“You want me to name all the times in history that one person led to the death of millions?” Donald asked. “Something like five or a dozen people
“You want me to name all the times in history that one person led to the death of millions?” Donald asked. “Something like five or a dozen people made this happen. You might be able to trace it back to three. And who knows if one of those men was influencing the other two? Well, if one man can build this, it shouldn’t take more than that to bring it all down. Gravity is a bitch until she’s on your side.”
For all of its strengths — its immersive worldbuilding, compelling premise, and a strong protagonist in Juliette — the Silo trilogy has often struggled with its pacing.
With Wool it was forgivable as Howey had to do a lot of heavy-lifting introducing us to this world. Once we got to Shift, the excuses didn’t come so readily. What we learned about the doomsday scenario that created the world of Wool amounted to, at the most charitable, about a hundred and fifty pages of story in a five-hundred-page book, and the rest of the page-count was spent playing catch-up to a story I’d much prefer to be reading.
Thankfully, Dust is that story.
Set some time after Juliette’s unexpected hero’s welcome back to 18, the good favour she’d earned seems all but squandered. Since recovering from her extensive burns, she’s neglected her mayoral duties and spent her time back overseeing the drilling of a passage to Silo 17. Juliette’s commitment to full disclosure at the end of Wool isn’t the potentially profound success it could have been due to her absenteeism.
Revealing world-shattering information and disappearing to drill disruptively in the bowels of the Silo was bound to sow a little discontent.
That’s not to say Juliette could have stemmed most of the backlash with a reassuring hand. The truth of a wider conspiracy, one that includes multiple Silos, was going to be met with disbelief. Her presence might have tempered it from becoming outright hostility as quickly as it did.
The front half of the book covers the drilling to 17 a little too long. Howey juggles named characters around without much time to flesh any of them out. I genuinely can’t say I care about any characters in 18 or 17 other than Solo and Juliette. Even Lukas, but his role this time around is tragically minimal with how his arc ends.
One surprise was how much I enjoyed the chapters covering Donald and Charlotte in Silo 1. They’re essentially stowaways as they try to continue their communication with Juliette (and Lukas). Donald’s brief stint outside in Shift didn’t leave him unscathed either; he’s dying, in fact.
For the bookend of a hefty trilogy, Howey lands about as many punches as he pulls. The destruction of 18 is a decisive turn the story needed, even if it doesn’t have the emotional impact it could have had. Without better defined characters, the unfolding tragedy feels mostly materialistic in its loss — a loss of resources and comfort. The loss of the known for the unknown eventually takes over to better effect.
A couple subplots just didn’t work for me personally. Lukas and Juliette’s relationship was given no time, and the religious subplot was given far too much. Once the page-count is dwindling between sixty pages, I don’t want to read about book burnings or attempts at making a young girl a child bride.
The conclusion is awfully abrupt for my taste. A bombastic climax is teased by Juliette only for her "last stand" to become a trek with a couple of other suited-up people from Silo 18. Personally, I'd have preferred Juliette blasting into 1 and giving them a taste of their own medicine to her stumbling onto a safe haven with faith as her guide.
I didn’t expect the series to end with all questions answered — that’s the purview of author Q&A’s, not satisfying storytelling, after all — but so much is disappointingly left up in the air that its hard to appreciate the ending for what it is. It’s bizarre to think that a series spanning 1500 pages can spend cumulatively more page time on the marital woes of Donald and Helen (that only mostly don’t matter) than it can on the status of the remaining Silos by the end....more
We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.
Wool
We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.
Wool is a richly realised post-apocalyptic tale that sometimes stumbles as it gropes through its fidelity to its worldbuilding.
Set inside the confines of a gargantuan underground silo, Howey takes great pains to establish to the reader the immense scale by tracking each journey up and down its over a hundred floors. The story starts with the sheriff choosing to leave the safety of their walls for the outside. In essence, choosing to die, just as his wife did before him.
There’s a conspiracy touched on here — something his wife found out that compelled her outside to the ostensibly toxic wastelands above them — that is momentarily sidelined as the story moves on to find someone to replace the sheriff.
It’s here we’re introduced to Jules, our protagonist, a determined workaholic of the deep down. I was a little worried that her being from Mechanical might veer into that so-called hokey salt-of-the-earth every-man trope, but it actually doesn’t. Her time as sheriff is short-lived due to the machinations of the head of IT.
As anyone whose ever had internet trouble knows, IT are not to be trifled with.
Howey not only establishes scale within the silo, but also depth, as each sector is lightly grazed and incorporated as the Mayor is assassinated and the conspiracies that inspired the sheriff’s wife and himself to leave the silo become known to some key players. In no time, rumblings of revolt plague the silo.
Bernard, our antagonist, functions more as a font of information than a flesh-and-blood character. His true-believer persona inspires little understanding of the man. His past, even his present, feel intangible in a frustrating way. He’s a vehicle for the Order that devised the silos and little else, and his anticlimactic resolution only compounds that.
As the scope of the storytelling widens and the cast of characters break off in different directions, the chapters become oddly truncated. A dramatic moment will happen and Howey will choose to end the chapter, spend the next two on other perspectives, and then return to that very moment just without the same tension tying it together. The worse case of this is when Jules emerges from her underwater tinkering and finds Solo on the floor.
The ending itself is similarly frustrating. The most interesting moments of Lukas surviving his cleaning happen off-page. We learn about them later as Jules is convalescing. That said, I was glad that Jules wasn’t willing to continue lying to everybody in the silo for some vague sense of greater good.
Whatever issues I had, Wool is an immersive and engaging track through an uncanny post-apocalyptic landscape and I’m excited to read the rest of the trilogy....more
The disputes among Alexander’s contemporaries over the cause of his death make it hard to accept any evidence on its face. This is a hall-of-mirror
The disputes among Alexander’s contemporaries over the cause of his death make it hard to accept any evidence on its face. This is a hall-of-mirrors world where the more convincing an account seems, the more it might be suspected to be the work of clever assassins concealing their crimes. But historical research has to begin somewhere; if nothing can be trusted, nothing can be known
The pitfalls of attempting to narrativize history are endless — facts and figures, however complete, don’t readily lend themselves to compelling three-act structures and dynamic characters — and yet, personally, its my favourite means of engaging with the subject. And a lot of the time, asking for a comprehensive history lesson and skillful storytelling is an impossible task.
Ghost on the Throne does the impossible with an almost impeccable ease, or at least, James Romm gives that appearance.
In just over three hundred pages, Romm sketches the vibrant political landscape of Alexander the Great’s empire in the third century B.C.E. With his death, the power vacuum had the remaining threads of the Argead dynasty become tangled in bitter rivalries and petty disputes until they frayed beyond utility for the major players spanning two continents.
Charting the six years after Alexander’s death, Romm ably tackles the stacked board of characters — Perdiccas, Ptolemy, Cassander, Antigonus, and especially Eumenes, whose rise and fall has a fascinatingly mythic quality in its own right — and tells the story of Alexander’s posthumously long-casting shadow with a historian’s insight but a storytellers eye.
The follies of monarchy have never felt so succinctly, entertainingly and educationally detailed. I loved it. ...more
And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless de
And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.
The most remarkable aspect of Revolutionary Road is its searing prescience — specifically its ability to predict how fifties America would be evaluated in the decades to come. Yates captures the zeitgeist of the time and dissects it with a deadly precision usually reserved for those with the luxury of hindsight.
I could believe this novel was written in 2010, and for a book published in ‘61, that’s quite a feat.
Post-war America was a time of extremes for its growing middle class. The browbeating idealism of the time was caught up in the spectre of Cold War paranoia: the standards of living had never been better, but the expectations never more oppressive. The prepackaged suburban lifestyle sold to white Americans was far more costly than advertised, and in Revolutionary Road the Wheelers are one of many couples struggling with buyers remorse.
Frank and April Wheeler are frustrating products of their time. They’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of American exceptionalism and come out the other side languishing in a petrifying sense of ennui. They’re greatness is undeniable; they’re meant for brighter, better things, and its mere practicalities that’s getting in the way of them harnessing that greatness.
The crux of the story is the Wheelers crumbling marriage, mainly how cognitive dissonance plagues the couple as they're confronted with their own mediocrity. With it being the fifties, gender plays a stark role. Frank can reasonably ascend his status through work opportunities, but as a woman, April’s options are far more limited. With that in mind, Frank is willing to suffer an existence in the suburbs, as his gilded cage is a lot more flexible than April's in her prescribed role as housewife.
It’s in April’s attempt to vicariously live through her husband’s greatness — arranging a new life in France and once again met with her husband's mediocrity — that their marriage reaches a point of no return.
Yates sketches a compellingly demoralised marriage with the Wheelers, and neatly serves them as a microcosm for the unmet promises of the American Dream laid bare and broken....more
Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum takes the simple premise of a dutiful wife caring for her dying husband and then ratchets up the tension with grotesque bodyHelpmeet by Naben Ruthnum takes the simple premise of a dutiful wife caring for her dying husband and then ratchets up the tension with grotesque body horror that teeters the story into incomprehensibility.
Ruthnum spends most of the novella detailing Edward’s deteriorating condition, lingering on his missing appendages, hollowed out body, and decaying flesh. It evokes the acute horror anyone caring for a dying loved one has experienced, as terror and helplessness struggle to the surface.
Set in 1900, the calamity Louise must face is contextualised by her economic and social position in society. Louise Wilks is just as dependent on her husband’s reputation and wealth as he is on her care, and in both cases it is a losing battle; Edward will die, and Louise will fall.
But Helpmeet concocts a bizarre synthesis for them as it introduces further disturbing elements to the story. It’s definitely an acquired taste as it hurtles to its disorientating conclusion, but at 85 pages, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. ...more
I’ve lost count of the number of things in my life — dates, films, meals, work appointments — I’ve missed because of delayed or cancelled trains. I
I’ve lost count of the number of things in my life — dates, films, meals, work appointments — I’ve missed because of delayed or cancelled trains. If I’d been an alcoholic or a junkie, I don’t think I could have bigger holes in my diary. Being a passenger teaches you that life is random and nothing can be counted on.
The Witnesses are Gone is the story of Martin Swan, a man who finds strange VHS tapes in the shed of his new house. The tale is permeated with a new millennium disaffection, as Lane situates the story with references to the War on Terror and the geopolitical narratives of the day that justified it.
The backdrop of growing unease and disenfranchisement segues naturally into Martin watching the strange tape and spiraling as he tries to make sense of it. He treats the mystery of the filmmaker Jean Rien as a Rosetta Stone, as if unlocking the mysteries of a nebulous auteur can act as a master key to more personal mysteries that plague him.
The strength of this novella is its weakness, too — its defiance of easy classification and conventional storytelling leaves the reader as adrift as Martin is as he watched that first tape.
The oppressive tone, especially at the latter half, often didn’t work for me; I found myself laughing at one or two points. The abruptness of Martin’s long-term girlfriends death by train and then this heroin hazed journey in South America with a woman who may or may not be real might have been an intentional choice, but that didn’t make it any less silly to read at times.
Still, The Witnesses are Gone succeeds in a way a lot of stories don’t and made a lasting impression on me....more
I was grateful to get back on my motorcycle. Things seemed simple there, stripped to bare essentials. While I was moving, slipping like a shadow t
I was grateful to get back on my motorcycle. Things seemed simple there, stripped to bare essentials. While I was moving, slipping like a shadow through the world, I didn’t feel so vulnerable to a child’s smile, or an old woman’s pity.
One thing that disappointed me about Unknown was how Cassiel become too adjusted to the human world after such a short time. Undone had done a fantastic job of capturing Cassiel’s aloofness in ways both interesting and frustrating, so I was glad Unseen found a better balance.
What distinguishes this series from a slew of others is Cassiel’s unique perspective and losing that so suddenly hurt Unknown.
Cassiel’s competing human and Djinn instincts are portrayed more nuanced too: before now, her Djinn part was unapologetically cold-blooded, and I think there’s a couple of situations here that better highlight the “virtues” of the Djinn.
Unseen starts like one of those reality shows where they bring troubled teens to prisons to “scare them straight” by listening to the well-meaning posturing of inmates.
In this version, Cass brings Isabel to someone who also messed around with their powers at a young age and suffered the consequence of becoming half-snake from the bottom down after a battle with a Djinn. This interaction leads Isabel to agree to go to a Warden facility to help her deal with her abilities.
I enjoyed all the time we got at the facility, and how much we learned about the children’s conditions. Horrifyingly, awaking a child’s abilities before they can handle them is a death sentence, and all the facility can do is prolong their life but not by much.
After learning this, Luis dedicates himself to caring for the children, Isabel particularly, but Cass has a greater duty in defeating Pearl. This leads to an understandably emotionally-charged fight between them, as Luis interprets this as abandonment. I sympathtised with Luis’s perspective right up until he claimed Rashid.
Unlike with Lewis in the main series, this enslavement plays into a great moment at the end between Luis and Cass. To his horror, she sets Rashid free. He can’t believe she'd bet their lives on a Djinn’s “goodwill” and Cass quickly rejoins, “It was better than betting it on his obedience”, and I just love that.
The second half of the book is spent with Cass going undercover in Pearl’s cult. I liked how the book seemed to be pushed in so many directions, but the confrontation between Pearl and Cass wasn’t as exciting, climactic, or even as significant to the plot as it really should have been.
Buttressing this point, the apocalyptic scenario of the Mother waking up happens out of nowhere at the end, which sort of dwarfs Pearl on the scale of threats.
Unseen is a little all over the place, but that isn’t always a bad thing, and given all the bases Caine covered, I’d even go so far as saying its a strength....more
One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later that he had felt as
One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had already died. The feeling of lifelessness was intensified by other causes: in time, it was the limitlessness of the term of imprisonment which was most acutely felt; in space, the narrow limits of the prison. Anything outside the barbed wire became remote — out of reach and, in a way, unreal. The events and the people outside, all the normal life there, had a ghostly aspect for the prisoner. The outside life, that is, as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as it might have to a dead man who looked at it from another world.
Man's Search for Meaning operates on two levels but only resonates, personally speaking, on one. On the level of recounting the harrowing events of life in a Nazi Concentration Camp, it excels. Frankl is able to dig deep into his trauma and make meaning of it — with a "tragic optimism" that contextualises the camps indignities and cruelties and his place in them.
There, humanity in all its awful and awe-inspiring aspects, reflects and refracts in curious ways.
The other level is Frankl the psychiatrist.
According to the book, it was his publisher that asked for more of this side of things. Even before the camp, Frankl had been working on a theory that eventually became logotherapy, an existential framework that relies heavily on spiritualism. That can sound contradictory, and honestly, the section that tries to go in-depth on this idea results in a lot of rambling. Mostly, it sounds like a sermon on suffering, one that pontificates his own rationalisations.
To make some measure of peace with something like the Holocaust — to make meaning from it — Frankl sanctifies suffering. Here, he sounds no different than Mother Teresa. In an addition written a decade or two later, he acknowledges that "needless suffering" shouldn't be endured if it can be helped, but I'd already read this passage:
Regarding our 'provisional existence' as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless. Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.
Talking about those that died in the camp's like this feels distasteful, but I imagine Frankl's apathy was a necessity during his time there and maybe even for the rest of his life. So I can't fault him too much.
However, I don't believe a devout mind has the ability to overcome the limitations of the body and that theological mentality will definitely alienate some, myself included. I'd recommend just reading his account of his experiences and skipping the section about logotherapy....more
I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pasttime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in
I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pasttime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bulletpocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is the second collection of short stories, and distinguishes itself from the former by delving into pre-Watson cases and getting a better sense of Sherlock in his own words.
The first case, about a missing race horse and a murdered man, starts the collection off to a poor start. For me, the story meandered and the mystery wasn't worth the build-up.
Then, the second story, The Yellow Face starts stronger, wobbles in the middle, and comes to a positively enlightened conclusion for the time of its publication.The Stockbrokers Clerk is another rendition of The Red-Headed League but without the fun factor that elevated it.
The Gloria Scott is a personal favourite. Set in Holmes's younger years, it tells the story of his isolated academic years and the fortuitous circumstances that led to him actually making a friend.
His friends' father dies unexpectantly and Sherlock finds his niche interest of observation and deduction may have a more productive application than a party piece. While he does decode a message which locates the confession, the mystery itself is completely laid bare from that point on. Here, Sherlock learns the relish of discovery, a high he'll spend his lifetime chasing.
The story of a mutiny on a prisoner ship to Australia is far more bloodthirsty and violent than any of Doyle's previous stories. And aside from a weird continuity issue (Victor says his father never regained consciousness after reading the letter and suffering a stroke, yet the confession locked in the cabinet contains a written reaction to receiving the letter), its one of the strongest short stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon.
The Musgrave Ritual continues Doyle's foray into pre-Watson cases, and its a mundane mystery with a satisfyingly bizarre end. The fixation on Rachel's Welsh-ness becomes comedic by the end, though.
The Reigate Squires begins with Holmes ailing from days without rest during a case. Watson takes him off to get some R&R, but of course, they encounter another puzzling incident. Throughout, Holmes plays up his ill-health, gets tackled, and expounds the merits of graphology. It's another dated pseudo-science of the time like phrenology, and I can understand Doyle wanting to exploit what was cutting-edge forensic-thought at the time and incorporate them into Holmes's methods.
The Crooked Man and The Resident Patient are passable, with the latter giving us another ejaculation from Watson, putting the tally to 7.
During my long and intimate acquaintance with Mr Sherlock Holmes I had never heard him refer to his relations, and hardly ever to his own early life. This reticence upon his part had increased the somewhat inhuman effect which he produced upon me, until sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence.
The Greek Interpreter is notable for introducing Mycroft Holmes, Sherlocks older brother whose keen eye for observation and deduction exceeds his own. Watching the siblings play off each other is the highlight of a story that boils down to a failed extortion.
Watson's commentary has that wonderful way of saying something truly horrifying like the quote above but with the clinical detachment of his profession.
The Naval Treaty has the distinction of being the longest of these stories, while not actually deviating from Doyle's well-trodden territory in the process. A crime of opportunity with the chance for international upheaval isn't as interesting as it should be.
"He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.
The Final Problem is a great swansong for the consulting detective. It would have been great had Moriarty's existence proceeded this story, that his presence in Watson's memoirs could be felt before Reichenbach Falls, but that's the nature of selling short stories for publication.
Despite this, Doyle does a fantastic job of engineering Moriarty as a real threat, even if the convoluted nature of his menace isn't borne out in any particular way. I also appreciated Holmes's stance on his career, and prioritising getting rid of Moriarty over his own life....more
It's generally accepted that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a much better short-story writer than he was a novelist, so it comes as no shock that The AdveIt's generally accepted that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a much better short-story writer than he was a novelist, so it comes as no shock that The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of short stories involving the consulting detective, are a vast improvement over the previous two books.
"Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.
A Scandal in Bohemia is a masterclass of a short story. In essence, Holmes is bested by a woman, Irene Adler, because he just can't escape his own woefully stereotypical views of women. Where a man can be defined by his social status, his personal habits and you know, by the rich tapestry of their humanity — woman is sufficiently explanatory of the opposite sex for Holmes.
Sherlock finally encounters a woman outside of the patriarchal roles assigned to them and is almost immediately humbled. Unfortunately, his takeaway isn't that, perhaps, women are as multifaceted as men, but that Adler herself is some kind of exceptional super-woman worthy of uncommon respect. A woman whose picture he'll paw at pathetically for decades to come. And for the Victorian recluse, that's a win.
"As far as you are personally concerned," remarked Holmes, "I do not see that you have any grievance against the extraordinary league. On the contrary, you are, I understand, richer by some thirty pounds, to say nothing of the minute knowledge which you have gained on every subject which comes under the letter A."
Then there's The Red-Headed League, another banger. A man gets roped into a preposterously suspicious job due to him being a ginger, and is flabbergasted when the opportunity blows up in his face.
Watson and Holmes don't take him seriously for a minute, laugh in his face about his predicament, and its hilarious. Also, Watson ejaculates again, and Holmes does that irritating thing where he quotes something in a different language — which must have been especially irritating to readers at the time, sans Google.
A Case of Identity takes the What-the-Fuckery up to new, dangerously implausible heights. Disguises have always been like magic in the Sherlock Holmes universe. No amount of crack could explain the scene in The Sign of Four where Sherlock reveals himself to Watson by taking off his sailor wig and Watson, actually for-the-love-of-god, wonders where the sailor has gone?
So the story of a stepfather tricking his poorly-sighted stepdaughter that he's another man entirely — by only coming out in the evening, and wearing dark glasses, and murmuring throughout their courtship — is another hard sell, but its stupidity rebounds and becomes almost as funny as the last story. Especially as it ends with Holmes declaring, "Bitches be crazy," as to his reason for not revealing the truth to the stepdaughter.
The Boscombe Valley Mystery is a simple blackmail-turned-murder mystery that's main contribution is adding a fifth "ejaculation" to Watson's tally.
The Five Orange Pips deals with the KKK exacting revenge over their flagging organisation. Holmes solves the case but justice isn't served as the culprits are presumably lost at sea. The Man with the Twisted Lip: a man with a full-time job supplements his income by professional begging and accidentally stages his own murder.
The Blue Carbuncle stands out because at one point Holmes assumes a man's an intellectual because he has a big head. Annnd that his wife doesn't love him because his hat is dirty, which is obviously a loving wifely duty not to be undertaken by the man, himself, ever. Other than that, its a bonafide Christmas special.
The Speckled Band is another case of a stepfather trying to prevent his stepdaughters from marrying because of its impact on his finances. This time Holmes and Watson beat a snake alone in a dark room at night. Watson ejaculates again.
A personal favourite is The Engineers Thumb, which is the series first real foray into horror. Its genuinely scary and the ending gives no resolution to the killer. The poor engineers business is still failing, he's lost a thumb and gained significant trauma from the ordeal — but Holmes is quick to look on the bright side; it'll be a good story to tell at parties. Honestly, good point.
The Noble Bachelor is a boring runaway bride mystery that resolves with a shrug. The Beryl Coronet is forgettable. And, lastly, The Copper Beeches starts with a curious conversation between Holmes and Watson:
"Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools."
There are a few ways this sentiment can be interpreted, but I lean toward it being evidence of Doyle's own weariness for writing these mysteries and, perhaps, regurgitating common criticisms his stories have gotten. Other than that its another father-wants-to-keep-the-dowry story, and Watson shipping Holmes with Miss Hunter....more
For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling acc
For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner — for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable
Moby Dick is a discursive, explorative examination of whaling and the crew of the Pequod under the authority of Captain Ahab. The key word here is discursive — Melville brings a philosophical perspective to all aspects of whaling in the same breath he details different whales and their physiology, tools of the trade, etc.
He also experiments with format, too, sometimes bizarrely: several chapters adopt a play-like script for no obvious reason. The experimental nature of this kind of storytelling can be frustrating. A character is introduced with pomp and forgotten about for hundreds of pages before becoming a footnote.
Ishmael gets lost in the weeds of Melville's literary whims far too many times to be a reliable protagonist, and that's only when Melville recalls he's supposed to be writing from Ishmael's perspective.
Don't get me wrong, though.
When Moby Dick works, its masterful. The lyrical prose, the pithy observations — "Warmest climes but nurse the cruelest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure." — or the chapter on Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish that shows Melville transcend the topic of whaling at his most discerning.
Outside of whaling, the idea of a group of people living together for years, isolated from larger society, and creating their own community is fascinating. Every so often, the Pequod will come across other whaling vessels and engage briefly with communities similar to their own but subject to the vicissitudes of whaling in unique ways.
The confrontation with the titular whale and its outcome are a foregone conclusion that doesn't really have much emotional weight to me, personally. Ahab as a character is perfectly characterised (I appreciated the emphasis placed on his isolation after losing his leg contributing largely to his monomania) and the majority of the crew are reasonably obtuse to his manipulations, but some of the important characters have a tendency to speak of themselves in the third person, even to each other, and I got lost more than once.
I spent more time confirming who was speaking by the end than who was dead....more
Alas! why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were
Alas! why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.
For the time of its publication in 1817, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a unique blend of gothic horror and speculative fiction.
The story of a monomaniacal man's perversion of the natural order and letting the consequences ravage those around him as he descends into a self-absorbed madness is ... a curious choice for Shelley, who concocted the story while in the company of luminaries like Lord Byron, and her own husband, Percy Shelley.
For me, the books gothic horror functions best when interpreting the creator, Victor Frankenstein, as a theological analogue. Here, he operates as all theoretical gods: he creates life and maintains a strict isolationist policy from his creation. The horror lies in presupposing it isn't some unknowable design that keeps our creator from interacting with us — some test of faith, etc. — but a visceral disgust.
Here, our creator isn't an omnipotent guardian but an arrogant, capricious coward. Frankenstein's Creature's grievance is easily applicable to a believers with their god: to exist in a state of deep dependance and to be abandoned to ones own devises, only to be harshly judged once you've miraculously eked out an existence you never asked for.
Sometimes I tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds, but was unable. Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.
The Creature's account is the strongest storytelling, even as it requires serious logical leaps to believe his language and comprehension could have developed so rapidly and in line with Victor's own vernacular. A little miscommunication would have gone a long way to making this more believable. On the other hand, the Creature's poor emotional intelligence is appropriately childlike.
Frankenstein's own experimentation at the beginning of the book is a confusing account to follow: he spends most of the time touting the writings of scientific authors he eventually dismisses, then delves into alchemy and discovers the secrets to life — specifically imbuing life into lifeless material, not restoring life.
On the creation of this new life, all of Frankenstein's scientific learning deserts him; he doesn't attempt to study this new life and instead flees his laboratory. For this humiliating and devastating abandonment, his creation seeks revenge, first killing his younger brother before offering Frankenstein an ultimatum: create me a companion or I'll kill everyone else you love.
Initially, Frankenstein agrees before, characteristically, abandoning his creation once he's thoroughly rationalised his cowardice.
The Creature goes on his killing spree and both of them are dead or presumed dead by the end. Not once is a quirky Alf living situation even considered.
Before dying, Victor attempts to impart a lesson about the evils of the pursuance of ambition, when a more appropriate lesson would be about taking accountability for ones actions. Victor Frankenstein is basically a deadbeat dad who got what he deserved....more
The Baudelaire orphans had found friends, and as they stood in the library with the Quagmire triplets, the world felt smaller and safer than it had f
The Baudelaire orphans had found friends, and as they stood in the library with the Quagmire triplets, the world felt smaller and safer than it had for a long, long time
I don't think I've ever been so shocked by such a turnaround as The Austere Academy is to The Miserable Mill. Just when I was writing off this series, Snicket does the improbable and tells the best story of this series so far.
With a dearth of on-hand relatives to foist them on, Mr. Poe has the Baudelaire's enrolled at Prufrock Preparatory School. The Baudelaire's are immediately ostracised by the rest of the students and forced to live in a shack rife with mould and infested with crabs of all things.
The curriculum is one class for both Klaus and Violet, who have to measure things and remember rambling anecdotes, respectively. Due to Sonny's age, of course, she's made the vice principal's secretary.
Vice Principal Nero is the MVP of this book. His name is obviously a reference to Emperor Nero, whose fiddling is replaced with interminable violin recitals. Nero is hilarious. He constantly mimics what the children say in a whiny voice like a petulant child; he can't play the violin but insists on mandatory attendance for his six-hour long recitals; he appoints Sunny, an infant, as his secretary. All of it is so beautifully batshit.
Olaf reappears as the school gym teacher, Coach Genghis, whose dastardly plan is deceptively silly: in his capacity as their gym teacher, he makes them run all night, every night, so they're too exhausted for schoolwork and are eventually expelled. The school setting lends itself to Harry Potter references, and having Count Olaf wear a turban to disguise his unibrow (as Quirrell did to disguise Voldemort's face on the back of his head) is cute.
What separates this story from the rest is the introduction of the Quagmire triplets (one of whom died in a fire along with their parents, so its just two of them). This is the first time the Baudelaire's have been able to engage with their peers and its refreshing. The Quagmire triplets are also recipients of a considerable inheritance when they come of age, which is an interesting direction to go and opens up a potentially larger conspiracy.
In the end, Olaf settles for kidnapping them over the Baudelaires and we're left with the first true cliffhanger of this series....more
The Miserable Mill is the fourth entry into this series and its formula is showing its wear. Books like this benefit from its relative brevity but theThe Miserable Mill is the fourth entry into this series and its formula is showing its wear. Books like this benefit from its relative brevity but there are downsides too.
With a short page count, the story remains focused, but when the story just hits the same three or four story beats with little variation, 190 pages can feel like 490.
Mr. Poe carts the Baudelaire's off to Paltryville to be under the guardianship of a man with an apparently unpronounceable name. Also, this man treats them like employees at his lumbermill — forcing minors to do backbreaking and dangerous work. And he has a perpetual cloud of cigar smoke obscuring his face to add to the fever dream feel of this entry.
Basically, Mr. Poe is still a menace and the true villain of this story and he has yet to prove otherwise.
Outside of having Violet and Klaus put themselves in the other's shoes and specialties, everything else that happens is just noise. Olaf is back and in drag — fine. He's in cahoots with a hypnotist — fine. Sunny has a fight with the hypnotist using her four sharp teeth like a sword — I can't even visualize that.
Honestly, this is the first boring instalment. Other than reading into the constant use of "partner" to describe Sir and Charles relationship and deciding, yes, that's gay, there's absolutely nothing I thought about for more than a second....more
Ireland's Other History is a light but informative dive into the history that shaped the small island. Ireland's relatively recent history — the past Ireland's Other History is a light but informative dive into the history that shaped the small island. Ireland's relatively recent history — the past five-hundred years — is entrenched in Christianity and colonialism; its only in the last seventy years Ireland has been recognised as an independent state, and that's usually where Irish history is centred and concerned with because of its continued impact to this day.
Due to this, it's almost easy to forget just how old Ireland is and how its history and identity emerged before then.
McDonnell traces thousands of years back to the island's geological beginnings as it thawed from the Ice Age and creates a tale that is inextricably interconnected with the rest of the world. So much of Ireland's prehistory is closely tied to the histories of other countries, people's and places. The book takes the time to show how ideas, legends, tools and resources are traded between budding societies and established networks.
I can't vouch for the veracity of much of this information — McDonnell highlights in the introduction the limitations of how we create narratives from the scant proofs available in our prehistory — but the narrative he weaves is a joy to read.
Between the accounts covering the Stone, Bronze and Iron ages, McDonnell incorporates a great deal of Irish mythology to add colour and character to an otherwise intangible time....more
It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards wer
It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.
The Hobbit is the unlikely tale of Bilbo Baggins, an unadventurous hobbit from Hobbiton tasked by Gandalf (a friendly wizard) to accompany thirteen dwarves on a treacherous journey to slay a dragon.
His initial (and incredibly understandable) reluctance is eventually overcome by his pride as the dwarves dismiss his usefulness as a "burglar" — alongside the promise of hoarded treasures. The story finds its purchase in how Bilbo proves to be an invaluable asset to the group.
The journey from Hobbiton to Smaug's dwellings is fraught with episodic dangers: trolls, spiders, starvation and elves. With each encounter, Bilbo becomes more formidable. He acquires a magical ring that renders its wearer invisible and on multiple occasions showcases courage, cunning and resourcefulness in no small measure.
However, once they disturb Smaug, the dragon takes his wrath out on the Lake-men of Esgaroth, destroying their homes, livelihoods and loved-ones — his death is a Pyrrhic victory to the village, and as Thorin lays claim to Smaug's treasure, the Lake-men and elves vie for their share of the spoils. News of the treasure leads to two more armies descending on the mountain and the dwarves are once again saved by the eagles — who have to be doing this literal "swooping in to save the day" thing on purpose at this point.
Basically, the Battle of Five Armies is completely those dumbass dwarves fault and they should feel bad about it.
Tolkien's foray into mythmaking is vibrant and immersive; its easy to understand its chokehold on the fantasy genre seventy years on. The Hobbit acts as a welcoming stepping stone to Middle-Earth's larger world and narrative....more
A woman runs to catch a bus on a spring afternoon and is never seen again. Another woman misses a bus and hitch-hikes home, with the same outcome.
A woman runs to catch a bus on a spring afternoon and is never seen again. Another woman misses a bus and hitch-hikes home, with the same outcome. Killers go undetected, sometimes for ever. We live with the not-knowing.
On its surface, The Vanishing Triangle covers a cluster of missing-person's cases that plagued Ireland in the nineties, that through institutional and social breakdowns continue to remain unsolved to this day. Without a shred of new evidence or leads or suspects to present a new angle to an old mystery, McGowan changes tact and analyses these cases through the socio-economic and political lens that informed the times. Ireland is a small island. Travelling by car from Cork to Belfast (both at opposite corners of the map) would take under five hours, but political divisions made Northern Ireland and the Republic seem world's apart, despite no tangible border.
As in so many of these triangle cases, a suffocating silence has covered her disappearance. Someone must know how a young woman could vanish off the streets of a city in the middle of the day. But no one is talking.
The Troubles were a uniquely turbulent time in Northern Irish history that bled into the Republic in marked ways that would ultimately prove detrimental to the missing women. If it wasn't a provable act of sectarian violence, the police didn't know how to competently classify it. While a misogynistic culture of judgement and silence aided and abetted these disappearances when it came to witness testimony and their enquiries, the state's inability to effectively prosecute violent sex offenders (allowing them to reoffend within a year or so) and investigate missing person's cases without falling back on tired sexist tropes (running away with a man or suicide without evidence or a body, all while very credible suspects lurk on the fringes, etc.) and actively rejecting the possibility of foul play is abominable. And infuriating to read.
McGowan also explores the distrust between the Irish people and its institutions—the state and the Church—in great detail, where the muddied waters of politics could stop a priest from notifying authorities of a body found on his premises, or a man could find the dumped belongings of a missing woman and not report them until a year later, long after he'd burned them. More impressively, McGowan details the cases with compassion and sensitivity, careful not to make any hasty judgments herself as she acknowledges off-hand by referring to her instincts as a crime fiction writer.
Both described that same state peculiar to families of the missing, where you're grieving, except grief relies on certainty and you don't even have that. You're just stuck, waiting to feel the wound that's been inflicted on you.
Ever since I heard about the phenomena of the vanishing triangle, I'd been curious about reading something better sourced and researched than the barebones Wikipedia page it links to, and with Claire McGowan's book I couldn't have asked for a better written and more comprehensive account. ...more
There are two ways to reckon with Dracula: first, as a seminal piece of horror fiction, and secondly, as a curious timepiece in how it chooses to maniThere are two ways to reckon with Dracula: first, as a seminal piece of horror fiction, and secondly, as a curious timepiece in how it chooses to manifest its horror. The title evokes a glut of imagery, whether you've read the book or not, and its that cultural consciousness that interests me most.
Dracula is, fascinatingly, both the prototype and the archetype of our modern conception of vampires, and while the quality of the novel has a lot to do with that, a not inconsiderable amount has to be owed to Bram Stoker never actually copyrighting the character. Due to this possible oversight, in the century since its publication, Dracula has evolved in exhaustive iterations that both change and continue the legacy Stoker started in interesting ways.
