TW skims: James Lee Burke: A Morning for Flamingos
This book was a freebie, and it's walking out the door mostly unread.
I've recently been reading a few more mysteries, and mostly enjoying them - they don't excite me to the same degree as speculative fiction does, but I've had fun.
This book comes from a different branch of the mystery genre. I see 'mystery' as 'a crime has been comitted, a detective or amateur sleuth finds out whodunnit (and sometimes whatbeendun). This book features a professional lawman bungling a prisoner transport, getting shot, and wanting to append the criminal. He also gets involved in a sting operation against a drug lord - so... Crime Novel? Thriller?
It's a personal story - man with gun gets into trouble, seeks revenge, cleans up the town.
I'm not the right reader for this. I'm not interested in gun porn. I'm not interested in revenge stories. The initial problem is a setup-by-the-author - the characters were stupid and incompetent, and I dislike stupidity and incompetence, and I don't want to read about them.
A Sunday Telegraph review says I can think of no other writer today who captures the American South with such eloquence and sympathy.
Ok. I suppose a 'realistic portrait' of the American South will contain a measure of racism, but it seems as if nobody can write about the South without portraying its inhabitants _as_ backward, gun-happy, hunting-and-fishing-chicken-roasting folks, racist, etc. And maybe it's a realistic picture - maybe people and places like these exist, but being an eternal optimist I would very much hope that there are people beyond the stereotype.
(And, y'know, I'm occasionally reading blog posts by people physically located in The South, and by self-identifying Southerners, and they're *not* all a bunch of illiterate rednecks.)
So. Eloquently portraying the American Sourth apparently means that we get the N-word on the second page. (First published by Century in 1992; republished by Orion in 2005.) It means using a stunning array of racial and racist terms, some of which I hadn't encountered before. It means having an African American character who says things like "Lookit what you send up there, you. Ain't you shamed?" - *every* non-white character _be talkin' like dat_, while the white characters use the odd 'y'all' but otherwise speak English wish perfect diction and grammar.
The effect is to render one group of people less intelligent-seeming than the other. We have a word for that: racist.
The black characters I saw in the short bit I read were hardworking-but-opressed, petty criminals, prostitutes - poor people and lowlifes, in other words. The white people I saw were law officers and a major criminal, and as far as I could make out, all the law officers I saw were white, because POC cannot possibly be solid, upright, educated, white-collar worker etc?
Casual, unintended racism still leaves a bitter aftertaste.
I'm certain that the writer didn't _mean_ to be racist, would deny being racist, but to the casual reader, the effect is there, and this was a major contributing factor in not wanting to read on. I didn't care for the main character, or whether he'd overcome his feelings of inadequacy by proving himself a manly man.
It doesn't help that I found the writer's descriptive skills less than wonderful. Random passage:
You never forget an LSU-Ole Miss game: the tiers upon tiers of seats filled with people, the haze around the banks of lights in the sky, the thunder of marching bands on the field, cheerleaders tumbling like acrobats, Confederate flags waving wildly in the crowd, Mike the Tiger in his cage riding stiff-legged around the track, the coeds with mums pinned on their sweaters, their breath sweet with bourbon and Coca-Cola - then, sudenly, one hundred thousand people rising to their feet in one deafening roar as LSU's team pours onto the field in their gold and purple and white uniforms that shine with light and seem tighter on their bodies than their very muscles.
It's a shopping list of details, and - other than the mums and the bourbon, there is nothing here that I could not have written with five minutes of Wikipedia - there will be people and noise and mascots and cheerleaders and marching bands.
This passage does not make me feel as if I'm there, and it doesn't make me feel as if the _author_ was there.
Random passage from _Ramage and the Rebels_:
Amsterdam's houses were painted in gay colours which the glaring sun emphasized without making them garish. The owners on the Punda side obviously preferred pinks and light blues while Otrabanda favoured reds, greens and white, but most of the roofs, steeply pitched and gabled in the Dutch style, had red tiles, in contrast to the wooden shingles favoured in the British islands. It was curious about the colour preferences but, Ramage thought, the explanation was probably mundane: the paint shop on one side stocked some colours, its rival the others.
Concrete detail. Detail that only someone who is in that place at the specific time could observe. The ballgame description above could refer to a thousand games; the description of the town to one moment in time. The ballgame observer could have been anyone (though probably male). Ramage, being British, comments on what distinguishes Dutch houses from British-built ones; the ballgame observer reveals nothing about himself.
Maybe most importantly for me as a reader, the description of the town asked questions. Painted houses? Where did they get the paint? What kind of trade was going on at the time? Who *did* build these towns, and how sensible were the builders in adapting to local circumstances and building materials?
Idle, and somewhat inconsequential musings.
The ballgame on the other hand - it's a game like a thousand others in a sport I have no interest in. There is no sense of why I should go to one, why people go and what they're seeing in the game. I mean... give me kids squirming with excitement on the edge of their seat and running between the aisles when it gets too much for them. Give me the guy knocking over his can of Coke and nearly starting a fight with the guy on the seat below. Give me the member of the marching band who stumbles, goes off-beat, and is booed or mocked by the crowd. Give me the guys who painted themselves in their team's colours, gold and purple and white, who even died their hair. (Or do you get such people only at soccer games?) What do the die-hard, drunk fans *do* at a colege football game? Raise banners? Use vuvuzelas? Throw stuff?
I expect those answers from a descriptive passage; a tiny glimpse of an alien world. I want to feel there at a specific event, I want to get the impression that the author didn't just get their knowledge from a casual web search, and I want to be able to wonder about some of the people involved.
If one writer can describe the past in a manner that makes me suspend my disbelief and accept that _the character is there, and this is what he sees, hears, feels_, then another ought to be able to do the same job for a common twentieth-century experience.
The descriptive bar has been set. Burke does not live up to the challenge.
This entry was also posted at http://beyond-elechan.dreamwidth.org/25182.html LJ comments disabled due to excessive spam and hassle. This post at DW has
comments.
I've recently been reading a few more mysteries, and mostly enjoying them - they don't excite me to the same degree as speculative fiction does, but I've had fun.
This book comes from a different branch of the mystery genre. I see 'mystery' as 'a crime has been comitted, a detective or amateur sleuth finds out whodunnit (and sometimes whatbeendun). This book features a professional lawman bungling a prisoner transport, getting shot, and wanting to append the criminal. He also gets involved in a sting operation against a drug lord - so... Crime Novel? Thriller?
It's a personal story - man with gun gets into trouble, seeks revenge, cleans up the town.
I'm not the right reader for this. I'm not interested in gun porn. I'm not interested in revenge stories. The initial problem is a setup-by-the-author - the characters were stupid and incompetent, and I dislike stupidity and incompetence, and I don't want to read about them.
A Sunday Telegraph review says I can think of no other writer today who captures the American South with such eloquence and sympathy.
Ok. I suppose a 'realistic portrait' of the American South will contain a measure of racism, but it seems as if nobody can write about the South without portraying its inhabitants _as_ backward, gun-happy, hunting-and-fishing-chicken-roasting folks, racist, etc. And maybe it's a realistic picture - maybe people and places like these exist, but being an eternal optimist I would very much hope that there are people beyond the stereotype.
(And, y'know, I'm occasionally reading blog posts by people physically located in The South, and by self-identifying Southerners, and they're *not* all a bunch of illiterate rednecks.)
So. Eloquently portraying the American Sourth apparently means that we get the N-word on the second page. (First published by Century in 1992; republished by Orion in 2005.) It means using a stunning array of racial and racist terms, some of which I hadn't encountered before. It means having an African American character who says things like "Lookit what you send up there, you. Ain't you shamed?" - *every* non-white character _be talkin' like dat_, while the white characters use the odd 'y'all' but otherwise speak English wish perfect diction and grammar.
The effect is to render one group of people less intelligent-seeming than the other. We have a word for that: racist.
