addressing each other with mock politeness as "O Mind" and "O Flesh", is the most amusing; the section with Bourdin the most bitter. As with most Descartes, it's very readable as philosophy goes.
Bundori & The Way of the Traitor, by Laura Joh Rowland; The Trip to Jerusalem & Nine Giants, by Edward Marston
"This murder constitutes an, ahh, act of war against the Tokugawa clan. The offender must be caught and punished promptly. We cannot let him get away with such a heinous affront to our regime, or let the daimyo think us vulnerable to attack. Therefore, I am granting you the full cooperation and assistance of the, ahh, police force. All the necessary orders have been given.
"In addition", the shogun continued, "you will have the services of the castle's chief shrine attendant, a mystic who has the power to communicate with the spirit world. I have ordered her sent directly to your residence. Now, Sosakan Sano, go and begin your inquiries at once."
--from Bundori
Westfield's Men left the pulsing world of London for the calmer pastures of Middlesex. Pangs of regret troubled them immediately. Once outside the city gates they headed due north for Shoreditch where they passed the Curtain and then the Theatre, two custom-built playhouses in which they had given memorable performances on a number of occasions. Constructed outside the city boundary in order to escape the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor and his Council, the two theatres were busy, boisterous, bustling centres of entertainment and hordes flocked to them. There would be no such havens for Westfield's Men on their travels. The sophisticated facilities of a real playhouse would give way to the exigencies of an inn yard or the limitations of a room in a private house. In purely artistic terms, touring was no pilgrimage. It was a sudden fall from grace.
---from The Trip to Jerusalem
Like most of his fellow Japanese, he had no experience of the outside world. He instinctively distrusted and feared foreigners--especially the white barbarians, subject of much hearsay. The Dutch were monstrous giants who stank of the cow's milk they drank; they had huge round eyes like a dog's, and wore high heeled shoes because the backs of their doglike feet didn't touch the ground; they worshipped wealth, and would kill for it.
--from The Way of the Traitor
Firethorn hit the ground with a thud that echoed through the taut silence. His outstretched fingertips made a last contact with the pale and forlorn hand of his bride. Anguished servants entered and the two bodies were lifted onto biers with reverential care before being carried out to solemn music. The noble Count Orlando and his adored young Countess would share a marriage bed in the family vault. Harrowed by the tragedy and caught up in its full implications, the onlookers did not dare to move or speak. Mute distress enfolded them.
--from The Nine Giants
Her clothes were like the outer defenses of a castle. I had to gaze hard to see past them, to the shield shaped face, the golden brown eyes under faint, arched eyebrows; the well-defined mouth. These too were defenses of a kind, for they told one nothing. Her face was truly a shield. The eyes were watchful, determined to reveal nothing of their owner's thoughts; the eyebrows were immobile; the shapely mouth devoid of passion. She looked more like a faery being than a human one.
--from To Shield the Queen
Laura Joh Rowland's series remains one of the most suspenseful I've read in a long time; it does not depend on whodunnit so much as on the challenge of bringing down corrupt villains who greatly outrank the detective, and and who will abuse the legal and the underworld systems to stop the investigation and disgrace him . The protocol of the Japanese court is unique to Japan, but westerners might imagine, by comparison, a rookie American police officer whose investigations lead to a US Senator or the corporate billionaire who owns the state; a cop who insists on doing it by the book while having to defy cease-investigation orders from the police chief and mayor on threat of demotion, termination and jail. Bundori involves a serial killer who takes the heads of the victims as war trophies. Sano Ichiro, devoted to the Bushido code of the samurai, must solve the case against the sabotage and violent opposition of the shogun's evil Chamberlain. The Way of the Traitor takes Sano to Nagasaki, a completely new snakepit of corruption where unfair death sentences are scattered like confetti, and the only port where commerce with other countries is conducted. This is the first Sano book to mention Europe, and gives a look at Europe as seen through Asian eyes. Again, both books are more than usually gripping.
