I was surprised to learn this week that Umberto Eco has a new novel out. That’s wonderful news, to be sure. I also came across this interesting interview with the man himself. This tidbit amused me:

His second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, took eight years to write. It was about three editors at a Milan publishing house trying to link every conspiracy theory in history, including that now famous one about the medieval Knights Templar and the secret of the Holy Grail.
‘I know, I know,’ he says with a laugh. ‘My book included the plot for The Da Vinci Code. But I was not being a prophet. It was old occult material. It was already all there. I treated it in a more sceptical way than Dan Brown did. He had the excellent idea of treating it as if it were true. Millions of people believed him. They took it seriously, but it was all a hoax.’
The Da Vinci Code is one of the few novels to have sold more than The Name of the Rose, I point out. Must be quite galling, that. He shrugs. Has he read it? ‘Yes.’ Did he like it? He shrugs again. ‘It’s a page-turner.’

I’ve not read The Da Vinci Code myself and can’t comment on it. But I know who would win in a Brown vs. Eco deathmatch.

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This evening, I finished reading Shusaku Endo’s novel Scandal. (I very much enjoy Endo’s writing; his excellent novel Silence is fairly well-known, and The Samurai would rank as one of my top five favorite novels.) I’m still trying to process exactly what Scandal “means;” feel free to read along as I mull over the novel. Spoilers will undoubtedly abound, so proceed with caution.
Scandal tells the story of Suguro, an aging Christian novelist who has, at the twilight of his literary career, found both critical success as a writer and personal fulfillment in an ordered and moral life. (I don’t know enough about Endo’s personal life to recognize which parts of the story are autobiographical and which aren’t, but I have a feeling that the protagonist’s life and thoughts bear more than a passing resemblance to Endo’s.)
Unfortunately for Suguro, just as he is preparing to “settle down” for a well-deserved rest from his long and difficult literary career, his reputation is threatened by scandalous rumors. Rumors surface that Suguro has been spotted in Tokyo’s “red light” district frequenting S&M clubs and other unsavory venues. Suguro is disturbed by the persistant rumors even though he knows they are untrue, and something about them seems to threaten the neatly-arranged, happily-married moral life he has constructed for himself over the years. The novel tells the story of Suguro’s search for the suspected impersonator, but also walks us step-by-step through Suguro’s reasoning as he comes to grips with his own morality and Christian beliefs.
That’s the surface story, at least. Beneath the surface, Endo is exploring a lot of difficult issues. A number of questions and themes surface briefly or are hinted at throughout the story: what it means to be a Japanese Christian; how a Christian artist can approach his craft with artistic integrity; how can Christians relate to and talk about a world tainted to its core by filth and sin. It seems clear to me that these are all issues that have troubled Endo, and the lack of firm resolution to any of them makes me suspect that he was still looking for answers himself while writing this novel.
But while these issues get some treatment in the story, the core of the novel is about one thing: sin. Sin, depravity, the unspeakable desires and urges that live at the heart of every human being. Suguro, and the characters he meets during the story, are walking contradictions: on the one hand, they can be polite, kind, generous, or innocent on the surface, but beneath each mask is an insatiable corruption that renders every good deed, every happy marriage, every kind word, every noble achievement hollow and meaningless.
As Suguro’s investigations continue, the actual question of whether or not he committed the scandalous acts becomes almost irrelevant–because the deeper he looks into himself, the more he realizes that he, the good husband and influential Christian Suguro, is as hungry for depravity as the worst rapist or murderer. Suguro has made it almost all the way to the end of his life living morally and righteously, but in the end he is utterly undone by sin. The perfect life he has created is a joke, a mask, a meaningless act of self-deception; in his heart, he is utterly depraved, a monster.
As Suguro learns about the nature of sin, we, the readers, learn with him. Endo is saying something profound about sin in Scandal, something that I haven’t seen since my college readings of Dostoyevsky and Flannery O’Connor. Endo wants to break down any notion that we can save ourselves. As the novel begins, Suguro believes that man’s capacity to sin contains the seeds of his own salvation–he believes that sin can have noble intentions, that it is undertaken in a twisted but nevertheless sincere desire to find spiritual fulfillment. Suguro sees sin as the misguided excess of humans who want salvation but don’t know quite how to attain it.
It’s a comforting notion of sin; it’s a sin that God will surely forgive, because He can understand why you’re doing it. That’s an attractive idea to me, at least. But after luring you into this mode of thinking, Endo springs his trap. Sin, Endo shows us, is not natural or misguided: it is vile. It infects every corner of our heart and every thought of our minds; it’s ugly and destructive and hateful. For Endo, real sin–the kind that lives in the human heart, that separates us from God–is not the moral failing of the disciples who doubted Jesus but who later felt bad for their actions and repented after the cock crowed. No–sin is the person who stood at the side of the road to Calvary and jeered at Jesus for no reason other than the pleasure of defiling something that’s pure and innocent. The kind of deliberate depravity that no just God could possibly forgive, let alone tolerate. The kind of sin that offers no hope of salvation or escape.
That’s the message Endo leaves for us: no resolution, no easy answer, just an awareness that human beings are truly and utterly wretched. Endo does not question that God forgives our sin, but he does not profess to understand it, either. What kind of love looks at the human monster and chooses to purify it? What kind of God could stand to look at a creature so corrupt with rebellion?
Flannery O’Connor famously hoped that, by exposing the dark heart of humanity in her stories, she would shock her readers into crying out for God. Endo, while his writing style is very different from O’Connor’s, bears a similar message in Scandal. Humans are never more aware of God’s mysterious, incomprehensible grace than when they have hit the absolute nadir of the soul.

Through the large glass window of a tearoom next door, he saw a cheerful group of three or four young women seated around a table. One of them noticed Suguro and pointed him out to her neighbor, not even knowing he was a monster. –from Scandal

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I’ve got a problem. A book-related problem.
A year or so ago, I started reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. I made it a good ways through, and was enjoying it. And then the unthinkable happened: I got distracted, and put the book back on the shelf… for about 12 months.
Now, I’d like to finish the novel and move on to the other two tomes in the trilogy. But I’ve forgotten all of the characters and plot details (and if you’ve read anything by Stephenson, you know that his plots contain a lot of details), so I feel some pressure to start over from page 1. But I also feel a mind-numbing dread at the prospect of re-reading 600 pages of fairly dense prose.
This has happened to me more than once before; the most spectacular such experience occurred while I was reading through Robert Jordan’s as-yet-unfinished Wheel of Time series. I read through book 5 in the series–and remember, that’s many thousands of pages just to get to that point–and then my brain collapsed from the strain of keeping track of so… many… characters! So many annoying characters!
So I put down the Wheel of Time series. Several years later, I decided for some reason that I’d like to give the series another try. As the details of my first reading were lost in a haze of repressed memories, I decided to start over with Book #1.
I made it to the exact spot at which I had stopped years earlier, somewhere in book 5… and stopped again. Something inside me had died. More likely, that something inside me had committed suicide at the realization that Achilles has a better chance of catching that tortoise than I ever do of reaching the (still unwritten!) end of the Wheel of Time series.
And so Robert Jordan and I parted ways somewhat messily. I love Mr. Stephenson’s writing, and would rather not risk a repeat of my nasty Wheel of Time breakup. Any suggestions?

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Very interesting essay on the re-creation of Spiderman for an Indian audience. (Via Instapundit.)

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I finished reading China Mieville’s The Scar today. The Scar (hereafter TS) is a semi-sequel to Perdido Street Station, which I discussed a while ago–it shares none of PSS’ characters and takes place in a different part of the same world, but does have a few ties to the events of PSS.
I want to take a bit more time to reflect on TS before I pronounce judgment. I can say that I definitely enjoyed it, perhaps even more than I did PSS. Both are clearly the works of the same author, sharing many of the themes and basic setting elements. Both chronicle the ordeals of sometimes-unpleasant characters as they get swept up into the machinations of others–machinations that can only be survived, not defeated. While PSS robs its protagonists of hope, TS goes a step further and robs them of freedom as well; nevertheless, it is fascinating to watch these everyday “heroes” persevere through it all.
If anything, TS surpasses its prequel in the imaginativeness of the setting. In addition to the steam- and dieselpunk technomagical industrial elements of New Crobuzon, TS introduces a very detailed and immersive nautical society. The Scar doesn’t limit itself to a single geographic location; throughout the course of the story, the characters visit a wide variety of islands and other bizarre locales. This gives it a bit more of an adventurous feel than PSS, which restricted the action to the New Crobuzon city limits.
At any rate, I recommend both novels if you’re looking for something a bit out-of-the-ordinary. Mieville’s writing is skillful and extremely vivid; it takes a while for the stories to really get started, but once they do, it’s hard to put them down. Check ’em out, and let me know what you think of them!

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…and while I’m tossing out these short posts (hey, that Perdido Street Station post tired me out), you really ought to check out this interview with Neal Stephenson over at Slashdot. Even if you aren’t that interested in Stephenson, scroll down to question #4.
Neal Stephenson is pretty much the coolest guy ever.

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I recently finished reading China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, and here are some of my thoughts on the book. I won’t talk much about the book’s technical merits, but rather its thematic elements as I understood them.
By way of introduction for those who aren’t familiar with it, PSS falls somewhere in that nebulous category between the science fiction and fantasy genres. More specifically, it’s very heavily steeped in the steampunk genre, complete with Victorian-era social trappings, oppressive urban industries, ubiquitous steam-powered technology, and seething Marxist undercurrents of class struggle ripped straight from the pages of Engels. PSS takes place entirely within the city limits of New Crobuzon, a crime-infested, pollution-choked industrial hell. Yet within this nightmare of capitalism gone awry are elements of profound beauty–staggering intellectual and cultural diversity, captivating alien art, and magnificent architectural and technological achievements. New Crobuzon’s fusion of beauty and dirtiness reflects one of PSS‘s themes: beauty, goodness, and kindness exist, but they are so tainted by hurt, grime, and suffering that one wonders if they are worth the price.
The first 100 pages or so serve primarily to introduce us to this unusual city and its sometimes bizarre inhabitants. New Crobuzon is a cultural melting pot–humans are a majority and dominate city government and society, but many other races make their home here as well. Among the beings who live alongside New Crobuzon’s humans are sentient cacti, insect-headed women, frog-like creatures who shape water like clay, and the “Remade”–people magically deformed or fused with machines (steam-powered cyborgs, if you will), usually as punishment for a crime.
PSS‘s protagonists are a motley bunch of people living on the fringes of society: Isaac, a somewhat scatterbrained scientist and researcher; Lin, his insect-headed girlfriend; Yagharek, a noble-savage bird-man from a distant desert; and several other characters from the university circle, the criminal underworld, and even the worker’s-revolution movement. It’s abundantly clear from the very first chapter that this is no Tolkien-esque fantasy of noble elves and good-hearted hobbits; PSS‘s “heroes” are self-centered, petty, and even unlikeable people who are mostly interested in surviving day-to-day in the city and making money.
Trouble (and the novel’s main plot) begins when Yagharek, a bird-man whose wings have been removed in punishment for a past crime, arrives in New Crobuzon and hires Isaac. The job: to give Yagharek the ability to fly again. Isaac excitedly begins scientific research towards this end. Meanwhile, Lin (Isaac’s girlfriend) has taken the equally lucrative but morally dubious job creating a sculpture of a sinister underworld mob boss.
Unfortunately, Isaac unwittingly releases a dangerous entity in the course of his research, one that threatens the entire city of New Crobuzon. The bulk of the novel follows the adventures of Isaac and his companions as they try to stop the entity before it multiplies and destroys the city. In the course of their “quest,” the characters are hunted by just about everybody: the entity, the criminal underworld, and the city government (which knows about the entity, but has a decidedly non-altruistic agenda). Isaac and his companions initially pursue this suicidal quest out of a sense of obligation, guilt, or necessity, but as the novel progresses, the characters slowly begin to exhibit heroic and self-sacrificing traits. By the story’s end, each of the survivors has changed radically: some have become something like true heroes; some have been victimized and broken; all have had to abandon their old lives and motivations.
The character’s quest is a grim one, and you don’t for a minute expect that it will end neatly. Like New Crobuzon itself, their quest contains moments of beauty, heroism, and victory, but always at great cost, and often tainted by moral compromise.
So that’s what the novel is about. Is it worth reading? The answer to that question is more difficult for me to answer. In my judgment, PSS is worth reading for the sheer imagination evidenced in it; but it’s grotesque enough that you may not find it an enjoyable read. I’ll try to elaborate.
PSS is incredibly, wonderfully imaginative. The city and its populace are strange and bizarre and incredibly interesting; from the alien races, to the steam-powered airships, to the gigantic fossilized ribcage that occupies the entire center of the city… PSS really stretches the imagination, especially if most of your fantasty/sci-fi reading has been of the more traditional swords-and-sorcery variety. The characters are much more like “average Joes” than are most fantasy heroes; they are noble and flawed at the same time, and we can relate to them. And they’re just plain interesting. The entire book is like that: it’s interesting. Magic and steam-technology exist side-by-side. New Crobuzon is huge, but we get intriguing hints that the world outside its walls is even more vast and more bizarre. The city militia hunts the fugitive heroes through the streets with muskets and cyborgs and airships. The corrupt mayor holds consultations with the Ambassador of Hell. Weird, and fascinating.
But balancing out the wonder of all that imagination is the novel’s heavy-handed grotesque-ness. As amazing as the setting is, it’s dirty, polluted, crime-infested, and overwhelmed by injustice. The author has taken every evil excess of the industrial revolution and cranked the dial as high as it will go. The people of New Crobuzon are hopelessly poor, constantly victimized by the government and industry, surrounded by crime and disease, and without any hope of bettering their situation. Attempts at reform and revolt are utterly and brutally smashed; New Crobuzon isn’t just going through a temporary industrial-growing-pains “phase”–it’s been locked in a state of industrial hell for hundreds of years.
At a certain point, this all becomes almost too much to believe, let alone bear. Why would anyone want to live in this place, when the standard of living would be several orders of magnitude better if they just holed up in a cave somewhere outside the city walls? Nobody is happy, there is no justice, everything is dirty and polluted and covered with grime, the few noble civic accomplishments–a university, a massive train system–have become symbols of corruption, decay, and oppression. And this heavy-handed grimness isn’t limited to physical descriptions of the city itself; several major plot events seem to occur not because they were realistic or believable story developments, but because they served to amp up the general level of angst. Bad things happen just to spite the characters, just for the sake of spoiling their victories.
All this is difficult to read at times. About the fiftieth time you read a description like “Before them was a large building, its shattered windows staring down vacantly and miserably at the grime-covered streets below, while filthy beggars glared hopelessly at passersby,” you will want to scream This place is hell! Why exactly are they trying to save it?
That is, of course, one of the novel’s interesting questions: why would these characters fight for, even love, something as grotesque and broken as New Crobuzon? In the end, the heroes aren’t fighting to fix New Crobuzon, or restore justice to its government, or rid its streets of crime and evil. They’re fighting because as disgusting and awful as New Crobuzon is, it grows on you somehow–it’s a remarkable human achievement gone awry, but beneath the blood and tears it still remains a remarkable human achievement. It’s greater than the sum of its parts, both for good and evil.
And that is ultimately why PSS is worth reading. Like the city it describes and the quest it details, it’s unpleasant and difficult to endure at times. But beneath the dirty surface, it’s a fascinating story about people struggling for victories even when they know those victories will be hollow. Beneath the alien surface and exaggerated qualities, the city and its heroes are things we can understand and to which we can relate. It relentlessly asks: “Is this–this broken relationship, this broken city, this broken dream–is this worth fighting for, as damaged as it is?” The book’s answer is “Yes, even this is worth fighting for.” And that’s why I’d recommend PSS–provided you can stomach the journey.

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One of the smallest but most interesting literary genres I’ve read is what you might call the “nostalgic male childhood fantasy.”

These are novels about, well, being a boy, and they chronicle with heartbreaking nostalgia the inevitable but painful process of growing up (a process they usually define more by the loss of wonder than by the gaining of maturity). But they differ from standard childhood memoirs or nostalgic reminiscing in at least one important way: they invariably take place in fantastic, magical versions of the real world. Dragons, monsters, magic, and every other fantastic element you can imagine lurk beneath the surface of these ordinary-seeming worlds. The protagonists, almost always boys on the verge of adolescence, can see and interact with this fantasy world; adults are typically people who lost the ability to enter the fantasy world when they “grew up” (and in some stories, adult males are given the opportunity to recapture a bit of this boyhood belief).

Three novels stand out in my mind as covering this theme especially well. The first and best has to be Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, in which a boy battles the minions of an evil carnival that has moved into town. It’s a true classic and an amazing story, and it hits on all of the “boyhood nostalgic fantasy” themes. A second book that fits well into this genre is Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life, also about a boy dealing with the magic creatures and people that lurk beneath the surface of his small all-American hometown, although the writing style is different than that of Bradbury’s novel. And a third book that exemplifies this theme is Stephen King’s It, perhaps the best novel he’s written and chock full of childhood wonder, fantasy, and horror.

The “fantasy boyhood” theme really grabs me. The “wonder of childhood” theme is fairly common in literature, and books written for children are full of monsters and magic, but these novels seem somehow different in style from the “childhood memoir” and “children’s lit” categories. For one, they often feature a fair amount of horror as a part of the protagonist’s fantasy world (and all three of the authors noted above write, or have at least dabbled, in the horror genre). And importantly, none of the books mentioned above are written for children–they’re written for adults, and they appeal to a very specific sense of nostalgia for lost innocence and gone-forever childhood. Notably, none of them feature girls as protagonists (It features a girl protagonist, but she’s not a central character; the main protagonist is the typical near-adolescent boy).

The last point in particular interests me. Is this type of story–boy sees wondrous and horrifying things beneath the surface of “real life,” has bizarre supernatural adventures, nobody else is aware–appealing mostly to males, or is it just coincidence that the best such stories feature boys as main characters? What about these stories makes them male fantasies–or do they appeal equally to both genders? Is there a female analog to this genre? If so, can you give me any examples? One of Michele’s favorite books about girlhood, Jane Gardam’s A Long Way from Verona, deals with the general theme of a girl coming of age and shares a fair amount in common thematically with the above books, but makes no use of the fantasy/magic/horror element at all. Is the “magic childhood”–and the heartbreaking loss than comes from growing out of it–a specifically male fantasy? Why?

Or maybe I’m just overanalyzing things. At any rate, they’re wonderful stories–perfect summer reading, if you’re looking for something to dive into over the next few months.

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I recently sat down to read the graphic novel/manga Ghost in the Shell. I’d seen (and enjoyed) the movie version some time ago and was looking forward both to revisiting the interesting setting and learning a bit more about the story and characters.
I was not disappointed; the graphic novel–actually a compilation of several sequential manga “episodes”–is an excellent read. It’s basically the story of a super-high-tech “black ops” team in a cyberpunk, Blade Runner-esque urban dystopia. It’s largely action-oriented–lots of gun battles and explosions–and features a number of interesting and distinctive sci-fi elements. Among these are the protagonists’ spider-like mechs, the inventive use of invisibility/cloaking suits, and oh-so-lovingly-detailed weapons and vehicles. And of course, plenty of computer hacking, killer intruder-detection programs, rogue AIs, and other assorted virtual mayhem. (And being a manga, it’s got excessive nudity and graphic violence, both of which come with the territory.)
So it was an entertaining read–a modern classic of the genre, even. But it did make me wonder if the cyberpunk genre is really a viable sci-fi setting anymore. Ghost, written a decade or two ago, must’ve cropped up during the peak of popular interest in the cyberpunk genre, with its focus on virtual realities, cyber-warfare, and “hard” sci-fi arms and vehicles.
Some sort of virtual “Net” (or at the very least, the ubiquity of computers and the ease with which information could be acquired with them) is a staple of the genre, it seems to me. Now that the Internet and the Web (dystopian as they are) have superseded that early vision of an “online universe,” can we really go back and suspend our disbelief enough to enjoy a story that revolves around hackers, duels between virtual avatars, and deadly security programs?
I don’t know. It’s unquestionably a fun genre, as stories like Ghost demonstrate. But now that my home PC is smaller and more impressive than the “hacker decks” or “rigs” depicted in most cyberpunk novels and movies, reading cyberpunk stories has a sort of Jules Verne, “isn’t that quaint” feel to it.
What do you think? Is cyberpunk a genre that has lived past its prime, and no longer has much to say to us? Have any new styles or genres taken its place in our Internet-everywhere era?

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Two passages from The Silmarillion stand out as my favorites. The first is the tale of Hurin’s last stand against an overpowering enemy force:

Last of all Hurin stood alone. Then he cast aside his shield, and wielded an axe two-handed; and it is sung that the axe smoked in the black blood of the troll-guard of Gothmog until it withered, and each time that he slew Hurin cried: ‘Aure entuluval! Day shall come again!’ Seventy times he uttered that cry; but they took him at last alive, by the command of Morgoth, for the Orcs grappled him with their hands, which clung to him still though he hewed off their arms; and ever their numbers were renewed, until at last he fell beneath them.

The second is the account of Fingolfin’s final battle against the Great Enemy, Morgoth, and his death:

Now news came to Hithlum that Dorthonion was lost and the sons of Finarfin overthrown, and that the sons of Feanor were driven from their lands. Then Fingolfin beheld (as it seemed to him) the utter ruin of the Noldor, and the defeat beyond redress of all their houses; and filled with wrath and despair he mounted upon Rochallor his great horse and rode forth alone, and none might restrain him…. a great madness of rage was upon him, so that his eyes shone like the eyes of the Valar. Thus he came alone to Angband’s gates, and he sounded his horn, and smote once more upon the brazen doors, and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat. And Morgoth came….
Thrice [Fingolfin] was crushed to his knees, and thrice arose again and bore up his broken shield and stricken helm. But the earth was all rent and pitted about him, and he stumbled and fell…. Yet with his last and desperate stroke Fingolfin hewed the foot [of Morgoth]….
Thus died Fingolfin, High King of the Noldor, most proud and valiant of the Elven-kings of old.

These are powerful accounts–Hurin and Fingolfin are just two of the book’s many great heroes who, in the absence of any hope, fight desperately and fanatically to the bitter end. There is a dearth of hope in The Silmarillion, and this theme carries into The Lord of the Rings–you see traces of it in Theoden’s charge at the Pelennor Fields and in Eowyn’s suicidal stand against the Witch-king of Angmar. Hurin and Fingolfin know that their efforts are futile. In The Return of the King, Theoden and Eowyn (and Gandalf and most of the Fellowship, for that matter) know this as well. Things turn out reasonably well in the latter case–but they shouldn’t have, by any reasonable estimation.
The heroes of Middle Earth–like the very World in which they live–yearn for release from the pain and grief that taints Creation, and in that sense they carry with them a powerful hope that evil will one day be wiped away. I have read much about these themes of hope (often in respect to the Christian themes in Tolkien’s works). But I have read very little commentary on the undercurrents of hopelessness that often crop up side-by-side with these optimistic themes. Middle Earth is filled with heroes who look around them, see no hope at all, and yet choose to go on fighting–often to their inevitable deaths. Why do they do this?
Is it possible to have hope in the face of absolutely certain defeat? Is this hope, faith, or simple stubbornness? Is this an unconscious understanding that Good will triumph in the end, or is it a grim fatalism that sees Doom on the horizon and prefers to charge into it rather than wait for its inevitable arrival?

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