Written in the last decade of the nineteenth century by an Irish writer in colonialised Ireland, the novel's horror cloaks itself in tangibly British anxieties. Given the British empires expansionism and eventual decline around the corner, xenophobia was rampant; exploiting different countries and people for profit was all well and good, but integrating with them in any meaningful way wasn't—or worse, non-subjugated territories potentially subjugating them.
Naturally, Dracula comes from the East. He's a wealthy Romanian who wishes to settle in Britain with nefarious motives. He's a foreigner hell-bent on making England his new hunting grounds. He's studied the language and culture to better infiltrate and "turn" them, and is particularly set on taking the honest Englishmen's women. At times it can read like a thinly-veiled screed against immigration: the plot is basically a group of men hunting down a foreigner around the world after he attacked two British women.
Most of the time, though, its a fantastic horror story that utilises its epistolary framework to great effect. Dracula's menace is established subtly, quietly, only giving way to great shows of force when cornered in the narrative. The central characters of Van Helsing and Mina Harker are nearly just as iconic as Dracula himself, and if you squint past Mina's contribution of being the victim and glorified secretary of the group (she compiles the diary entries), her role is considerable for its time.
Despite these gripes, I really enjoyed Dracula. So much of the vampire mythos I've come to love started right here....more
"The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. Conside
"The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual—and, after all, what is an individual?' With a sweeping gesture he indicated the rows of microscopes, the test-tubes, the incubators. 'We can make a new one with the greatest ease—as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself. Yes, at Society itself,' he repeated.
What interests me the most about Brave New World is how it teeters the line between utopia and dystopia—depending entirely on one's point of view. It was evidently a struggle Huxley wrestled with too, as he initially espoused some of the core idea's present in the book's World State: rigid hierarchy and social conditioning from conception. He was a vocal proponent of eugenics and was optimistically in favour of Stalin's Five Year Plan.
For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently—though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers, but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
That said, the World State also broadly reflects his conservativism: promiscuity and casual drug-use are shallow depths for depravity, but that's a natural consequence of reading it in 2022, rather than 1932. Sexuality and gender are divorced from their traditional social roles, but aren't explored much outside of the roles of mother and father. There's also the racial component. While the cast is predominantly white, the nonwhite characters that do exist are scattered in servant roles, invariably at the bottom of the hierarchy, or "savages" outside of the World State's control. Also they're addressed in the prose by one particular slur I had to look up to fully appreciate, and a movie Lenina brings John the Savage to sounds like if Birth of a Nation got a porn parody.
Long after publication, Nazism and the horrible truth of Stalin's Five Year Plan complicated Huxley's feelings on his idea of social engineering. While writing the book he straddled somewhere between the philosophies of Mustapha and John the Savage, detailed in their first and last conversation at the end of the book, and many years later he seems to have resolved these issues in his own way, but the specifics of that aren't relevant to Brave New World. Just the conflict itself. How, at turns, the World State can be a sincere outline for societal progress and, simultaneously, a deconstruction of it. A satire of the modern American lifestyle he found grotesque at the time, and a profound quest for societal stability. It's this complex prism of potential readings that gives the novel is lasting legacy, even if I didn't find it quite so compelling as I did when I was fifteen....more
The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life.
Lord of the Flies was written in 1954, and excep
The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life.
Lord of the Flies was written in 1954, and excepting one awful slur placed at an unfortunately pivotal moment in the book—and spoken by the most sensible character, no less—it holds up really well.
A story about schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean is right up my alley. The particulars that led them to this fate aren't terribly important; if anything, its how quickly the boys divest themselves of their past under the strain of island life that really matters.
Without an adult authority to look to, the first few hours are spent reining in the survivors, establishing some order with the conch, and appointing a Chief. Tensions immediately develop between Ralph (the appointed Chief) and Jack (the self-appointed hunter), the two strongest personalities of the group. However, without adult censure and guidance, this attempt at self-governance is undermined within days.
Henry was the biggest of them. He was also a distant relative of that other boy whose mulberry-marked face had not been seen since the evening of the great fire; but he was not old enough to understand this, and if he had been told that the other boy had gone home in an aircraft, he would have accepted the statement without fuss or disbelief.
There are few things so terrifying as being stranded on an island, but subjecting the terror on a group of children creates its own unique horror. Golding explores the mindset of individuals and haphazard communities when societies strictures are no longer enforceable, and he does it without straining believability for the sake of entertainment value.
The children are convincingly written; never once did I feel like I was reading dialogue written by a grown man. Golding skilfully expresses the complexity of Ralph's internal struggles with just the right amount naïveté. Even Piggy, the most precocious of the group, is still identifiably childlike. A story like this can only work if the children actually resemble children emotionally and psychologically—which isn't too unlike adults in times of distress.
It's here, where the characters become almost ageless in their desperation, that the novel really finds its stride. The paranoia and stress that leads to a breakdown of authority and communication within the group are things that happen between adults all the time. Emotional realities can usurp rationality in the best, wisest of people and groups, and groupthink can overwhelm our best interests in the name of conformity. In times of crisis, leaders like Jack are infinitely more attractive than practical leaders like Ralph, and there are plenty of contemporaneous example of that.
There are also few endings that are as impactful as this one and on the off-chance you haven't read it, I'm not spoiling it....more
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