Sunday, February 24, 2008

I Capture the Castle

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE (Dodie Smith) - Four Stars

Cassandra Mortmain and her family live in penniless poverty in a dilapidated castle in between-the-wars England. Her father is a famous author who released one sensational book (which, we are led to imagine, is something of a stylistic cross between Finnegan's Wake and Pale Fire) and then came down with an all-time case of writer's block. Her stepmother is an artist's model who loves being naked. Her older sister is a reclusive beauty who daydreams about becoming high society. Cassandra herself is an aspiring author who starts writing journals to become a better writer (the book is presented as a series of journals). A wealthy American family with two eligible bachelor sons becomes their new landlords and the scheming commences.

If you can make it through the first hundred pages of this novel, you've got it made. The book starts off terribly slowly, with rough character sketches and lots of descriptions of scenery (tangent... Descriptions of scenery do not bother me like they do Mo, but I'm finally beginning to understand her viewpoint: scenery seems to be a default "fall-back" for lesser authors when they can't think of anything better to write, excepting those stories where the scenery is so important to the plot that it can practically be considered an additional character, such as in the "Lord of the Rings" series). Once the Cotton family moves into Scoatney Hall, the book picks up steam and becomes very good (sometimes great) all the way to the end. In retrospect, I see that this was just another of Smith's numerous clever subtleties: the "writing" in the book gets better and better as the book progresses because it's supposed to reflect Cassandra's improving skill from practicing in her journals.

The book is very good because the characters are great. The characters are all very well-defined, with separate and distinct personalities. The plot requires no suspensions of disbelief: the characters act as people would act; the complexities of human relationships aren't always logical and rarely finish "neatly." The book is a must read for Anglophiles, full of British personality and particularly the dry, "arched eyebrows" style of British humor (which Smith occasionally deviates from with pointed bluntness, usually to surprising and humorous effect). In the end, however (and this is not meant to be a sexist comment), I think female readers will get more out of it than male readers. It does, after all, deal with a teenage girl's coming of age (complicated family life, first love or loves, etc.); and, even with as well I would consider myself at empathizing with women, there were several passages where I couldn't help but think I was missing out on some of the impact simply because I was male.
Ivy had on a pale grey suit, tight white gloves, and the brightest blue hat I ever saw, which accentuated the red in her cheeks. She is a good-looking girl. Enormous feet, though.

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Ubik

UBIK (Philip K. Dick) - Three Stars

I was expecting the Dick to be more... substantial.

Pardon my pompous comedy—I've already been accused once of being a sci-fi hating elitist—but I still have yet to read a fantasy writer that can actually WRITE. Write, like a Rushdie or an Irving (Kage Baker and Mary Doria Russell have come closest). When I saw Ubik on Time's list of the 100 greatest English language novels of the past 100 years, I was expecting a brilliantly executed novel. Instead, I found a moderately intriguing, well-conceived, but poorly-executed book that was much like any other sci-fi novel I've ever read, only with a bit more ingenuity and fatalism.

Ubik is almost a murder mystery: Dick does a good job of making reality diaphanous and confusing the reader. Who died in the explosion on Luna? Who was behind it? And what's going on with time? The book did keep my interest, trying to unravel just what the fuck was going on here. The creativity of the plot carried me through the sections of sub-standard prose.

In the end, the book was kept from greatness for me by a few issues. Dick has too many throw-away sections that don't serve the main purpose of the story. The protagonist is really a whiny jerk for much of the novel. Dick shows a bit of a misogynistic bent towards his female characters. The left-turn at the end was "shocking" (though I figured it out a few pages before it was revealed), but what purpose did it serve? All of the plot-twists were fairly haphazard, nothing was wrapped up: sure, it's great to throw in a bunch of twists and turns that confuse the reader, but it's even better if all those twists and turns share a unifying greater theme.

*** SPOILER ALERT ***
(Sure, the ending's not a cheat per se, but it basically says "Haha, everything that happened in this book was bullshit and everyone's fucked." Okay, great, why'd I read this again?)

So, yeah: Dick was very clever and quite ingenious, but he was a pretty average writer and this is a good, not great book.