Three fictions

I’m a bad one for staying current with the pop lit lists. A bestseller endorsement means little: not because I sniff at their quality or lack thereof, but because I am so far behind on my “ought to read” list that popular novels fill me with guilt.

There was a time when I did not suffer such scruples. In the Sturm und Drang years (aka adolescence), I wallowed in science fiction, starting with the campy Tom Swift series, slumming in prurient Heinlein ilk, and sporing into the spice mélange of Frank Herbert.

I get misty-eyed over reminiscences of repelatron skyways, sentient spacesuits, and galactic jihads. I miss the youth when “gee whiz” was all the meaning I needed. After a while, when novelty for novelty’s sake faded, Tom Swift lost his appeal: after one invents a gizmo like a Cosmotron and consorts with galactic ghosts, what then can one do? Heinlein, after while, became rather tiring with his incessant pubescence, and his untiring attempts at Nietzsche: I thank him, nonetheless, because he represented Ayn Rand more neatly than she did herself.

Herbert tried ever so hard to be meaningful and significant. His stories portend the ghastly peril of the sequel business: spin-offs do not resolve or even prolong the story – they merely evoke ghosts of plots, rather like conversations overheard in the halls of Hades, and the characters are simply undead. Herbert’s story-factory churned out some pretty and Turkish pieces: but they could not escape their Arabesque recursiveness. Character, especially hero, was desiccated for the sake of structure. Crisis took on the scripted familiarity of inevitability. Everything was made to sound and feel like opera, but left you, at every bookend, with soap.

So I detoured again (with occasional lapses into Brin and Benford) – this time into fantasy. Here, I found myself in the fluff of a thousand de plumes trying to parrot Tolkien and Lewis. Everyone had a neato map in the front. Everyone had names dragged out of Bulfinch, Frazer and half-remembered Indian lore. Everyone had swords and rings and bad things.

It was mostly disappointing. It was mainly because Tolkien had made mythopoeia, after him, simply unattainable. Too, Lewis made the  children’s fairy tale so moral, and morale-rich, that creeps like Pullman should be smart enough to despair.

So after all these detours into embarrassing fiction, I am applying myself to remedial reading. James’ The Bostonians. Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. You know, stuff that I should have dealt with in high school.

I won’t mention my enduring affection for O’Brian, Sayers and Williams. I will also not mention my utter unwillingness to read important modern novels like Franzen and other Oprah-listed oeuvres.

But occasionally, I get waylaid by my old friends. Someone twisted my arm into reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, and Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Neil and China (?) seem to follow the receipt of 1) find an unattractive hero; 2) make him uglier; 3) infect him and everyone else with the urge to announce "Coitus!" in every quantum of consciousness; 4) force the hero into grim-ness and dread, with lots of gore; 5) transmogrify former friends into bad people, and bad people into worse people; and 6) propel the hero, in spite of himself, into a denouement where things end up melancholy at best.

I do not know why Gaiman and Mieville are the heirs apparent of whatever literary legacy they are inheriting. Perhaps they deserve the torch left by Mssrs. Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, and all those people who chipped in to Thieves’ World (remember that? … tell me that New Crobuzon doesn’t remind you of Sanctuary). I’m sure Heinlein would have loved to have been permitted to say the dirty F-word far more often than he did. Oh well, it’s the thought that counts.

But that leaves me with Clark. She’s my age, you know. Setting aside that negative remark, her 850-page doorstop wasn’t bad. Her title characters were drawn with good thickness, and one could detect real becoming from chapter to chapter, while the being stayed intact.

She is able to chuck the occasional bon mot, which today is hardly standard, given the current penchant for everything sullen and demotic. I found this gem on page 619:

… the sad decay, which buildings, bridges and church all displayed, seemed to charm them even more. They were Englishmen and, and to them, the decline of other nations was the most natural thing in the world. They belonged to a race blessed with so sensitive an appreciation of its own talents (and so doubtful an opinion of any body else’s) that they would not have been at all surprised to learn that the Venetians themselves had been entirely ignorant of the merits of their own city – until Englishmen had come to tell them it was delightful.

I liked the book, and would furnish it to my daughters, who quite adore anything that sounds remotely like Jane Austen. This is the goods, indeed: for this book is chock full of Austen, and a bit of Dickens (especially The Pickwick Papers). It is almost too much – almost, to the point where one suspects that the tone is forced.

All in all, the book gets a plus.

But I fault her for the obligatory melancholy ending. That is to be expected nowadays, since we must not be able to furnish ourselves with real tragedy or comedy anymore.