The black characters I saw in the short bit I read were hardworking-but-opressed, petty criminals, prostitutes - poor people and lowlifes, in other words. The white people I saw were law officers and a major criminal, and as far as I could make out, all the law officers I saw were white, because POC cannot possibly be solid, upright, educated, white-collar worker etc?
Casual, unintended racism still leaves a bitter aftertaste.
I'm certain that the writer didn't _mean_ to be racist, would deny being racist, but to the casual reader, the effect is there, and this was a major contributing factor in not wanting to read on. I didn't care for the main character, or whether he'd overcome his feelings of inadequacy by proving himself a manly man.
It doesn't help that I found the writer's descriptive skills less than wonderful. Random passage:
You never forget an LSU-Ole Miss game: the tiers upon tiers of seats filled with people, the haze around the banks of lights in the sky, the thunder of marching bands on the field, cheerleaders tumbling like acrobats, Confederate flags waving wildly in the crowd, Mike the Tiger in his cage riding stiff-legged around the track, the coeds with mums pinned on their sweaters, their breath sweet with bourbon and Coca-Cola - then, sudenly, one hundred thousand people rising to their feet in one deafening roar as LSU's team pours onto the field in their gold and purple and white uniforms that shine with light and seem tighter on their bodies than their very muscles.
It's a shopping list of details, and - other than the mums and the bourbon, there is nothing here that I could not have written with five minutes of Wikipedia - there will be people and noise and mascots and cheerleaders and marching bands.
This passage does not make me feel as if I'm there, and it doesn't make me feel as if the _author_ was there.
Random passage from _Ramage and the Rebels_:
Amsterdam's houses were painted in gay colours which the glaring sun emphasized without making them garish. The owners on the Punda side obviously preferred pinks and light blues while Otrabanda favoured reds, greens and white, but most of the roofs, steeply pitched and gabled in the Dutch style, had red tiles, in contrast to the wooden shingles favoured in the British islands. It was curious about the colour preferences but, Ramage thought, the explanation was probably mundane: the paint shop on one side stocked some colours, its rival the others.
Concrete detail. Detail that only someone who is in that place at the specific time could observe. The ballgame description above could refer to a thousand games; the description of the town to one moment in time. The ballgame observer could have been anyone (though probably male). Ramage, being British, comments on what distinguishes Dutch houses from British-built ones; the ballgame observer reveals nothing about himself.
Maybe most importantly for me as a reader, the description of the town asked questions. Painted houses? Where did they get the paint? What kind of trade was going on at the time? Who *did* build these towns, and how sensible were the builders in adapting to local circumstances and building materials?
Idle, and somewhat inconsequential musings.
The ballgame on the other hand - it's a game like a thousand others in a sport I have no interest in. There is no sense of why I should go to one, why people go and what they're seeing in the game. I mean... give me kids squirming with excitement on the edge of their seat and running between the aisles when it gets too much for them. Give me the guy knocking over his can of Coke and nearly starting a fight with the guy on the seat below. Give me the member of the marching band who stumbles, goes off-beat, and is booed or mocked by the crowd. Give me the guys who painted themselves in their team's colours, gold and purple and white, who even died their hair. (Or do you get such people only at soccer games?) What do the die-hard, drunk fans *do* at a colege football game? Raise banners? Use vuvuzelas? Throw stuff?
I expect those answers from a descriptive passage; a tiny glimpse of an alien world. I want to feel there at a specific event, I want to get the impression that the author didn't just get their knowledge from a casual web search, and I want to be able to wonder about some of the people involved.
If one writer can describe the past in a manner that makes me suspend my disbelief and accept that _the character is there, and this is what he sees, hears, feels_, then another ought to be able to do the same job for a common twentieth-century experience.
The descriptive bar has been set. Burke does not live up to the challenge.
This entry was also posted at http://beyond-elechan.dreamwidth.org/25182.html LJ comments disabled due to excessive spam and hassle. This post at DW has
comments.