Botannical metaphors.
Oct. 7th, 2007 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI've seen a couple of memes recently about unread books. While I don't do so badly on the Library Thing one (I think I've read about 40) I have an entire box of unread books lurking by the door at the moment, in the hope that I'll actually pick one up on my way out the door. Given that Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo is currently on top and I walk to work this is unlikely without more upper body strength, but I'll try and make a more conscious effort. I think part of it is the existential dread of Running Out of Books...
The Town in Bloom. Three women living in London in the 1920s and working on the stage, and a fourth they meet later; their friendship and romantic entanglements, bracketed by a lunch meeting some thirty years later. Told by Mouse, who has just come up to the city from the country, and is not the naïve innocent expected, or at least not predictably so (and, equally, not the undiscovered acting talent she expects). Sharply observed and fascinating, especially in terms of how single (in the sense of unmarried) women lived, or were expected to live in those days; the three who act have rooms (technically cubicles) in the Club, a women’s boarding hostel, the rules for which are somewhat cramping in terms of having a social life. Two of the plotlines involve affairs with married men, one as a mistress (with the requisite flat – what on earth did these women do all day? Especially before mobile phones…) and one on a more transient basis, but with potentially far more consequences.
Mouse writes in her journal “Why should sex, which is a part of love, be considered indecent when written about?... But before starting this paragraph I sat for a long time tyring out words in my mind – and they didn’t so much sound indecent as embarrassing, ludicrous and, above all, unlikely.” The Town in Bloom is not particularly explicit (it’s published in 1965, a few years after the Lady Chatterley trial) but it is, in its own way, accurate, and this is one of the things I found particularly appropriate. I think it unlikely, for example, that fiction writers are going to ever award Good Sex writing prizes, and in some ways I prefer the more oblique references, which can often cut deeper, to the more acrobatically anatomical.
Rose of No Man's Land. The strong voice in this one is what made me pick it up from the library; it’s sharp and funny, without being too self-aware, and the verbal tricks (the narrator’s speech Is Like This All The Time and everyone else’s is in italics) actually work really well, in that I had to consciously think about them rather than being driven crazy. Trisha, the narrator, is 14 and shuts herself in her room rather than deal with a hypochondriac mother, a vaguely criminal mother’s boyfriend, and a sister who is a hairdresser with dreams of appearing on The Real World. Her sister drags her to the mall to get a job, replacing a girl who’s tried to commit suicide, and although Trisha loses the job rapidly she meets Rose, one of the other mall workers, and ends up on a night-long adventure with her involving drugs, first-time sex, tattoos and some very bad food.
It does slow down a bit towards the end – the tattoo parlour scene is great, but I was flagging a little by the time we got there, and so much emphasis gets put on the girl who attempts suicide in the first half of the book that I was surprised when it fades away at the end. Also, the blurb pitches this as “a heart-pounding love story of two atypical girls,” which is a bit of a stretch. It’s believable and it’s mostly unhappy, and you could argue that at least Trisha’s gotten out of her room and realised she’s a lesbian, but the final curve of the story is towards home again, where even if things have changed it may not ever be enough to escape the pull of everything.
Green Rider. First novel. Karigan G’ladheon is running away from school when a dying messenger hands her his satchel, his brooch and his horse, and implores her to deliver them all to the king. Plot ensues. Some interesting characters and ideas, but a rather irritating tendency towards the deus ex machina – most evident when Karigan meets Immerez for the first time and, trapped, wishes she could turn invisible. Which she does, thanks to the apparently magic brooch the messenger gave her. She is also possessed by the ghost of a swordsmaster during one – but not other – fight scenes, aided by eagles and elf-equivalents and, in the end, activates wild magic in order to save the kingdom. She’s not a bad character (despite the apostrophe) but she is very much reacting rather than planning, and it would’ve been nice to see that change more throughout the series.
The Town in Bloom. Three women living in London in the 1920s and working on the stage, and a fourth they meet later; their friendship and romantic entanglements, bracketed by a lunch meeting some thirty years later. Told by Mouse, who has just come up to the city from the country, and is not the naïve innocent expected, or at least not predictably so (and, equally, not the undiscovered acting talent she expects). Sharply observed and fascinating, especially in terms of how single (in the sense of unmarried) women lived, or were expected to live in those days; the three who act have rooms (technically cubicles) in the Club, a women’s boarding hostel, the rules for which are somewhat cramping in terms of having a social life. Two of the plotlines involve affairs with married men, one as a mistress (with the requisite flat – what on earth did these women do all day? Especially before mobile phones…) and one on a more transient basis, but with potentially far more consequences.
Mouse writes in her journal “Why should sex, which is a part of love, be considered indecent when written about?... But before starting this paragraph I sat for a long time tyring out words in my mind – and they didn’t so much sound indecent as embarrassing, ludicrous and, above all, unlikely.” The Town in Bloom is not particularly explicit (it’s published in 1965, a few years after the Lady Chatterley trial) but it is, in its own way, accurate, and this is one of the things I found particularly appropriate. I think it unlikely, for example, that fiction writers are going to ever award Good Sex writing prizes, and in some ways I prefer the more oblique references, which can often cut deeper, to the more acrobatically anatomical.
Rose of No Man's Land. The strong voice in this one is what made me pick it up from the library; it’s sharp and funny, without being too self-aware, and the verbal tricks (the narrator’s speech Is Like This All The Time and everyone else’s is in italics) actually work really well, in that I had to consciously think about them rather than being driven crazy. Trisha, the narrator, is 14 and shuts herself in her room rather than deal with a hypochondriac mother, a vaguely criminal mother’s boyfriend, and a sister who is a hairdresser with dreams of appearing on The Real World. Her sister drags her to the mall to get a job, replacing a girl who’s tried to commit suicide, and although Trisha loses the job rapidly she meets Rose, one of the other mall workers, and ends up on a night-long adventure with her involving drugs, first-time sex, tattoos and some very bad food.
It does slow down a bit towards the end – the tattoo parlour scene is great, but I was flagging a little by the time we got there, and so much emphasis gets put on the girl who attempts suicide in the first half of the book that I was surprised when it fades away at the end. Also, the blurb pitches this as “a heart-pounding love story of two atypical girls,” which is a bit of a stretch. It’s believable and it’s mostly unhappy, and you could argue that at least Trisha’s gotten out of her room and realised she’s a lesbian, but the final curve of the story is towards home again, where even if things have changed it may not ever be enough to escape the pull of everything.
Green Rider. First novel. Karigan G’ladheon is running away from school when a dying messenger hands her his satchel, his brooch and his horse, and implores her to deliver them all to the king. Plot ensues. Some interesting characters and ideas, but a rather irritating tendency towards the deus ex machina – most evident when Karigan meets Immerez for the first time and, trapped, wishes she could turn invisible. Which she does, thanks to the apparently magic brooch the messenger gave her. She is also possessed by the ghost of a swordsmaster during one – but not other – fight scenes, aided by eagles and elf-equivalents and, in the end, activates wild magic in order to save the kingdom. She’s not a bad character (despite the apostrophe) but she is very much reacting rather than planning, and it would’ve been nice to see that change more throughout the series.
