Mason & Dixon, sequels, etc
This week I have emerged on the other side of Mason & Dixon, blinking in the sunlight. I managed to read a few other books also.
Before starting the big book, I read a couple of books by Arthur W Upfield. The first is titled Murder Down Under, so you will be unsurprised to hear that it's a series set in early-twentieth-century Australia, with the hero a half-Aborigine half-English police detective. This and the other one (Bony and the Black Virgin) are pretty similar: basically, they have a lot of interesting period color and slang, and the characters are quirky enough to keep your attention, but the actual mysteries are pretty weak and so is the central detective (with the exception of the fact that he goes by the name Napoleon Bonaparte, which is awesome. There should be a detective like Monk, except instead of being OCD he thinks he's Jesus or King George III). Still, if you want to read about scrappy Australians on the frontier, this probably isn't a bad choice, and there's a whole series to go through if you like them.
Mason & Dixon (Thomas Pynchon): Somewhere along the line I acquired the expectation that long books would be serious. This was rattled but apparently not dislodged by Infinite Jest, so I was startled when I read this and found out it was silly. I use 'silly' advisedly -- it's not so much that it's light or funny or comedic, it's that it's -- well, ok, there's a passage that goes
"Recollect, cher Maitre, as I do with senses even today a-tremble, your Canard au Pamplemousse Flambe. It is unique in Civilization. Not to mention the sublime Canard avec Aubergines en Casserole...mmhhnnnhh! I embrace them! The immortal Fantaisie des Canettes...," -- and much more, including Dishes I'd all but forgotten. I should have stood unmov'd, but I'd gone a-blush. "Oh, those old Canards," I murmured.
and then there's the line about "Dutch Ado About Nothing". I mean, c'mon. And I haven't even mentioned the whole scene where a guy in 1750 is pounding on a container of ketchup trying to get it out of the bottle, or George Washington's slave who's a black Borscht-Belt comedian.
But it's arguable that silly is totally appropriate here. The whole premise of the Mason-Dixon line is a joke -- the idiots back in England assigned overlapping land grants to different people in America, leading to disputes over just which state Philadelphia's in*. And the other big theme of the novel, slavery, is pretty silly in retrospect also. Like, people really thought they could own other people? WTF.
And then there's 800 pages of it, and it's not quite the same feel by the end. I'm not sure if this is like the process where you take layers of dinosaurs and press them together forever and they turn into oil; or if it's more like the process the guys go through in the novel, where they go on this crazy long journey across the continent (all the way to Ohio! So far!) and at the end they look back and say "yep, that's what we did." But somehow the book's transmuted; the silliness shifts towards something meaningful.
I don't think the book was totally successful. In retrospect what I remember most about Infinite Jest was the AA story -- there was a lot of stuff about evil Canadian separatists and weird drugs, but what it really came down to was a guy and his life and what he was doing about it. I don't think Mason & Dixon has a similar spine. It seems like Pynchon is trying to get something like that with discussions of slavery and the oncoming American Revolution hanging over the events of the novel, but neither of these really matter all that much for the characters in the novel. Or maybe he's not trying for that: there's a bit where they speculate about being minor characters in a larger story, where they only think it revolves around themselves.
I did like the book. I'm not sure I 800 pages liked it, but it had a lot of scenes worth remembering, so what the hell.
*It is also awesomely hilarious that there was a Baron of Baltimore.
Lost in a Good Book (Jasper Fforde): I said in the previous review that I'd probably get bored halfway through this one, and I didn't, so that's good right there. It's basically the same thing as last time, old jokes presented with new enthusiasm, but what this book made me think of mostly is how people go about designing a sequel. It reads, specifically, like the sort of sequel you write to a first novel where you didn't think it was going to be successful enough to warrant a sequel so you forgot to leave any plot hooks.
So this book shows off all the classic methods of restarting the plot momentum for the sequel. You start off by undoing some happy endings from the first book, and getting back some bad guys that were eliminated. Then you take the magic system and expand it, so the amazing thing from before is now the average thing, which gives you head-room to fit in more amazing things on top. You add in a bunch of new characters with new conflicts, and you bring out some old well-loved characters with the same quirks so the audience is soothed. Then you put in a new master villain, ideally with ties to one of the previous book's master villains, and don't make the mistake this time of killing them off too quickly.
Then you -- hey, wait, the book's over. There are a couple of conflicts I've glossed over, but the author clearly didn't intend them to be a big deal: a chapter that starts with the protagonist being thrown in jail has an epigraph detailing how she gets out. There's certainly no resolution to any of the main storylines introduced ("I won't make that mistake again," thinks the author).
I guess this formula didn't hurt Empire Strikes Back any, but it's still not what I'd call satisfying.
Finally I should mention that I received from ghira a copy of Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames which is, like Winnie Ille Pu a book that I am probably not likely to read a lot, but that I find pleasing just to own.
Next up, I have received my copy of Second Person which looks (and I am assured is) totally awesome if you are into IF or RPGs or narrative theory or things which are awesome. So I will probably read it.