By the third volume of Edward Marston's Westfield's Men series, I was getting a sense for the basic plot structure, not as readily discernible since the action shifts frequently between the perspectives of the various characters: The stage-manager/detective Nick Bracewell; the lead player Firethorne; the low comedian Barnaby Gill; the playwright/romantic lead Edmund Hoode; many supporting characters from inside and outside the playing company. In general, the story consists of a panorama of life in Merrie England, and the plot is a farfetched excuse to bring it all together, with one part of the solution guessable by deduction and another part thrown like an improbable curveball. Also, the titles are all derived from the names of actual Ye Olde Englishe Tavernes. The Trip to Jerusalem is such a public house in York, that is never actually reached by the company on their long trip from plague-ravaged London that begins with the author aiming a huge neon pointy-finger at the identity of a man hanged for treason right as the players happen to be leaving town, and ends with the sorting out of the many people encountered en route to York who just happen to be connected with him. The Nine Giants is even more far-fetched, but has at least one potentially foreseeable plot twist that surprised me. There are problems between the outgoing and incoming Lord Mayors of London; corruption (but what, exactly?); Bad Things happening (but which faction is responsible?); attacks on a young apprentice; as well as rowdy romances and business dealings that threaten the existence of Westfield's Men entirely. Bracewell the stage manager, of course, finds the improbable threads linking them all together.
Finally, the first in a new series goes back to the 16th Century as Fiona Buckley's heroine Ursual Blanchard, born out of wedlock, orphaned and raised by her century's equivalent of Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia, later widowed at a young age with a baby to feed and no money--Ursual Blanchard begins a turn of fortune and a term of service as a lady in waiting to young Queen Elizabeth and as an informant to William Cecil. Her first adventure, in To Shield the Queen, draws on the true untimely death of the wife of Sir Robert Dudley, an early paramour of the Queen--a death that, because of the scandalous rumor that Dudley had plotted it, a rumor that was already circulating even before her death, may have changed history by making it impossible for Dudley to continue to be seen with Her Majesty. Buckley has taken the known facts and speculated plausibly about what really happened. I should have read this series last year, but I expect I'll come back for more regardless.
The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch
I saw a monster rising from the waves. I can describe this in no other way. Out of a perfectly calm empty sea, at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile (or less), I saw an immense creature break the surface and arch itself upward. At first it looked like a black snake, then a long thickening body with a ridgy spiny back followed the elongated neck. There was something which might have been a flipper or perhaps a fin. I could not see the whole of the creature, but the remainder of its body, or perhaps a long tail, disturbed the foaming water round the base of what had now risen from the sea to a height of (as it seemed) twenty or thirty feet. The creature then coiled itself so that the long neck circled twice, bringing the now conspicuous head low down above the surface of the sea. I could see the sky through the coils. I could also see the head with remarkable clarity, a kind of crested snake's head, green-eyed, the mouth opening to show teeth and a pink interior. The head and neck glistened with a blue sheen. Then in a moment the whole thing collapsed, the coils fell, the undulating back still broke the water, and then there was nothing but a great foaming swirling pool where the creature had vanished.
This one had a powerful emotional effect on me in particular, as it addresses the sort of stunted character development I have spent half my life rejecting and running away from, and holds to my psyche a sort of warped fun house mirror image of myself, in the same way A Christmas Carol might do to a former miser still struggling with fear of poverty or lost worth.
The unreliable narrator is a pathetic, horrible train wreck of a man who ruins lives while believing himself to be a hero or a victim. He toys with the affections of women who want him, and obsessively, feverishly stalks women who don't want him. He indulges in paranoid conspiracy theories. He's never actually been married (or, probably, seen a B-grade movie, though Murdoch doesn't say so explicitly), has no children, and has created nothing of permanence, his primary talents having been food and acting. Like Scrooge, he is in danger of dying friendless and inconsequential.
As The Sea, The Sea begins, the narrator has retired from an acting career to a remote, gloomy seaside house without electricity. Maybe the place is haunted, or maybe he's slowly going nuts, but he sees sea monsters and ghosts, and things in his house move around and break. He is visited by friends and family who he does not want to see, and I kept waiting to see which of them would turn out to be ghosts as well, as their appearance is reminiscent of Scrooge's visitations.
Then he discovers that a woman in the village is the first woman he ever believes he loved, now grown considerably older and married. It's ambiguous whether she has feelings for him, but the time for renewing their love is definitely long past (think of the final scenes from The Remains of the Day, except imagine that the old butler decides at the very end to throw away all and pursue this lost love by any and all means necessary, to get her away from the "no-good husband"), at which point the plot becomes possibly triggery for extreme stalking behavior.
Many readers are going to emphatically hate Charles Arrowby, the narrator, and find his behavior inexcusable, period. Others will, like me, want to reach into the pages and shake sense into him, warn him about the cliff he's rushing toward. I felt excruciating anguish because, although Arrowby is much older than I am now, I could not help but identify him with my younger self, the self that was old enough to know better but didn't, the self that made me and those I believed I loved miserable, the self I chose to be different from but that still scares me because he's inside me somewhere, trying to fuck up my life.
See my November 2012 Bookpost for Murdoch's Under the Net, which was downright comic. The Sea, The Sea is nothing like it. It is gripping, and tha characterization is done very, uncomfortably, well.
De Corpore, by Thomas Hobbes
Philosophy is such knowledge of effects or appearances, as we acquire by true ratiocination from the knowledge we have first of their causes or generation. And again, of such causes or generations as may be from knowing first their effects.
By ratiocination, I mean computation. Now to compute, is either to collect the sum of many things that are added together, or to know what remains when one thing is taken out of another. Ratiocination, therefore, is the same with addition or subtraction; and if any man add multiplication and division, I will not be against it, seeing multiplication is nothing but addition of equals one to another, and division nothing but a subtraction of equals one from another, as often as is possible. So that all ratiocination is comprehended in these two operations of the mind, addition and subtraction.
And now I know why Hobbes is mostly remembered for Leviathan. In De Corpore, Hobbes tries to map out learning the way Francis Bacon did in The Advancement of Learning, with maybe even more meandering, and not in the context of "This is what learning is" but in defining philosophy as the study of "bodies in motion." A large part of the book consists of mathematical proofs and musings on physics. It's more or less easy to read, but doesn't say much that isn't covered in better books.
Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami
In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains--flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be seventeen years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it wound up. almost.
Yet another book that consists of mostly a character study of a free-spirited, emotional nonconformist who is apparently fated to be crushed under the wheels of dull regular society. More than anything, it reminded me of other books. Many of them. Especially John Green novels in which the girl, loved by the narrator, disappears leaving the narrator to have The Feels over her. Or possibly an alternate, Japanese Lolita in which the narrator behaves better, stifling his creepy feelings while watching helplessly as a female Quilty carries her off. In Sputnik Sweetheart (so named because the older female lover confuses Sputnik with Beatnik), the male narrator is 25 and the manic dreamgirl 22; still, I had to keep reminding myself of this because he is a teacher and she a student. His soul is old; hers is young and flighty. She's in love with the older woman but he's the one she calls at midnight with her emo crises, which he listens to stoically, even when he hasn't eaten all day and is exhausted.
And then she's gone. Not necessarily dead. Not necessarily run off to flee "all this". But maybe a little of each. It gets philosophical.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts
Being the chronicles of Abby Normal: Completely Fucked Servant Of The Vampire Flood
OMFG W00T! I have failed, left my duty undone, like so much dog poop on the gloaming sidewalk of the tragedy that is my life. Even as I sit here at the Metreon Starbucks, writing this, the froth slaves seem to move like silver-eyed zombies and my nonfat soy Amaretto Mochaccino has gone as bitter as snake bile (which is like the bitterest bile you can get). If there wasn't a totally hot guy two tables away acting like he doesn't notice me, I would weep--but real tears make your mascara run, so I'm staying chilly in my despair. your loss, cute guy, for I have been chosen. Suffer, bitch!
I read this one out loud to The Redhead on the road to and from a convention (having read its predecessor, Bloodsucking Fiends (see Bookpost, January 2014) during the same con the previous year).
The series continues, picking up the morning following the end of Bloodsucking Fiends. SPOILERS: Now Tommy and Jody are both vampires, and their relationship reminds me a bit of Chuck and Sarah on Chuck, where he's guilt-ridden and perpetually flustered and dramatic about The Beast Within, while she's completely in her natural element, feeling for the first time in her life what it's like to go down a city street at night without fear, knowing herself to be the most powerful being in the immediate environment.
there's more involvement with the Safeway night shift "animals"; a prostitute nicknamed "Blue" for the color she's dyed her skin; and a teenage Goth Girl named Abby Normal who is less baddass than she thinks, but who fangirl-squees at the thought of being Tommy and Jody's new minion.
It's everything I've come to expect from Christopher Moore, with the added attraction that, the more of his books I read, the more I get the inside jokes and references to other books that get salted throughout. Very high recommendations.
The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, by Garrett Mattingly
"It's very simple. It is well known that we fight in God's cause. So, when we meet the English, God will surely arrange matters so that we can grapple and board them, either by sending some strange freak of weather or, more likely, just by depriving the English of their wits. If we can come to close quarters, Spanish valor and Spanish steel (and the great masses of soldiers we shall have on board) will make our victory certain. But unless God helps us by a miracle the English, who have faster and handier ships than ours, and many more long-range guns, and who know their advantage just as well as we do, will never close with us at all, but stand aloof and knock us to pieces with their culverins, without our being able to do them any serious hurt. So," continued the captain, and one fancies a grim smile, "we are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle."
As Descartes is often called the "first modern philosopher", the epic battle between the English and Spanish in 1588 is often called the "first modern sea battle". Most histories I've read about it are anglocentric and portray the conflict as David slaying Goliath, the miraculous victory by can-do heroes over an overwhelming military force.
Mattingly, by contrast, depicts Spain's very effort as an act of pig-headed lunacy by the Spanish King Philip, in which the leader of the Armada did pretty much everything right and still never had a chance. Most of the Armada, says Mattingly, was barely seaworthy, had shorter-range guns, and was crowded with soldiers who wanted to board the enemy, and who sank like stones when the enemy shot the ships down from afar. Not to mention that the English were by their own shores and had the weather gauge. And that the Spanish ran out of ammunition and fresh water, and lost more ships due to freak storms before and after the battle. As Mattingly describes it, the Spanish rout was a foregone conclusion, described with relentless inevitability from the death of Mary Queen of Scots to the assassination of the duke de Guise by Henry III (whose weakness and ultimate loss of Paris, as well as Parma's campaign in the Netherlands, make intriguing subplots).
In fact, a lot of Mattingly's efforts are devoted to telling us that what we learned in school about the Armada is wrong. It did not mark "the beginning of the end of Spanish political dominance" (which apparently remained about the same through most of the 17th century) or "the transition of sea power from Spain to France"; the Spanish who returned via the Irish coast apparently neither were murdered in droves after being wrecked, nor did they rape hundreds of Irish women resulting in dark-haired, aquiline-profiled "black Irish" people. And so forth.
It reads almost like an exciting historical novel. Very high recommendations.
Objections to the Meditations, and Replies, by Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, et al
I thought that what I had before me was not just one man's essay but the balanced and careful assessment that your entire Society had formed of my views. When I read the essay, however, I was astounded to realize that I would have to revise my view completely. For if it had come from an author governed by the same spirit that animates your whole Society then I would have found within it more--or at least, no less--kindness, gentleness and modesty than I have found in the comments of those laymen who have written to me about my work. But instead, anyone comparing it with other people's objections to my Meditations would be sure to think that it was these other critics' work that had been composed by those in holy orders, and to regard this essay as having been written with such bitterness as would be unseemly even for a layman, let alone one whose vows require him to be more virtuous than ordinary men...I found no learning at all (unless we count familiarity with the kind of Latin used by the pleds of ancient Rome as learning), no reasoning (except what was either invalid or false), and a sharpness of intellect more suited to a bricklayer than to a Jesuit priest.
See last month's Book post for more Descartes and Gassendi. As I wrote last month, Descartes' Discourse and Meditations are two short works which, for Western Humanities purposes, encompass Descartes. But he also invited critical responses to the Meditations, which he collected and published, with his replies, in a much longer work which really does seem like the first comments section ever, with about as much nose-tweaking and other snark. Death threats are mercifully absent, but you can almost see between the lines the most learned men of the age saying "You suck, and I hate all the bands you like!"
At issue is the alleged supremacy of mind over body, the importance of the "I think, therefore I exist" doctrine, the unconvincing "proof" of the existence of God from which the entire decision to trust other things is derived, and the many opportunities for willful misrepresentation and ridicule in Descartes' experiment with doubting all things. Most of Descartes' critics choose to interpret his momentary "suppose for the sake of argument that sensory input cannot be trusted' as if it were a permanent renunciation of trust in the senses, whereas Descartes was really searching for, and believed he had found, a reason based on pure thought, that would enable him to go back and re-establish the senses as a basis for learning. It seems to me that the critics were being fatuous. Similarly, there is a lot of taunting about what constitutes a "clear and distinct idea" and whether an atheist is allowed to think. All of these deliberately miss the point, and so the critics come out looking bad. On the other hand, Descartes' replies, which range from patient repetition of the obvious, to snark, to appeals to mysticism, still fail to convince, particularly where the existence of God is concerned. As with most comments sections, everybody loses.
Also, unless you're much of a philosopher, your reaction as a reader is likely to be, "Why should anyone care about this?"
The section with Hobbes is the most back-and-forth; the section with Gassendi, in which they are reduced to sticking out their tongues and addressing each other with mock politeness as "O Mind" and "O Flesh", is the most amusing; the section with Bourdin the most bitter. As with most Descartes, it's very readable as philosophy goes.
Bundori & The Way of the Traitor, by Laura Joh Rowland; The Trip to Jerusalem & Nine Giants, by Edward Marston
"This murder constitutes an, ahh, act of war against the Tokugawa clan. The offender must be caught and punished promptly. We cannot let him get away with such a heinous affront to our regime, or let the daimyo think us vulnerable to attack. Therefore, I am granting you the full cooperation and assistance of the, ahh, police force. All the necessary orders have been given.
"In addition", the shogun continued, "you will have the services of the castle's chief shrine attendant, a mystic who has the power to communicate with the spirit world. I have ordered her sent directly to your residence. Now, Sosakan Sano, go and begin your inquiries at once."
--from Bundori
Westfield's Men left the pulsing world of London for the calmer pastures of Middlesex. Pangs of regret troubled them immediately. Once outside the city gates they headed due north for Shoreditch where they passed the Curtain and then the Theatre, two custom-built playhouses in which they had given memorable performances on a number of occasions. Constructed outside the city boundary in order to escape the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor and his Council, the two theatres were busy, boisterous, bustling centres of entertainment and hordes flocked to them. There would be no such havens for Westfield's Men on their travels. The sophisticated facilities of a real playhouse would give way to the exigencies of an inn yard or the limitations of a room in a private house. In purely artistic terms, touring was no pilgrimage. It was a sudden fall from grace.
---from The Trip to Jerusalem
Like most of his fellow Japanese, he had no experience of the outside world. He instinctively distrusted and feared foreigners--especially the white barbarians, subject of much hearsay. The Dutch were monstrous giants who stank of the cow's milk they drank; they had huge round eyes like a dog's, and wore high heeled shoes because the backs of their doglike feet didn't touch the ground; they worshipped wealth, and would kill for it.
--from The Way of the Traitor
Firethorn hit the ground with a thud that echoed through the taut silence. His outstretched fingertips made a last contact with the pale and forlorn hand of his bride. Anguished servants entered and the two bodies were lifted onto biers with reverential care before being carried out to solemn music. The noble Count Orlando and his adored young Countess would share a marriage bed in the family vault. Harrowed by the tragedy and caught up in its full implications, the onlookers did not dare to move or speak. Mute distress enfolded them.
--from The Nine Giants
Her clothes were like the outer defenses of a castle. I had to gaze hard to see past them, to the shield shaped face, the golden brown eyes under faint, arched eyebrows; the well-defined mouth. These too were defenses of a kind, for they told one nothing. Her face was truly a shield. The eyes were watchful, determined to reveal nothing of their owner's thoughts; the eyebrows were immobile; the shapely mouth devoid of passion. She looked more like a faery being than a human one.
--from To Shield the Queen
Laura Joh Rowland's series remains one of the most suspenseful I've read in a long time; it does not depend on whodunnit so much as on the challenge of bringing down corrupt villains who greatly outrank the detective, and and who will abuse the legal and the underworld systems to stop the investigation and disgrace him . The protocol of the Japanese court is unique to Japan, but westerners might imagine, by comparison, a rookie American police officer whose investigations lead to a US Senator or the corporate billionaire who owns the state; a cop who insists on doing it by the book while having to defy cease-investigation orders from the police chief and mayor on threat of demotion, termination and jail. Bundori involves a serial killer who takes the heads of the victims as war trophies. Sano Ichiro, devoted to the Bushido code of the samurai, must solve the case against the sabotage and violent opposition of the shogun's evil Chamberlain. The Way of the Traitor takes Sano to Nagasaki, a completely new snakepit of corruption where unfair death sentences are scattered like confetti, and the only port where commerce with other countries is conducted. This is the first Sano book to mention Europe, and gives a look at Europe as seen through Asian eyes. Again, both books are more than usually gripping.
By the third volume of Edward Marston's Westfield's Men series, I was getting a sense for the basic plot structure, not as readily discernible since the action shifts frequently between the perspectives of the various characters: The stage-manager/detective Nick Bracewell; the lead player Firethorne; the low comedian Barnaby Gill; the playwright/romantic lead Edmund Hoode; many supporting characters from inside and outside the playing company. In general, the story consists of a panorama of life in Merrie England, and the plot is a farfetched excuse to bring it all together, with one part of the solution guessable by deduction and another part thrown like an improbable curveball. Also, the titles are all derived from the names of actual Ye Olde Englishe Tavernes. The Trip to Jerusalem is such a public house in York, that is never actually reached by the company on their long trip from plague-ravaged London that begins with the author aiming a huge neon pointy-finger at the identity of a man hanged for treason right as the players happen to be leaving town, and ends with the sorting out of the many people encountered en route to York who just happen to be connected with him. The Nine Giants is even more far-fetched, but has at least one potentially foreseeable plot twist that surprised me. There are problems between the outgoing and incoming Lord Mayors of London; corruption (but what, exactly?); Bad Things happening (but which faction is responsible?); attacks on a young apprentice; as well as rowdy romances and business dealings that threaten the existence of Westfield's Men entirely. Bracewell the stage manager, of course, finds the improbable threads linking them all together.
Finally, the first in a new series goes back to the 16th Century as Fiona Buckley's heroine Ursual Blanchard, born out of wedlock, orphaned and raised by her century's equivalent of Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia, later widowed at a young age with a baby to feed and no money--Ursual Blanchard begins a turn of fortune and a term of service as a lady in waiting to young Queen Elizabeth and as an informant to William Cecil. Her first adventure, in To Shield the Queen, draws on the true untimely death of the wife of Sir Robert Dudley, an early paramour of the Queen--a death that, because of the scandalous rumor that Dudley had plotted it, a rumor that was already circulating even before her death, may have changed history by making it impossible for Dudley to continue to be seen with Her Majesty. Buckley has taken the known facts and speculated plausibly about what really happened. I should have read this series last year, but I expect I'll come back for more regardless.
The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch
I saw a monster rising from the waves. I can describe this in no other way. Out of a perfectly calm empty sea, at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile (or less), I saw an immense creature break the surface and arch itself upward. At first it looked like a black snake, then a long thickening body with a ridgy spiny back followed the elongated neck. There was something which might have been a flipper or perhaps a fin. I could not see the whole of the creature, but the remainder of its body, or perhaps a long tail, disturbed the foaming water round the base of what had now risen from the sea to a height of (as it seemed) twenty or thirty feet. The creature then coiled itself so that the long neck circled twice, bringing the now conspicuous head low down above the surface of the sea. I could see the sky through the coils. I could also see the head with remarkable clarity, a kind of crested snake's head, green-eyed, the mouth opening to show teeth and a pink interior. The head and neck glistened with a blue sheen. Then in a moment the whole thing collapsed, the coils fell, the undulating back still broke the water, and then there was nothing but a great foaming swirling pool where the creature had vanished.
This one had a powerful emotional effect on me in particular, as it addresses the sort of stunted character development I have spent half my life rejecting and running away from, and holds to my psyche a sort of warped fun house mirror image of myself, in the same way A Christmas Carol might do to a former miser still struggling with fear of poverty or lost worth.
The unreliable narrator is a pathetic, horrible train wreck of a man who ruins lives while believing himself to be a hero or a victim. He toys with the affections of women who want him, and obsessively, feverishly stalks women who don't want him. He indulges in paranoid conspiracy theories. He's never actually been married (or, probably, seen a B-grade movie, though Murdoch doesn't say so explicitly), has no children, and has created nothing of permanence, his primary talents having been food and acting. Like Scrooge, he is in danger of dying friendless and inconsequential.
As The Sea, The Sea begins, the narrator has retired from an acting career to a remote, gloomy seaside house without electricity. Maybe the place is haunted, or maybe he's slowly going nuts, but he sees sea monsters and ghosts, and things in his house move around and break. He is visited by friends and family who he does not want to see, and I kept waiting to see which of them would turn out to be ghosts as well, as their appearance is reminiscent of Scrooge's visitations.
Then he discovers that a woman in the village is the first woman he ever believes he loved, now grown considerably older and married. It's ambiguous whether she has feelings for him, but the time for renewing their love is definitely long past (think of the final scenes from The Remains of the Day, except imagine that the old butler decides at the very end to throw away all and pursue this lost love by any and all means necessary, to get her away from the "no-good husband"), at which point the plot becomes possibly triggery for extreme stalking behavior.
Many readers are going to emphatically hate Charles Arrowby, the narrator, and find his behavior inexcusable, period. Others will, like me, want to reach into the pages and shake sense into him, warn him about the cliff he's rushing toward. I felt excruciating anguish because, although Arrowby is much older than I am now, I could not help but identify him with my younger self, the self that was old enough to know better but didn't, the self that made me and those I believed I loved miserable, the self I chose to be different from but that still scares me because he's inside me somewhere, trying to fuck up my life.
See my November 2012 Bookpost for Murdoch's Under the Net, which was downright comic. The Sea, The Sea is nothing like it. It is gripping, and tha characterization is done very, uncomfortably, well.
De Corpore, by Thomas Hobbes
Philosophy is such knowledge of effects or appearances, as we acquire by true ratiocination from the knowledge we have first of their causes or generation. And again, of such causes or generations as may be from knowing first their effects.
By ratiocination, I mean computation. Now to compute, is either to collect the sum of many things that are added together, or to know what remains when one thing is taken out of another. Ratiocination, therefore, is the same with addition or subtraction; and if any man add multiplication and division, I will not be against it, seeing multiplication is nothing but addition of equals one to another, and division nothing but a subtraction of equals one from another, as often as is possible. So that all ratiocination is comprehended in these two operations of the mind, addition and subtraction.
And now I know why Hobbes is mostly remembered for Leviathan. In De Corpore, Hobbes tries to map out learning the way Francis Bacon did in The Advancement of Learning, with maybe even more meandering, and not in the context of "This is what learning is" but in defining philosophy as the study of "bodies in motion." A large part of the book consists of mathematical proofs and musings on physics. It's more or less easy to read, but doesn't say much that isn't covered in better books.
Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami
In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains--flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be seventeen years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it wound up. almost.
Yet another book that consists of mostly a character study of a free-spirited, emotional nonconformist who is apparently fated to be crushed under the wheels of dull regular society. More than anything, it reminded me of other books. Many of them. Especially John Green novels in which the girl, loved by the narrator, disappears leaving the narrator to have The Feels over her. Or possibly an alternate, Japanese Lolita in which the narrator behaves better, stifling his creepy feelings while watching helplessly as a female Quilty carries her off. In Sputnik Sweetheart (so named because the older female lover confuses Sputnik with Beatnik), the male narrator is 25 and the manic dreamgirl 22; still, I had to keep reminding myself of this because he is a teacher and she a student. His soul is old; hers is young and flighty. She's in love with the older woman but he's the one she calls at midnight with her emo crises, which he listens to stoically, even when he hasn't eaten all day and is exhausted.
And then she's gone. Not necessarily dead. Not necessarily run off to flee "all this". But maybe a little of each. It gets philosophical.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts