TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Sullenberger Takes Issue With New Book A pilot whom many consider a hero takes issue with a new account of the flight that landed in the Hudson. feeds.nytimes.com |
Here be dragons: the most noble of literary beasts When did vampires become so soppy? When it comes to mythological creatures, you can't beat the cruelty and wisdom of dragons. Just don't look them in the eye ...I've given up on vampires. Nothing against R-Patz and the face that launched a thousand samplers, but I preferred it when our fanged friends embodied more transgressive desires. From Le Fanu's Carmilla, who gazed "with languid and burning eyes" and "the ardour of a lover" at the maiden friend she fed on, or the savagely voluptuous post-mortem Lucy Westenra, we've got to a point where the angsty black and red covers of teen vamp romances are the darkest thing about the books, and the bad guys have given up all pretensions to the Count's charisma. Twihards? Too dull. For those who haven't washed their hands of vampires, I recommend Robin McKinley's Sunshine as a ray of light in the gloaming. McKinley's haemovores are alien, scary and amoral – old-school, in a word – and there's a sense of genuine transgression when the heroine starts to fraternise. But when it comes to mythological monsters, I'm going back to dragons.Dragons have traditionally occupied an ambiguous moral ground in fantasy; even the good ones may turn on you at any moment. It's unwise to trust a dragon or to look one directly in the eye, as Bilbo nearly does with Smaug, or you might end up hypnotised and ingested. Knowing their true names sometimes confers power – Ged binds a marauding dragon by this means in Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. Otherwise, they are generally renowned for cruelty, greed, wisdom, magic, fire-breathing, gold fetishes and long lives. Good dragons work symbiotically with humans, giving their small riders psyche-widening insights, long-distance transport or answers to difficult questions. Bad ones are likely to steal your treasure and make a nest of your bones.The best dragons of the decade, for my money, are Temeraire and his cohorts in Naomi Novik's eponymous series of alternate histories of the Napoleonic wars in which England and France boast dragon air-forces as well as the more traditional army and navy. In convincingly straitlaced 19th-century prose, Novik chronicles the partnership of Temeraire, a rare Chinese dragon captured in the egg, and Laurence, a Navy captain whose ramrod notions of duty and patriotism are disrupted by Temeraire's casual radicalism. Their developing bond is set against a spectrum of dragon breeds (Regal Coppers, Winchesters, vitriol-spitting Longwings) and devoted aviators, who live outside the rigid structures of English society in coverts where female dragon-captains can wear breeches and drink port to their hearts' content. The aviators' outsider status and the intelligent naivete of the dragons allows Novik to examine pompous, paranoid ideas of national identity and the chain of command from a detached, airborne perspective, and the appendices on dragon breeds are satirically brilliant. I can't wait for the next in the series to appear.I'm also waiting impatiently for the sequel to The Two Pearls of Wisdom, Alison Goodman's exploration of sexual politics in a fantasy Imperial China. Crippled Eon has been groomed to be a Dragon-Eye since childhood, undergoing pain and hardship for the right to be chosen as apprentice by one of the 12 energy dragons whose power and allegiance sway the emperor's court. Chosen by the Mirror Dragon, who has been missing for 20 years, Eon/Eona fails to bond completely because she is too accustomed to concealing her true self (there's a nice play on the "true name" theme here – this time it's the human who has to give up the key to their inner identity to receive the dragon's in return.) Disguising her failure while juggling Imperial favour and malice behind the scenes, Eon realises too late that denying her identity leaves her vulnerable to the ambitious machinations of the Rat Dragon-Eye … The book was so lush, brutal and intriguingly subtle that I forgive it for ending with a terrible cliffhanger, although I hope the next one doesn't.There are some dragons I don't get on with. Eragon, for instance, has never floated my boat, and I was staggered to discover just how dismal Anne McCaffrey's dragon novels look when re-read past the age of 12. Set in the increasingly unmedieval world of Pern (the Pernese become more computer-literate the more ancient spaceships they discover), the books, particularly the earliest in the series, are jaw-droppingly misogynistic and generally joyless, heavy on drinks called "klah" and drudges wearing excremental colours. McCaffrey's dragons, as it transpires several books later, have been bioengineered from indigenous lizards, which leaches out yet more of the joy as far as I'm concerned. They imprint on humans shortly after hatching in a process known as Impression, for which they have a rather weird system to decide who Impresses whom, based on sexual preference and whether one is a "masculine" or "effeminate" homosexual male. Hmm. Dodgy sexual politics aside, the dragons' telepathic communication is so gnomic (frequent use of "Little one" to reassure perturbed riders, etc), and the world of Pern is such a grim, tawdry one that I can't imagine ever wishing to revisit it. For me, the best dragon-fantasy examines human nature by the use of dragons as a distorted mirror – creatures like us in intelligence but unlike in almost every other way. Sometimes the dragons' state is enviable, superior to human, as in the denouement of Le Guin's The Other Wind, in which the deformed, shy Tehanu becomes a dragon, a glorious culmination to years of misery and exclusion.What are your favourite or least favourite literary dragons?Science fiction, fantasy and horrorImogen Russell Williamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Concerning EM Forster; Bury Place Papers At 90, Frank Kermode remains our finest literary critic. Two more incisive volumes cement his reputation, says Rónán McDonaldFrank Kermode recently celebrated his 90th birthday with the addition of these two books to his sizable corpus. In Concerning EM Forster, Kermode tells the reader that Forster "lived to be old and still active, an achievement that almost always impresses the public". The self-deprecation contained within this remark is characteristically subtle, dry and imbued with gentle exasperation. Kermode knows that the reviewers will once again acclaim him as Britain's greatest living literary critic, pointing to his erudition and astonishing output, his calm authority and easy eloquence. Kermode, born on the Isle of Man in 1919, is the last survivor of a golden age of postwar public criticism, though in some ways he is atypical of the earlier generation.What differentiates him from FR Leavis, William Empson and TS Eliot is the mildness of his persona, an absence of fervour or mission. This is not to suggest a lack of faith in his own judgment, but, rather, that his voice is marked by a certain caution and tact. Kermode is tellingly fond of Lionel Trilling's remark about Forster: "He refused to be great." Perhaps this is because Kermode did not reach Cambridge until his 50s, arriving via grammar school and a string of provincial universities. It is not accidental that his 1995 memoir was called Not Entitled. His 10-minute encounter with the "great man" in 1955 was time "well spent" for Kermode, but Forster, "understandably tired and bored", would "probably have judged it differently".To what extent this humble and self-effacing persona is a performance is a moot point. Kermode's voice is slow to anger, balanced, fair-minded and discreet, but this affords its own authority. He persuades us to listen by speaking quietly. This humility, the lack of an air of entitlement and hauteur, is one reason why the nonagenarian does not seem dated or out of time in a way which, arguably, a more mandarin and high-cultural figure like George Steiner now does.Deriving from Kermode's 2007 Clark Lectures (which Forster had delivered 80 years previously), Concerning EM Forster is laced with submerged identifications between author and subject. Forster was also something of an outsider or marginal figure, simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the avant-garde experimentalism of his contemporaries. He had a dislike of system or theory and felt that Henry James's ruminations on the novel form were overly abstract and prescriptive. Likewise, the elasticity of Kermode's critical discrimination favours variety of effect rather than predefined artistic purpose. In their differing ways, Kermode and Forster embody the virtues of a liberal-minded Englishness, open-minded and capacious in sensibility, suspicious of over-abstraction, eager to be true to lived experience, including, crucially, the reality of death. For Forster, the recognition of death was an urgent necessity for the novel to achieve greatness.Kermode is often at his best when giving into the occasional irritation, such as the snobbery he detects in Forster's depiction of Leonard Bast in Howards End. Among the richest pieces in Bury Place Papers are those where he finds fault with William Empson, who he prizes as the greatest critic of the last