Fun fact: I'm taking a contemporary Arabic literature class, so this and at least five other reviews will be about books written in the Middle East or North Africa. I hope you read some of them, especially if you don't know much about the literature of this part of the world!
Young Layla (pronounced LYE-la) Suleiman is an adolescent in Egypt in the 1950's, when the country decided it had enough of British imperialism. Egypt is the site of the Suez Canal, an extremely important trade route whose possession is a powerful decider of world politics. The revolution for Egyptian independence is originally made up of mostly youths, and Layla's older brother Mahmud is a fervent activist. Unfortunately, as a girl, Layla is cloistered by her parents and unable to follow Mahmud's example. She is also beleaguered with awful suitors who consider her nothing more than property. Layla steels her heart against the injustice that occurs to her, but in doing so she misses the chance to accept the love of Husayn, a revolutionary who has made it his mission to make Layla free at heart. Separated from her family and countrymembers by ideology, behavior, and war, Layla struggles to find an escape from restriction without leaving behind everything she loves.
There's a problem with this book: it's a tremendous allegory. There's no getting around it. Layla is Egypt; her father and suitors are colonial countries, etc. Even knowing very little about modern Egyptian history, this was obvious to me. In fact, I think my ignorance on the subject made the story more enjoyable than knowledge would have done.
But that's enough griping. Apart from the allegory, Layla is a likable protagonist if only because her problems are deep but relatable. I approve of the fact that she doesn't know what she wants for most of the story, because this is so true of everybody I know. She's not out on a mission; instead, she's dealing with the everyday problems of a young woman in a restrictive society. Her desires and failings are understandable if the story is taken at its own pace. There's quite a river of metaphor through which to wade, so you might as well get wet.
Most of the male characters irritated me. As a man who doesn't make a habit out of psychologically enslaving women, I tend to have two harsh reactions to these portrayals: sympathy for the female characters so victimized, and indignation that I and my fellow dudes should be established as creeps. Al-Zayyat gets slack from me because I believe her descriptions are accurate toward middle-class Egyptians of the time. The only exception is Husayn, whose role as the "good guy" ranges from amusing to maddening. At times he even hints about the end of the book; either he read ahead, or al-Zayyat spoiled it for him.
Overall, I found The Open Door to be about average in terms of entertainment and tired in terms of morality. It's not about female empowerment, but Marxism, and even that has to be read pretty closely between the lines. I don't regret reading it, but as recommendations go, I'd hold off until I've read other Arabic novels.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2004)
"Unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years." So sayeth Neil Gaiman, the only currently-living fantasy author who is both a very famous celebrity and whose opinion I respect. All this adds up to unquestionably the finest English dust jacket quote of the fantastic written since who-knows-when, but what book is he describing? (The rhetorical question works better if you forget the title for a moment.) Everything written by Tolkien makes the cut, as do The Chronicles of Narnia. J. K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett are accounted for, as is T. H. White.
Now forget everything you know about fantasy. I find myself agreeing completely with Gaiman's quote, because the only two books I'd rank with it (Lord Foul's Bane and possibly The Last Unicorn) are American. I present Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
In the early 1800s, magicians still populate England. Unfortunately, magic itself has passed them by; the profession is populated by little more than street performers and stuffy scholars. One day, offended by the presumption done in the name of his craft, the stuffy old Mr Norrell decides to reveal to the world that he is the most powerful (that is, only) magician alive. He demonstrates his prowess by raising a young London lady from the dead, keeping it a secret that this particular miracle has come from a bargain with an ancient, powerful fairy king who then considers himself loosed upon London. Anxious both to secure his newly garnered respect and to keep any more unstable magic from threatening the people of England, Norrell sets out to collect any magical knowledge for himself and hide it away... until Jonathan Strange discovers a talent for magic that may surpass that of Norrell. Norrell takes the audacious young gentleman as his first and only pupil. Together, Strange and Norrell span an English cultural revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and a malevolent magical presence as they try to determine whether Norrell's bookish caution or Strange's stylish confidence will set the standard for the re-emergence of English magic.
The first thing to notice about this book is its complete devotion to the setting. The entire story is written in the style of early 1800's English romances, complete with alternate spellings like "chuse" and "surprize." Then comes the fact that Clarke's legendarium may surpass the size even of Tolkien's if you consider all the real-world references she weaves into the narrative. Not only is there a tremendous amount of fictional secondary material (she uses footnotes dozens of Mr Norrell's private books), but she also draws on figures of the time period. It takes a history lesson to tell some of them apart. My favorite is the intrusion of Lord Byron, who alternately bickers with Jonathan Strange and fuels Strange's melodramatic tendencies.
Now, since this is a blog interested in fantasy, magic ought to be an important focus. Magic is represented differently by every author, but there are several broad categories out there. Some authors (I'm lookin' at you, R. A. Salvatore) portray magic as a powerful weapon with no repercussions, and suddenly everybody is shooting energy blasts like super soakers. Others express the multi-functionality of magic, not just as a weapon, but as a tool for any aspect of life. Frequently these authors try to express the dangers of magic by linking it to the energy of the magician's body; that is, a character who does magic undergoes the physical strain as though he had done it by hand. Christopher Paolini's Eragon is a popular example of this. Personally, I find that this takes the magic out of magic. Nothing as mysterious and compelling as a fairy tale should be governed by such a bland, self-interested weighing of ends and risks.
Compare this to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Those two magicians can do nearly anything. At one point, Strange moves a city (a Dutch one, I think) to the modern-day Dakotas, picking up a handful of cowboys and Indians along the way. In her Austenian deadpan, Clarke quips that this is very inconvenient for the city's inhabitants unless Strange can put it where he found it, but it turns out that this is the whole point. Magic is not instructive if it's just a tool we've mastered already. It's the act of turning over stones, not knowing what might escape from under them. It's the act of opening doors to see what's behind them. Nobody, not even Clarke, captures it better than Peter Beagle when he has Schmendrick cry, "Magic, do as you will!" Only then do we realize that the world spins in ways the keenest instruments cannot meaningfully describe.
This is the heart of Strange and Norrell's quarrels. Norrell gets all his learning from books, yet he turns out to be a prodigious magician. He loves magic and himself enough to offer his services to his country, but this is primarily to gain respect and fear not only for himself, but for his craft. He then spends the rest of the book trying to stop anyone else from doing magic, no matter what or where. But the gentleman with the thistledown hair – that's our fairy villain – is already loose in London. The door has been opened, and the consequences are more than personal. On the other hand, Strange advocates active learning by as many people as possible, yet his audacity is no safer than Mr Norrell's caution, as certain casualties come to show. The resulting calamities resolve the way all calamities resolve: life goes on for some.
I love all of the characters in this book, including the ones I hate. Both the scoundrels and the gentlemen, most of whom overlap, are portrayed with powerfully realistic strokes. Both women and men are given complex, characteristic stories. They weave together in a masterful dance that combines poetic justice with the footsteps of real life. It's fitting, because these are the genes of magic.
Now forget everything you know about fantasy. I find myself agreeing completely with Gaiman's quote, because the only two books I'd rank with it (Lord Foul's Bane and possibly The Last Unicorn) are American. I present Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
In the early 1800s, magicians still populate England. Unfortunately, magic itself has passed them by; the profession is populated by little more than street performers and stuffy scholars. One day, offended by the presumption done in the name of his craft, the stuffy old Mr Norrell decides to reveal to the world that he is the most powerful (that is, only) magician alive. He demonstrates his prowess by raising a young London lady from the dead, keeping it a secret that this particular miracle has come from a bargain with an ancient, powerful fairy king who then considers himself loosed upon London. Anxious both to secure his newly garnered respect and to keep any more unstable magic from threatening the people of England, Norrell sets out to collect any magical knowledge for himself and hide it away... until Jonathan Strange discovers a talent for magic that may surpass that of Norrell. Norrell takes the audacious young gentleman as his first and only pupil. Together, Strange and Norrell span an English cultural revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and a malevolent magical presence as they try to determine whether Norrell's bookish caution or Strange's stylish confidence will set the standard for the re-emergence of English magic.
The first thing to notice about this book is its complete devotion to the setting. The entire story is written in the style of early 1800's English romances, complete with alternate spellings like "chuse" and "surprize." Then comes the fact that Clarke's legendarium may surpass the size even of Tolkien's if you consider all the real-world references she weaves into the narrative. Not only is there a tremendous amount of fictional secondary material (she uses footnotes dozens of Mr Norrell's private books), but she also draws on figures of the time period. It takes a history lesson to tell some of them apart. My favorite is the intrusion of Lord Byron, who alternately bickers with Jonathan Strange and fuels Strange's melodramatic tendencies.
Now, since this is a blog interested in fantasy, magic ought to be an important focus. Magic is represented differently by every author, but there are several broad categories out there. Some authors (I'm lookin' at you, R. A. Salvatore) portray magic as a powerful weapon with no repercussions, and suddenly everybody is shooting energy blasts like super soakers. Others express the multi-functionality of magic, not just as a weapon, but as a tool for any aspect of life. Frequently these authors try to express the dangers of magic by linking it to the energy of the magician's body; that is, a character who does magic undergoes the physical strain as though he had done it by hand. Christopher Paolini's Eragon is a popular example of this. Personally, I find that this takes the magic out of magic. Nothing as mysterious and compelling as a fairy tale should be governed by such a bland, self-interested weighing of ends and risks.
Compare this to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Those two magicians can do nearly anything. At one point, Strange moves a city (a Dutch one, I think) to the modern-day Dakotas, picking up a handful of cowboys and Indians along the way. In her Austenian deadpan, Clarke quips that this is very inconvenient for the city's inhabitants unless Strange can put it where he found it, but it turns out that this is the whole point. Magic is not instructive if it's just a tool we've mastered already. It's the act of turning over stones, not knowing what might escape from under them. It's the act of opening doors to see what's behind them. Nobody, not even Clarke, captures it better than Peter Beagle when he has Schmendrick cry, "Magic, do as you will!" Only then do we realize that the world spins in ways the keenest instruments cannot meaningfully describe.
This is the heart of Strange and Norrell's quarrels. Norrell gets all his learning from books, yet he turns out to be a prodigious magician. He loves magic and himself enough to offer his services to his country, but this is primarily to gain respect and fear not only for himself, but for his craft. He then spends the rest of the book trying to stop anyone else from doing magic, no matter what or where. But the gentleman with the thistledown hair – that's our fairy villain – is already loose in London. The door has been opened, and the consequences are more than personal. On the other hand, Strange advocates active learning by as many people as possible, yet his audacity is no safer than Mr Norrell's caution, as certain casualties come to show. The resulting calamities resolve the way all calamities resolve: life goes on for some.
I love all of the characters in this book, including the ones I hate. Both the scoundrels and the gentlemen, most of whom overlap, are portrayed with powerfully realistic strokes. Both women and men are given complex, characteristic stories. They weave together in a masterful dance that combines poetic justice with the footsteps of real life. It's fitting, because these are the genes of magic.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
An Outsider's Perspective on Social Politics
As I warned you, social politics are a thing that not even I, with my squirrelly cluelessness, can avoid. I've been waiting for the right book to toss around my opinion on the subject, and The Secret Life of Bees is probably as good as I'm going to get.
To begin: social politics are the attempts of constructed groups to gain a comparative advantage over each other. They're different from regular politics because they don't always travel widely-shared, explicit modes like elections, and because they are more frequently peopled by clichés and ideals. They're a favorite of Marxists, and like many Marxist theories, they're thought to be inescapable.
That's the first and last paradox to hurdle. Is everything we do an assertion of power over another class, race, etc.? Many people would disagree, but the assertion is that sitting in front of your computer and reading a literary blog is a luxury purchased at the expense of everyone else in the world who doesn't have that opportunity. After all, they say there's no such thing as a free lunch. The ideology that most promotes the awe of social politics also tends to find fault with behavior that doesn't make everybody equal–not only in freedoms and opportunities, but also in comfort, possessions, behavior, morals, personality, etc. I'm not straying too far into the political: this has everything to do with literature, being the branch of criticism that analyzes the social spheres of the winners and losers in any novel. In The Secret Life of Bees, if Sue Monk Kidd gives Lily a sandwich, it has a different import than if she gives Zach a sandwich. This has nothing to do with their lives and everything to do with their gender and skin color. What could be more natural?
The trick is that a level of this is always necessary. If I pretend that all my characters' races, etc. are random or arbitrary, then I'm both kidding myself and making room for a ton of accidental cultural slander. This is a trap that catches most of the crappier fantasy authors in the biz. Assuming that their legendariums are coming entirely out of their own heads, their characters and cultures reflect medieval Western Europe time after time. (Some are beginning to show signs of America, but this may be the result of declining levels of research.) Culture is what's literally inescapable, and writers shouldn't try. After all, we're creating culture. To admit anything less would be selfishly to insist that our ideas, including the language in which we write, are our private property. In this case, I shouldn't let anybody read my books.
Culture, however, is not at all the same as social politics. Oh, the two almost always intersect. There are many examples of culture without social politics, but a Marxist literary critic could read class warfare into almost all of them. Social politics, on the other hand, finds existing without culture a lot like breathing in space. After all, culture is the structure given to the shared beliefs of a society, and without more than one person to share political ideas, you've got a dictator on your hands.
People will read social politics into any book not because of their ideology, but because of who they are. I read The Secret Life of Bees much differently from the way my mother read it, because I've never been a fourteen year-old girl. I can share as much of Lily's ethics or personality as I want, but I don't have the experiences Kidd has written into her backstory. And neither I nor my mother has specifically African American memories, nor South Carolina ones. We understand the characters the same way we understand other people; that is to say, we read imperfectly.
Once this is understood, there are many ways to leap from the platform. All of them have to do with the outcome people want each other to have after reading the book; we want others to agree with us. Some readers insist that Lily should triumph in the end, and that she should come to a deeper understanding with the black characters who support her. This, it can be argued, would create an optimism that encourages other people to seek a similar understanding with their neighbors of a different social background. Other readers, especially the grumpy varieties of postmodernist, want a sad ending in which the iniquities of the real world (for example, racist dads) strangle Lily's dreams and her relationship with August, Zach, and the rest of the gang. The point of this would be to create a pessimism that would fuel the reader to go forth and fix such iniquities.
I don't believe that these outlooks are worthless. I, like most authors, tend to write mixed outcomes, with optimism and pessimism holding hands. But it becomes dangerous to neglect looking at a story from the inside. And, unlike a view of which class is oppressing which, it's absolutely necessary for reading. I tried to connect with Lily's choices in spite of never having been a fourteen year-old, white, lower-middle-class, South Carolina girl in the year 1964. Kidd's words and my thoughts are both human, and so however imperfect my understanding of the political setting, I am the better off for having read it.
There is a great reason that people like to empathize with the characters, and it has nothing to do with selfishness. Books are lessons that help us deal with the problems we face every day, not just what politicians and scholars see when looking down at a map of humanity. Everything else is founded on the face-to-face drama, which is the only (but generous) source of meaning for the vast majority of people who don't have the luxury of brooding in the ivory tower of progressivism.
To begin: social politics are the attempts of constructed groups to gain a comparative advantage over each other. They're different from regular politics because they don't always travel widely-shared, explicit modes like elections, and because they are more frequently peopled by clichés and ideals. They're a favorite of Marxists, and like many Marxist theories, they're thought to be inescapable.
That's the first and last paradox to hurdle. Is everything we do an assertion of power over another class, race, etc.? Many people would disagree, but the assertion is that sitting in front of your computer and reading a literary blog is a luxury purchased at the expense of everyone else in the world who doesn't have that opportunity. After all, they say there's no such thing as a free lunch. The ideology that most promotes the awe of social politics also tends to find fault with behavior that doesn't make everybody equal–not only in freedoms and opportunities, but also in comfort, possessions, behavior, morals, personality, etc. I'm not straying too far into the political: this has everything to do with literature, being the branch of criticism that analyzes the social spheres of the winners and losers in any novel. In The Secret Life of Bees, if Sue Monk Kidd gives Lily a sandwich, it has a different import than if she gives Zach a sandwich. This has nothing to do with their lives and everything to do with their gender and skin color. What could be more natural?
The trick is that a level of this is always necessary. If I pretend that all my characters' races, etc. are random or arbitrary, then I'm both kidding myself and making room for a ton of accidental cultural slander. This is a trap that catches most of the crappier fantasy authors in the biz. Assuming that their legendariums are coming entirely out of their own heads, their characters and cultures reflect medieval Western Europe time after time. (Some are beginning to show signs of America, but this may be the result of declining levels of research.) Culture is what's literally inescapable, and writers shouldn't try. After all, we're creating culture. To admit anything less would be selfishly to insist that our ideas, including the language in which we write, are our private property. In this case, I shouldn't let anybody read my books.
Culture, however, is not at all the same as social politics. Oh, the two almost always intersect. There are many examples of culture without social politics, but a Marxist literary critic could read class warfare into almost all of them. Social politics, on the other hand, finds existing without culture a lot like breathing in space. After all, culture is the structure given to the shared beliefs of a society, and without more than one person to share political ideas, you've got a dictator on your hands.
People will read social politics into any book not because of their ideology, but because of who they are. I read The Secret Life of Bees much differently from the way my mother read it, because I've never been a fourteen year-old girl. I can share as much of Lily's ethics or personality as I want, but I don't have the experiences Kidd has written into her backstory. And neither I nor my mother has specifically African American memories, nor South Carolina ones. We understand the characters the same way we understand other people; that is to say, we read imperfectly.
Once this is understood, there are many ways to leap from the platform. All of them have to do with the outcome people want each other to have after reading the book; we want others to agree with us. Some readers insist that Lily should triumph in the end, and that she should come to a deeper understanding with the black characters who support her. This, it can be argued, would create an optimism that encourages other people to seek a similar understanding with their neighbors of a different social background. Other readers, especially the grumpy varieties of postmodernist, want a sad ending in which the iniquities of the real world (for example, racist dads) strangle Lily's dreams and her relationship with August, Zach, and the rest of the gang. The point of this would be to create a pessimism that would fuel the reader to go forth and fix such iniquities.
I don't believe that these outlooks are worthless. I, like most authors, tend to write mixed outcomes, with optimism and pessimism holding hands. But it becomes dangerous to neglect looking at a story from the inside. And, unlike a view of which class is oppressing which, it's absolutely necessary for reading. I tried to connect with Lily's choices in spite of never having been a fourteen year-old, white, lower-middle-class, South Carolina girl in the year 1964. Kidd's words and my thoughts are both human, and so however imperfect my understanding of the political setting, I am the better off for having read it.
There is a great reason that people like to empathize with the characters, and it has nothing to do with selfishness. Books are lessons that help us deal with the problems we face every day, not just what politicians and scholars see when looking down at a map of humanity. Everything else is founded on the face-to-face drama, which is the only (but generous) source of meaning for the vast majority of people who don't have the luxury of brooding in the ivory tower of progressivism.
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