Before starting the big book, I read a couple of books by Arthur W Upfield. The first is titled Murder Down Under, so you will be unsurprised to hear that it's a series set in early-twentieth-century Australia, with the hero a half-Aborigine half-English police detective. This and the other one (Bony and the Black Virgin) are pretty similar: basically, they have a lot of interesting period color and slang, and the characters are quirky enough to keep your attention, but the actual mysteries are pretty weak and so is the central detective (with the exception of the fact that he goes by the name Napoleon Bonaparte, which is awesome. There should be a detective like Monk, except instead of being OCD he thinks he's Jesus or King George III). Still, if you want to read about scrappy Australians on the frontier, this probably isn't a bad choice, and there's a whole series to go through if you like them.
Mason & Dixon (Thomas Pynchon): Somewhere along the line I acquired the expectation that long books would be serious. This was rattled but apparently not dislodged by Infinite Jest, so I was startled when I read this and found out it was silly. I use 'silly' advisedly -- it's not so much that it's light or funny or comedic, it's that it's -- well, ok, there's a passage that goes
"Recollect, cher Maitre, as I do with senses even today a-tremble, your Canard au Pamplemousse Flambe. It is unique in Civilization. Not to mention the sublime Canard avec Aubergines en Casserole...mmhhnnnhh! I embrace them! The immortal Fantaisie des Canettes...," -- and much more, including Dishes I'd all but forgotten. I should have stood unmov'd, but I'd gone a-blush. "Oh, those old Canards," I murmured.
and then there's the line about "Dutch Ado About Nothing". I mean, c'mon. And I haven't even mentioned the whole scene where a guy in 1750 is pounding on a container of ketchup trying to get it out of the bottle, or George Washington's slave who's a black Borscht-Belt comedian.
But it's arguable that silly is totally appropriate here. The whole premise of the Mason-Dixon line is a joke -- the idiots back in England assigned overlapping land grants to different people in America, leading to disputes over just which state Philadelphia's in*. And the other big theme of the novel, slavery, is pretty silly in retrospect also. Like, people really thought they could own other people? WTF.
And then there's 800 pages of it, and it's not quite the same feel by the end. I'm not sure if this is like the process where you take layers of dinosaurs and press them together forever and they turn into oil; or if it's more like the process the guys go through in the novel, where they go on this crazy long journey across the continent (all the way to Ohio! So far!) and at the end they look back and say "yep, that's what we did." But somehow the book's transmuted; the silliness shifts towards something meaningful.
I don't think the book was totally successful. In retrospect what I remember most about Infinite Jest was the AA story -- there was a lot of stuff about evil Canadian separatists and weird drugs, but what it really came down to was a guy and his life and what he was doing about it. I don't think Mason & Dixon has a similar spine. It seems like Pynchon is trying to get something like that with discussions of slavery and the oncoming American Revolution hanging over the events of the novel, but neither of these really matter all that much for the characters in the novel. Or maybe he's not trying for that: there's a bit where they speculate about being minor characters in a larger story, where they only think it revolves around themselves.
I did like the book. I'm not sure I 800 pages liked it, but it had a lot of scenes worth remembering, so what the hell.
*It is also awesomely hilarious that there was a Baron of Baltimore.
Lost in a Good Book (Jasper Fforde): I said in the previous review that I'd probably get bored halfway through this one, and I didn't, so that's good right there. It's basically the same thing as last time, old jokes presented with new enthusiasm, but what this book made me think of mostly is how people go about designing a sequel. It reads, specifically, like the sort of sequel you write to a first novel where you didn't think it was going to be successful enough to warrant a sequel so you forgot to leave any plot hooks.
So this book shows off all the classic methods of restarting the plot momentum for the sequel. You start off by undoing some happy endings from the first book, and getting back some bad guys that were eliminated. Then you take the magic system and expand it, so the amazing thing from before is now the average thing, which gives you head-room to fit in more amazing things on top. You add in a bunch of new characters with new conflicts, and you bring out some old well-loved characters with the same quirks so the audience is soothed. Then you put in a new master villain, ideally with ties to one of the previous book's master villains, and don't make the mistake this time of killing them off too quickly.
Then you -- hey, wait, the book's over. There are a couple of conflicts I've glossed over, but the author clearly didn't intend them to be a big deal: a chapter that starts with the protagonist being thrown in jail has an epigraph detailing how she gets out. There's certainly no resolution to any of the main storylines introduced ("I won't make that mistake again," thinks the author).
I guess this formula didn't hurt Empire Strikes Back any, but it's still not what I'd call satisfying.
Finally I should mention that I received from ghira a copy of Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames which is, like Winnie Ille Pu a book that I am probably not likely to read a lot, but that I find pleasing just to own.
Next up, I have received my copy of Second Person which looks (and I am assured is) totally awesome if you are into IF or RPGs or narrative theory or things which are awesome. So I will probably read it.