century, for attempting to shoehorn John Donne into his own anti-Christian belief system.This selection of 29 essays – mostly reviews that Kermode contributed to the London Review of Books, the journal he played a key part in founding – gives a sense of the breadth of his learning. It starts with a piece on millenarianism from 1979 and, following a chronological sequence, ends with a 2007 review of Helen Small's book on old age. On the way, it takes in Flaubert, Wilde, Shakespeare, Raymond Carver and Kazuo Ishiguro, to say nothing of Howard Hodgkin, Noël Annan, Harold Nicolson and Donald Winnicott. An elegant introduction by fellow LRB regular Michael Wood precedes the whole. These pieces comprise a cornucopia of Kermode's critical acuity but also a history of modern letters.There are memorable vignettes, such as the 74-year-old AE Houseman, ailing and tired of life, running up the stairs to his college room in the hope that he might expire on arrival. Occasionally I felt that Kermode pulled his punches. His review of John Carey's What Good Are the Arts? leaves him wondering if there is not "surely more to be said", while parts are "probably over-simplified". Perhaps the big beasts of criticism should not review each other. Yet his critical asides can be gloriously arch, even when wrapped in a compliment. "Martin Amis has always wanted to be a good writer and he has got what he wanted." This sentence economically evokes an image of the warrior against cliché rifling through the thesaurus, and Kermode gives us a choice selection of Amis's "recherché adverbs".The judgments and reflections here are sound and wise. The final piece on old age is characteristically generous, reflective, layered and nuanced. It includes the wistful recognition that we cannot shape death into the reassuring pattern of narrative, cannot imbue it with the sense of an ending: "Death may be, is likely to be, a little too early or a little too late."EM ForsterRonan McDonaldguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Truth by Peter Temple If only this taut Australian thriller wasn't quite so grim, writes Edmund GordonTruth might seem, at first, a more promising title for a treatise on epistemology than a hardboiled detective story, so grand is the project that it appears to map out. Yet by the end of Peter Temple's new novel the title feels almost elegiac. The book's major theme is corruption, personal and political. Temple puts old-fashioned abstract values into conflict with a bleak vision of modern reality, and the result is consistently arresting.The central narrative is tautly constructed and compulsively paced. In a summer of devastating forest fires in Australia, Inspector Stephen Villani, head of the Victoria homicide squad, has a spate of new killings to contend with. A woman has been found in a luxury apartment block with her neck broken. Her clothes and personal effects have been taken, there is little hope of identifying her, and the apartment's residents are proving impossible to trace. Meanwhile, the mutilated bodies of three drug dealers have been discovered in an abandoned warehouse across the city. Villani's attempts to uncover the facts behind these crimes are obstructed from almost every angle: the owner of the apartment block has many influential friends, and is keen to preserve the reputation of his investment; politicians, senior police officers and figures in the media all throw their weight against the investigation, while Villani's own subordinates undermine him at every turn.Villani himself is a severely flawed and indelibly compromised hero: an adulterous husband and an inadequate, guilt-ridden father and son, harrowed by his experiences in the police force, it emerges that he once helped another officer to disguise the fatal shooting of an unarmed suspect as an act of self-defence. When he begins to realise that one of his colleagues might be among the people responsible for the crimes he's investigating, it is far from clear whether his damaged conscience will prevail over his instinct for self-preservation.Temple has long been regarded as one of Australia's most accomplished crime writers, but this is only the second of his nine novels (after the widely acclaimed bestseller The Broken Shore, which features Villani as a minor character) to be published in Britain. A far more literary writer than most of his peers, he eschews the staccato prose rhythms that typify the genre, opting instead for long sentences that do their work over several clauses, blooming and shrinking, and achieving strange, impressionistic effects. His dialogue is entirely distinctive, full of the mangled poetry and beautiful solecisms of ordinary speech. His images can catch in the mind like things glimpsed under lightning. A dead girl's flesh is the colour "of earliest dawn". Autumn leaves move through the air "like broken water, yellow and brown and blood".But despite these great accomplishments, the novel prevents itself from escaping the pigeonhole of genre fiction because of its unrelenting ugliness of vision. Nightmarish murders evidently do occur daily, but accepting the reality of a world in which everybody is corrupted by power and damaged by violence, in which savagery has become a monotony, in which a government minister, talking to a near-stranger, can describe murdered women as "sluts… dogshit on the shoes of society", involves a prolonged banishment of disbelief.The darkness that pervades the novel would be a good deal more effective if it had a little more light to dispel. JM Coetzee's Disgrace (which Temple's publishers ambitiously compare Truth to) contains one scene of horrifying violence; it would be inestimably less powerful if it was just one among several. For all Temple's mastery of style, for all his clarity of thought and subtlety of characterisation, in the end his new novel lacks that essential quality, the impression of truth.Crime booksguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
from The Idiot Boy by William WordsworthAnd now she's high upon the down,And she can see a mile of road:"O cruel! I'm almost three-score;Such night as this was ne'er before,There's not a single soul abroad."She listens, but she cannot hearThe foot of horse, the voice of man;The streams with softest sound are flowing,The grass you almost hear it growing,You hear it now, if e'er you can.……Poor Betty now has lost all hope,Her thoughts are bent on deadly sin,A green-grown pond she just has passed,And from the brink she hurries fast,Lest she should drown herself therein.And now she sits her down and weeps;Such tears she never shed before;"Oh dear, dear pony! my sweet joy!Oh carry back my idiot boy!And we will ne'er o'erload thee more."……Then up she springs as if on wings;She thinks no more of deadly sin;If Betty fifty ponds should see,The last of all her thoughts would beTo drown herself therein.O reader! now that I might tellWhat Johnny and his horse are doing!What they've been doing all this time,Oh could I put it into rhyme,A most delightful tale pursuing!Perhaps, and no unlikely thought!He with his pony now doth roamThe cliffs and peaks so high that are,To lay his hands upon a star,And in his pocket bring it home.Perhaps he's turned himself about,His face unto his horse's tail,And still and mute, in wonder lost,All silent as a horseman-ghost,He travels on along the vale.And now, perhaps, is hunting sheep,A fierce and dreadful hunter he!Yon valley, that's so trim and green,In five months' time, should he be seen,A desert wilderness will be!Perhaps, with head and heels on fire,And like the very soul of evil,He's galloping away, away,And so will gallop on for aye,The bane of all that dread the devil!I to the Muses have been boundThese fourteen years, by strong indentures:O gentle Muses! let me tellBut half of what to him befell;For sure he met with strange adventures.……Who's yon, that, near the waterfall,Which thunders down with headlong force,Beneath the moon, yet shining fair,As careless as if nothing were,Sits upright on a feeding horse?Unto his horse— that's feeding free,He seems, I think, the rein to give;Of moon or stars he takes no heed;Of such we in romances read:—'Tis Johnny! Johnny! as I live.And that's the very pony, too!Where is she, where is Betty Foy?She hardly can sustain her fears;The roaring waterfall she hears,And cannot find her idiot boy.Your pony's worth his weight in gold:Then calm your terrors, Betty Foy!She's coming from among the trees,And now, all full in view she seesHim whom she loves, her idiot boy.And Betty sees the pony too:Why stand you thus, good Betty Foy?It is no goblin, 'tis no ghost,'Tis he whom you so long have lost,He whom you love, your idiot boy.She looks again— her arms are up—She screams— she cannot move for joy;She darts, as with a torrent's force,She almost has o'erturned the horse,And fast she holds her idiot boy.And Johnny burrs, and laughs aloud;Whether in cunning or in joyI cannot tell; but while he laughs,Betty a drunken pleasure quaffsTo hear again her idiot boy.And now she's at the pony's tail,And now is at the pony's head,On that side now, and now on this;And almost stifled with her bliss,A few sad tears does Betty shed.She kisses o'er and o'er againHim whom she loves, her Idiot Boy;She's happy here, she's happy there,She is uneasy every where;Her limbs are all alive with joy.William WordsworthPoetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |