Caveat: This is the third book in a trilogy, and I haven't read the first two. However, I personally think that books in a series should be able to stand on their own.
The concept...King Arthur retold as urban fantasy in a gang-war setting with mainly African-American and Latino characters...is awesome. The execution is somewhat lacking. It starts slow and even towards the end the pace is glacial, especially for a story with this one's violence quotient. Some of the Arthurian and fantasy elements...notably the Grail quest and the existence of Fae...seem a bit tacked on, as if the writer really wanted to tell a story about coming up hard, families, and betrayal and didn't weave the mythic elements in deeply enough. They don't seem integral; you could strip them out and it would be essentially the same story. I still don't know how magic is supposed to work in the world of the story or what its deeper significance is.
Some of the problems I would describe as technical. The eARC needs another editing pass (a seven-year-old is suddenly twelve only a few pages later, and a character description is repeated verbatim twice in different chapters). However, some issues are created by the specific choices the author made; the story is written in universal 3rd person, and there are many POV shifts and what you might call expositional telepathy....that is, we listen in on the character's thoughts as he or she just happens to be musing on things the reader needs to know. This happens a lot. The effect is to slow down the pace and undermine the immersive quality of the story. The prose also suffers from what I have come to think of as the Edible Person/Descriptive Default problem: that is, the coloring and complexion of all of the PoC's in the book are described precisely, often with food adjectives ("coffee," "mocha," "toffee," "honey"), while all the white people are just white.* The prose style smooths out in the later portions of the book and the pace moves more briskly...but this is the third installment in a trilogy, not the first.
I liked the Guenevere character ("Lady G") and also liked the fact that she didn't just disappear into some nunnery-analog, hand to forehead; however, she doesn't seem to do a whole lot other than skulk about feeling guilty. There are several more active female characters, but interestingly Lady G is the only one who seems to have the aura of the mythic about her that the story needs in order to evoke the source material; even Nine (ie, Nimue) is a bit prosaic and her motives, though they may have been explained in one of the earlier books, are unclear in this one.
I might be a hard sell here; I read The Once and Future King when I was twelve and loved it to pieces. I've also read Idylls of the King, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Mists of Avalon...you get the picture. And yet, when you take on a story like this, you choose exactly that kind of difficult challenge. Is it fair to complain that a book could have been brilliant but isn't? There's some potentially good stuff in it...social commentary and philosophical underpinnings...but it just doesn't quite gel. I like the idea of the book better than I liked the actual book itself. Arthur is such an old story with so many re-tellings that it's hard to bring a new twist to it; in that much, King's War succeeds (and, I assume, the preceding two books as well). If you find the subject and setting compelling and are not as easily distracted by prose tics as I am, this book might work for you. It didn't, so much, for me.
*I grant this is the kind of thing that many readers wouldn't notice, but the fact that it's invisible is kind of the problem. Anyhow, K. Tempest Bradford was on a WisCon panel about describing non-white characters and made a crack to the effect that if she were really chocolate she'd be tempted to chew her own arm off. And now I can't unsee it. Thank you, Tempest.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Monday, November 16, 2009
On the resurgence of Ayn Rand
The Bitch is Back
"Isn't that book the Bible of right-wing losers?" - Lisa Simpson
Ah, Ayn Rand. Human beings don't work the way she says they do. Societies don't work the way she says they do. Economies don't work the way she says they do. Her books are painfully awful and warp the term "literary art" even as one hesitates to apply it. Yet her ideas and novels persist because they feed the most indestructible and gullibility-producing force in the universe, human egotism.
I do grant, as a reviewer on Goodreads said, that the books are useful. Anyone who is a fan of Ayn Rand is someone to avoid. It's good to know that before you get too involved. And unlike more personal questions, it's easy to work into casual party conversation: "Hey, what do you think of Ayn Rand's books?" If the person's eyes light up and they declaim upon their admiration of Howard Roark or John Galt, you have the opposite of a keeper. You know to throw that one back.
I, like many people, read The Fountainhead as a teenager. I intended to enter the essay contest the Ayn Rand Institute runs every year. They offered a lot of money, and I'd already won a couple of state-level writing competitions. I was seventeen or eighteen, and no less arrogant than bright eighteen-year-olds generally are: the target audience.
I couldn't bring myself to write anything that wasn't scathing.
"This is not a book to be set aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." - Dorothy Parker, on Atlas Shrugged.
The books are terrible in all respects. They are bad art, bad writing, foully mis-representative of human behavior, laughably improbable, bone-headedly self-contradictory, morally putrid, and pragmatically incoherent. Even the supposed free-market ideals which Rand espouses with such Darwinian cheer don't actually appear in her books. There is something the characters call that, but even they don't actually believe that it should apply to them. For example, Roark's clients don't like his work and he can't make money as an architect. This is seen, incomprehensibly, as evidence that they are stupid and he is a genius, instead of being the only real example of the free market winnowing someone out that actually happens. When he blows up his own building this is proof of his ideals instead of an appalling waste of resources; instead of being rightfully excoriated as a trifler and an inefficient wastrel he's a hero. Why? We don't know. There is no sensible reason given. Nothing any of her characters do in The Fountainhead makes any sense, or bears any resemblance to how actual persons behave. If you dare ask why of a Randroid, you will be told that you just don't understand.
They are all like that, her books. They are brick-sized cesspools of badness held together with binding glue. They are wastes of ink, and of the effort required to lift them from the shelf and turn the page. You could spend those calories and that time watching Wife Swap re-runs.
If it were only that. If only...a waste of time is perhaps not a good thing, but it's your own business. You might read Ayn Rand, or watch Fox News, in perfect peace for all of me if you would just exhibit a moderate degree of decency and decorum and keep it to yourself. I myself like to read textsfromlastnight.com and chuckle with schadenfreude. It is a perfect waste of time, and not nice of me, but essentially harmless.
Alas, no. Rand devotees are right, they know they are right, and they have to share, with, as noted in the GQ article, a grim impervious defiance of logic rivaled only by Fundamentalists.
And that points to the real, true and basic contradiction of the Randroids. They declare, with that special dollop of Nietzschean contempt, that they are free and the rest of us (of course) are sheep. But if you cannot ever reflect upon an ideology, if you can't evaluate its limits or especially admit when it fails (and the Randian philosophy has spectacularly failed on all levels and by all measures; even its name, Objectivism, embeds a lie), if you not only can't admit that it might be wrong but believe anyone who dares to disagree is actually evil, then you aren't free at all. You are ideology's slave.
And I have a little secret to tell you. You aren't the genius you think you are, either. All of the Randroids I know are kind of mediocre, maybe a little brighter than average but not all that. All the most brilliant people I know, and I know several truly brilliant people, are altruists.
I've heard of some people threatening to "go Galt," that is, to withdraw from participation in society and their imagined contributions to it. To which I say, God I hope so. Go Galt and get the hell out of the way. It's actually possible, I deem, that if all the people who actually produce and do and accomplish things in the world left or quit doing what they do, society would crumble. However, if all of the self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, Rand-addled egomaniacs with a firm belief in their own superiority and entitlement left, there would be nothing but a huge sigh of relief.
Goddamn, the experience of being 19 years old and reading Ayn Rand! The crystal-shivering-at-the-breaking-pitch intensity of it! Not just for that 19-year-old, but for everybody unfortunate enough to be caught in his psychic blast radius. Is "experience" even the right word for The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged? Ayn Rand's idolization of Mickey Spillane and cigarettes and capitalism—an experience? Her tentacular contempt for Shakespeare and Beethoven and Karl Marx and facial hair and government and "subnormal" children and the poor and the Baby Jesus and the U.N. and homosexuals and "simpering" social workers and French Impressionism and a thousand other things the flesh is heir to: experience?
"Isn't that book the Bible of right-wing losers?" - Lisa Simpson
Ah, Ayn Rand. Human beings don't work the way she says they do. Societies don't work the way she says they do. Economies don't work the way she says they do. Her books are painfully awful and warp the term "literary art" even as one hesitates to apply it. Yet her ideas and novels persist because they feed the most indestructible and gullibility-producing force in the universe, human egotism.
I do grant, as a reviewer on Goodreads said, that the books are useful. Anyone who is a fan of Ayn Rand is someone to avoid. It's good to know that before you get too involved. And unlike more personal questions, it's easy to work into casual party conversation: "Hey, what do you think of Ayn Rand's books?" If the person's eyes light up and they declaim upon their admiration of Howard Roark or John Galt, you have the opposite of a keeper. You know to throw that one back.
I, like many people, read The Fountainhead as a teenager. I intended to enter the essay contest the Ayn Rand Institute runs every year. They offered a lot of money, and I'd already won a couple of state-level writing competitions. I was seventeen or eighteen, and no less arrogant than bright eighteen-year-olds generally are: the target audience.
I couldn't bring myself to write anything that wasn't scathing.
"This is not a book to be set aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." - Dorothy Parker, on Atlas Shrugged.
The books are terrible in all respects. They are bad art, bad writing, foully mis-representative of human behavior, laughably improbable, bone-headedly self-contradictory, morally putrid, and pragmatically incoherent. Even the supposed free-market ideals which Rand espouses with such Darwinian cheer don't actually appear in her books. There is something the characters call that, but even they don't actually believe that it should apply to them. For example, Roark's clients don't like his work and he can't make money as an architect. This is seen, incomprehensibly, as evidence that they are stupid and he is a genius, instead of being the only real example of the free market winnowing someone out that actually happens. When he blows up his own building this is proof of his ideals instead of an appalling waste of resources; instead of being rightfully excoriated as a trifler and an inefficient wastrel he's a hero. Why? We don't know. There is no sensible reason given. Nothing any of her characters do in The Fountainhead makes any sense, or bears any resemblance to how actual persons behave. If you dare ask why of a Randroid, you will be told that you just don't understand.
They are all like that, her books. They are brick-sized cesspools of badness held together with binding glue. They are wastes of ink, and of the effort required to lift them from the shelf and turn the page. You could spend those calories and that time watching Wife Swap re-runs.
If it were only that. If only...a waste of time is perhaps not a good thing, but it's your own business. You might read Ayn Rand, or watch Fox News, in perfect peace for all of me if you would just exhibit a moderate degree of decency and decorum and keep it to yourself. I myself like to read textsfromlastnight.com and chuckle with schadenfreude. It is a perfect waste of time, and not nice of me, but essentially harmless.
Alas, no. Rand devotees are right, they know they are right, and they have to share, with, as noted in the GQ article, a grim impervious defiance of logic rivaled only by Fundamentalists.
And that points to the real, true and basic contradiction of the Randroids. They declare, with that special dollop of Nietzschean contempt, that they are free and the rest of us (of course) are sheep. But if you cannot ever reflect upon an ideology, if you can't evaluate its limits or especially admit when it fails (and the Randian philosophy has spectacularly failed on all levels and by all measures; even its name, Objectivism, embeds a lie), if you not only can't admit that it might be wrong but believe anyone who dares to disagree is actually evil, then you aren't free at all. You are ideology's slave.
And I have a little secret to tell you. You aren't the genius you think you are, either. All of the Randroids I know are kind of mediocre, maybe a little brighter than average but not all that. All the most brilliant people I know, and I know several truly brilliant people, are altruists.
I've heard of some people threatening to "go Galt," that is, to withdraw from participation in society and their imagined contributions to it. To which I say, God I hope so. Go Galt and get the hell out of the way. It's actually possible, I deem, that if all the people who actually produce and do and accomplish things in the world left or quit doing what they do, society would crumble. However, if all of the self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, Rand-addled egomaniacs with a firm belief in their own superiority and entitlement left, there would be nothing but a huge sigh of relief.
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