(Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks...)

I generally have a stubborn-minded bull-headishness when it comes to finishing novels that I don't like.  I've found that more often than not, if I hang with a book, by the end it will have won me over.  The last book I read--Wuthering Heights--was just this sort of experience: I started reading W.H. comparing it unfavorably to Jane Eyre, and through the second-hand narration and lack of charming characters, I'd just about written it off--but then came the second volume, which was gripping.  Anyway, the point of this blog post is that I failed reading Sword of Shannara.  At page 220, I quit.  Here's why: While I am used to reading one author's work and finding it heavily indebted to another author's, I have never come across a book that is such a blatant plagarist farce, a shameful rip-off, a con, a...well, whatever.  I'll give Brooks the benefit of the doubt.  He really, really, really, really, really, really, really loves the Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien's novel is very precious to Terry Brooks. 

(Gollum is to "Precious" as Terry Brooks is to L___ of the R____)


Here's the plot: Shea and Flick, two brothers from "The Vale" (read: The Shire), find out from a mysterious, all powerful figure "Allanon" (read: Gandalf) about the "Sword of Shannara" (read: The Ring), that the Warlock Lord ("Sauron") wants.  Shea is half-elf ("Hobbit") and has to travel through the woods from their sleepy village to get to safety in a distant kingdom.  Well, it turns out they are pursued by powerful creatures of darkness...the Skull Bearers (Read "Ring Wraiths") who were once powerful rulers of men, but were so hideously twisted towards evil by their lust for power that...well, you get the point?  There's a Boromir character, a Strider character, a Gimli character, two elves that stand in for Legolas--this fellowship even fights a Shelob type creature...instead of Orcs there are Gnomes (gnomes, by the way, aren't quite as threatening as Orcs....), and according to Wiki there are even more similarities that I will never read, that occur throughout the novel.

(The Xerox "Phaser" 3200MFP/N.  It makes copies...get it?)

I couldn't take it anymore.  Apparently, Sword of Shannara was hugely popular upon publication and helped ultimately usher in fantasy fiction as well as Dungeons and Dragons, for which I'm grateful.  The author's jacket-photo makes him look like a nice guy...and, really, this book might be more appropriate for a 13 year old, rather than a 31 year old...but, ye gods!  This is plagiarism.  My only question is why didn't the Tolkien estate, which seems protective of Tolkien's works, ever sue Brooks or the publisher?

  (...Wuthering Heights).

           One evening about midway through Wuthering Heights, I tucked myself into bed and listened to the pops and cracks of our still unfamiliar house, my heart jumping at the sounds.  When I eventually fell asleep I was disturbed by a vivid dream: I was in the ancient room of an ancient house, the smoldering ash pit of a spent fireplace black and cold.  There were four women in the room with me, all in white, and soon their charcoal hair and white-as-death faces warped and twisted into hideously elongated masks.  They were moaning, robed in white, floating towards me, howling.  The dream turned violent—I fought them away, struggling in their clutches, pounding their heads with stones that were strewn about the floorboards.  Hydra-like, every time I murdered one of these spectral women two more took the original’s place and soon I was subsumed.  I woke up, of course, before I died—

 

 (...Bertha/Cathy looked a bit like the "Scream" killer...)

            Recently having finished Jane Eyre, I assumed this was a Bertha Rochester nightmare, but a moment later I realized I had blended elements of Bertha with Catherine Earnshaw, the passionate and beautiful young woman who turns mad through wrath, petulance and pride in Wuthering Heights.

 

           Up until my nightmare, I had trouble sinking into Wuthering’s narrative—the framework is somewhat inelegant: it is a first person narration told by a Mr. Lockwood, who becomes little more than a reporter/observer, listening to Heathcliff’s tale as reported by the longtime housekeeper, Ellen Dean.  Most of the actual action of the book is Ellen Dean’s recitation, interrupted only occasionally by Lockwood’s wondering interjections or his reports of going to bed, to hear the rest of the tale another night.  I don’t know why Bronte didn’t just tell Heathcliff’s story herself; I’m sure Wuthering apologists would tell me why Bronte’s approach is superior—but, for my tastes, I would rather have been immediately present in the action, rather than a passive listener.

 (...the REAL Heathcliff)

 

I know that at least one person who reads my blog is thinking of reading Wuthering Heights, so I can’t talk too much about plot specifics—however, if you have the thought that Wuthering Heights is a “romance novel” (and my paperback was marketed as such—with the neck and lips of a young woman framed by her brunette curls and frilly lace collar)—it isn’t…really.  A friend of mine who loves the novel explained that most adaptations feature Heathcliff’s turbulent childhood and passionate love for Catherine, making Wuthering Heights little more than a story about an anti-hero driven by passionate love that lasts “beyond the tomb”—but leave out the later parts of the novel that would convince readers/viewers that Heathcliff might indeed be Satan incarnate.  At times, I thought Bronte’s novel might be a closer relation to Ketchum’s brutal kidnap-and-torture novel “The Girl Next Door,” than the bodice-ripper most people seem to think it is. 

 (...the cover of my edition of The Plague by Camus)

 

Having just read the Bronte sisters side-by-side, I do prefer Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights—Jane Eyre is more charming, (even right now I’m imagining Jane and Rochester figuring out their costumes for an upcoming faerie festival, with Rochester wanting to go as a gypsy lady while Jane wants him to dress more dashingly, as long as he wears the faerie wings she’s made for him…); Wuthering Heights is dark and twisted.  It is bleak, full of torture and torment, and Heathcliff’s final redemption might even be a rictus-grinned decent into Hell, rather than any salvation most readers long for. 

Up Next: The Sword of Shannara by Brooks.

 (...Jane Eyre).


I've read Jane Eyre four times, now--thrice assigned in school, and now as part of my reading list.  It wasn't until my third time through, however, that I actually liked it--and on my fourth, I really quite enjoyed reading about Jane. 

I think if this were modernized, Jane would be a Trekker geek--she's always talking about fairies and elves.

I don't think I picked up on the humor of this novel before--I was taking it more in earnest.  This book is actually brilliantly funny.  Is there a better "meet cute" in classic fiction? 

Speaking of humor, after briefly imagining Rochester as Edgar Alan Poe, here's who my brain settled on to play his part:

  (...Jane, if you leave me because of Bertha, I shall be very PUT OUT!!!)


Bronte goes out of her way to say how ugly Jane and Rochester are.  After she nearly starves to death, Bronte has Jane wake from her swoon and overhear St. John talking about how plain she is.  Plain Jane.

Even though there was little suspense, the narrative flows very smoothly and has a brisk pace. 

Anywhoo--four times.  Will there be a fifth?  I've read Jane Eyre more than any other work of fiction.  Here's what comes closest:

Ulysses by Joyce: 2 times
Dante's Inferno: 2 times (the rest of the Comedy, just once).
The Iliad: 3 times.

...And yes, Jane Eyre: 4 times.

 (...Sundiver and Startide Rising by David Brin.  2 of 3 novels in the "Uplift" trilogy-that's-not-really-a-trilogy.  I can take no more Brin!...for right now.  So, because it's not actually a "series-series"... #3 won't be read as part of my list.)

About three quarters through the "B" section of my Reading List, I hit: "Brin, David"--four books listed.  Generally speaking, I'm not too keen on reading so many books by the same author right in a row.  But, in the spirit of the List I dutifully read "The Postman," (see last post) and then began his Uplift novels, with "Sundiver."  The Uplift Trilogy isn't "really" a trilogy--Unlike, say, the Lord of the Rings where one book flows into the next to tell a unified story, the Uplift novels share only a common universe or scenario.  Each story is essentially independent.  After "Sundiver" I read "Startide Rising" but couldn't quite bring myself to read the last novel, and longest, novel "Uplift War."  Maybe I'll get back to it at some point, but I figured as of right now I can't learn anything more from Brin...so, I took the stressful decision to skip a book on my List and move onto the Bronte sisters.  And yes, it was stressful--you can ask my wife how stressed I was as I stood in my "library" debating whether or not to read "Uplift War."  My life in general must be fairly easy.  Which is good.  After all, the most stress I feel is whether or not I read a certain paperback...

In Brin's universe, no race or species of creature can attain spacefaring intelligence until it has been "Uplifted" by an already intelligent race--for example, humans have already "Uplifted" dolphins and chimpanzees so that they can talk and fly spaceships and whatnot.  Whenever a species is Uplifted, they are indebted to serve their patron race as client/slaves.  The only known example of a race evolving without Patron intervention, however, is the human race, who have apparently evolved through Natural Selection to attain a quirky and unique intelligence.  This makes humans an object of both curiosity and derision to the ancient Galactic races they now interact with on a daily basis.

"Sundiver," is decent.  Humans have developed a spaceship that can fly quite close to the sun, and have discovered creatures they call Ghosts dwelling therein.  Galactic races come to observe their missions, resulting in political intrigue, backstabbing, and Freudian crises. 

Something happened to Brin, though, in between Sundiver and Startide Rising--it was like his writing style was Uplifted by alien technology. Startide Rising is very superior to Stardiver.  Startide Rising is a straight-forward space adventure as well...Dolphins fly spaceships and crashland on a waterworld pursued by feuding alien factions.  So far so good.  What's odd though is that Brin relentlessy sexuallizes his dolphins--there is dolphin-on-human groping, memories of dolphin masturbation, an implied dolphin-human-human manage a trois, etc.  Ye gods!  Does Brin know there's a furry convention going on?  He could be the guest of honor!

 

Startide Rising won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and is consistenly ranked quite high on Sci-fi lists.  I'd call it a great "airplane" read--it doesn't have the far reaching social commentary that a Philip K. Dick or Stanislaw Lem have, but it is a page-turner.  I rank it low on my List of Greatest Novels, but that's comparing him to Beckett and Balzac and the other lights of literature.  I'd recommend Startide Rising over most other paperback novels...providing your sensibilities don't cause you to shudder at reading brief passages of soft-core dolphin porno.   

Next up: The Bronte sister square off!  Jane Eyre followed by Wuthering Heights.

 (Sundiver by David Brin)

...Hm, debating, debating...should I read more Brin?  I've read the "Postman," and I've read "Sundiver," and I haven't really enjoyed either one of them...There are two other books on my list by Brin...Unfortunately, the next two books in the "Uplift" trilogy-that-isn't-really-a-trilogy, are the most highly decorated.  Choices, choices.  Hm...

  (Brin's The Postman.  Is that MacGyver on the cover?)


While reading the Postman I began to think of the Post-Apocalyptic novel less as a genre and more as a form—in the same way that a sonnet is a form, or an epistolary novel is a form.  There are certain rules, conventions and expectations we encounter—defamiliarization of local culture and/or geography, the inner struggle of barbarian vs. civilized man, the reconstruction of society, etc. and so on.  Some novels are better than others, of course: McCarthy’s The Road is beautifully written, while Brin’s The Postman has sentences like this:

 

“A combination of pride, obstinacy, and simple gonadal fury rooted him in his tracks. Here he would do battle, and that was that.”

  (...the gonadal fury of the plant kingdom.)

The Post-Apocalyptic form also has various types of execution.  The Postman is what I’ll call, “The Little Mermaid” type of Post-Apocalypse.  Remember in The Little Mermaid—Ariel, in “Part of Your World,” wishes she could live on land with all the land lubbers and she sings a song which includes these lyrics:

 

“I wanna be where the people are
I wanna see, wanna see 'em dancing
Walking around on those—what do you call them? Oh feet!
Flippin' your fins, you don't get to far
Legs are required for jumping dancing,

Strolling around on those—what's that word again? Streets!”

 (...exerting tremendous influence on science fiction).

 

Generally, Ariel’s knowledge of the English language and customs of land lubbers is perfect except for a few words: “Feet,” and “streets,”—common, and also rhyming, words (maybe she has a sort of auditory mental block).  The Postman is similar: At some point, civilization had been laid to waste by a combined effort of war, pestilence and "survivalists."  When we meet the main character, an itinerant minstrel named Gordon, Brin tries to balance the curious feeling of nostalgia of the “predoom” past with the new world order of near-feudal servitude and a survival of the fittest ethic.  Unlike the “Documentary” type of Post-Apocalytic fiction (another term I just made up, this would describe books such as the excellent Ridley Walker, where the language carried throughout the novel creates the effect that you are reading a document from the future), the “Little Mermaid” type leads to tonal inconsistencies such as this:

 

“Mrs. Thompson chuckled as well.  “Oh, it was harmless I think.  And more than that.  You’d served as a…you know, that old automobile thing…a catalyst I think.”

 

Generally, everyone's english is perfect...until someone can't remember a certain word.  This is supposed to let us know how far civilization has fallen?  Come on, Mr. Brin!  Mrs. Thompson can speak English but she can’t remember the word “catalyst”?! 

  ("I'm really sick, of this sea-foam mist...I need something to spark a change, a...what's the word?  Catalyst!"

 

As for the plot, reading The Postman is a bit like hiking a steep hill in the mud: just when you think you’ve grabbed hold of the plot, your feet slip out from under you and you slide back to the beginning.  Just when we’re used to the idea of Gordon as a traveling actor/minstrel, he finds a long-rotten postal uniform and becomes a fake-representative of the Restored United States.  Just when we get used to the idea of Gordon rebuilding civilization one letter at a time, the novel becomes a Wizard of Oz mash when he meets the Wizardesque computer “Cyclops.”  Just when we’re used to Oz, the novel becomes a war novel between survivalists and farmers.  Just when we’re used to this, the Amazonian army shows up.  Just when we’re used to this, here come the genetically modified super-soldiers.  Just when we’re used to this…

 

You get the idea.

Overall, the novel is about the power of symbols and belief as the glue of civilization.  Hurray for mail carriers!  The novel may have been much different had it been written now, with email and UPS threatening snail mail.  Maybe Brin would have felt even more justified in picking this dying civil service as a symbol of beneficent society; Or, maybe it would have been a mournful elegy to another way of life changed by the internet.  Or, an ode to the Forever Stamp!

 (...this Postman does not always ring twice.)

 

All that being said, The Postman is a brisk read, and certainly better than the Kevin Costner movie version.  I don’t rank the novel very high, I suppose: shoulder-to-shoulder with the greatest novels ever written, it doesn’t stand a chance.  It is, however, a fine example of the Post-Apocalyptic form—so, for fans of the Apocalypse and Science Fiction that examines social issues, such as myself, it was a fun read. 

 

Up next: More Brin!  I’m reading the first “Uplift” trilogy—Sundiver, Startide Rising, the Uplift War. 

 (Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Bardbury)

I started reading Martian Chronicles, but remembered it too well from previous readings to continue through with it right now: the point of my reading list, after all, is to make sure I catch all the great books that I’ve so far missed, or have forgotten…so, I skipped Chronicles and went onto Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which must have come from one of the “greatest horror novels” lists I incorporated into my Official Reading List. Not being a fan of Bradbury, I can’t quite throw my support behind Something Wicked, but it is certainly one of the most influential novels in the horror genre—for that alone, it deserves to be read.

 

Like with Fahrenheit, had I encountered Something Wicked in junior high I might have been more forgiving of the novel than I am now—But even so, I’ve forever had an aversion to circus imagery (actually, that’s not strong enough: I detest circus imagery—and it’s not just fear, as in the popular “fear of clowns,” but simple hatred. If someone wanted to psychoanalyze me, I have a suggestion as to why I might hate circus imagery so much: When I was young, I had a friend named Anthony, and one night I went to the circus with Anthony and his mother. I don’t remember much about that night beyond the dim circus tent lights and the smell of animals. But, I was horrendously sick—running an abnormally high temperature, almost passing out in my seat. I don’t know if I asked to be taken home, or if Anthony’s mother just decided that would be best, but I remember leaving the circus in the middle of the show. I don’t remember Anthony saying anything to me, but I do remember utter humiliation added to my illness. I don’t know if that’s why I hate circus imagery so much, but it certainly is a specific negative association…); Anyway, Something Wicked is nothing but circus imagery: two boys living in an idyllic suburb have their lives disturbed one late October when an evil carnival rolls into town. The head of the carnival is Mr. Dark—the “Illustrated Man,” so called because his body is completely covered in elaborate tattoos. Bradbury bludgeons us with his favorite theme: boyhood and the nostalgia for lost boyhood, (the main threat is a carousel that either ages its riders or makes them young again). One of the boys’ fathers, the janitor at the library, must come to terms with his own nostalgia for boyhood before he can help his son defeat the Illustrated Man. Outside of a few memorable scenes (the best is when Will Halloway attacks a hot air balloon with an arrow), the plot held no weight for me—I can’t foresee reading Bradbury again anytime soon (All apologies to my wife, who is a HUGE Bradbury fan, and constantly informs me that I’ve so far missed his best novel, Dandelion Wine).

 

It is influential—Stephen King draws heavily on this book for It and Needful Things, and Richard Laymon’s Traveling Vampire Show is essentially an R-rated version of Something Wicked, even down to the bow and arrow used as a special weapon. Horror readers definitely shouldn’t skip this one—and it can be read in a day and a half, so there’s not much commitment. General readers, however, can probably find other, better ways to spend their reading time.    

Up Next: The Postman, by Brin

 (Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451)

Because of blog-fatigue, this one will be…different than previous posts. 

 

Last night, my wife and I were watching “Dan in Real Life,”—a quirky romantic comedy in which the two leads, Steve Carell and Juliet Binoche, meet cute in a Rhode Island bookstore.  The bookstore is the kind we don’t see too many of these days, except in tourist resorts or wealthy main streets—small, (probably) independent, with the books, (which looked to be a collection of new and used), piled together on thin wood-slatted shelves.  While the proprietor is on the phone, Binoche mistakenly thinks Carell works at the shop and asks him for some recommendations.  Carell leads her around the store, falling desperately and instantly in love, picking out books—Neruda, Anna Karenina, etc.  The two talk, recognizing one another as kindred spirits.

 

Meeting cute in bookstores is a staple of television shows and movies, I said to my wife.  But day after day, I read articles about the demise of print-culture and with that, bookstores.  I wonder how people will meet over books in the future?

 

I think people will be more and more lonely, she said.

 

Independent bookstores are already disappearing, and now even the chain bookstores are facing serious trouble.  I don’t believe that the end of print culture will mean an end to reading and literature, as some alarmists are claiming, but I do think that the bookstore as we know it will be gone, gone, gone…

 

…and once that happens, how will quirky intellectuals meet one another over books?  Thank God for libraries…

 

Or, maybe bookstores will change somehow that I can’t foresee—maybe bookstores will be “curated” like art galleries, or maybe books will be expensive luxury items, or maybe bookstores will by like vinyl record stores, interesting for the initiated…

 

…but I do fear that by the time a few generations have passed—hopefully it will take that long—people watching old movies won’t quite remember why scenes where people meet cute in bookstores were so important or so prevalent.  Maybe they just won’t understand what it means to look across the aisles of a bookstore, on some random rainy afternoon, and see the most beautiful woman in the world pull down your favorite book of poetry from the shelves and leaf through the pages.  It might all be lost…

 

Which brings me to Fahrenheit 451.  Yes, in Bradbury’s novel books are illegal and books are burned.  The owners of books face serious legal repercussions.  But a tyrannical government outlawing books as a way to prohibit freethinking or potential dissent is only part of the story, here.  Bradbury makes it clear that in this world, the banning/burning of books began as a grass roots effort.  People wanted diluted versions of classics, in order to remove the challenge from the entertainment, so much so that massive novels were watered down to only a few pages.  Minority groups found more and more things offensive in books, so each group censored the passages they found offensive (I’m surprised the Republican Party and Anti-PC zealots haven’t adopted this book yet…), eventually reducing books to poor imitations of themselves.  Soon, people just wanted fun—televisions, loud sounds, fast driving, and Ipods (yes, Bradbury prefigures Ipods in his novel as a dangerous symbol of social isolation…but if you ask me, Ipods are great). 

 

I may have enjoyed this novel much more had I encountered it when I was twelve or thirteen.  Reading it as a 31 year old, however, is simply depressing: Montag’s (also, I believe, in his early thirties) is facing a life he finds increasingly hollow and pointless.  He yearns for something more and eventually this yearning leads him to the discovery of books and intellectual curiosity.  Once I take a step back from my own life, however, I realize that I too am finding life hollow and pointless…but I already live in a world with books!  So, the moral of the story for me is: I’m screwed.  Or, on a literary level, Montag is screwed when he comes to realize that books don’t provide the keys to happiness.  I wonder if he’ll ever wish to go back to a life of pure fun, without responsibility.  What happens when he realizes there is nothing in books but words?  Of course, since by the end of the novel, the cities of America have been reduced to nuclear ash, so I figure his life is about to get more difficult in many new and unexpected ways.

 

This novel disappoints: One of the characters mentions taking a painting class, and I couldn’t understand why painting wouldn’t lead to radical thought as well as books, and I thought it was Oh-so-convenient that Montag happened to start memorizing parts of the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Book of Revelation.  Both are important, vital poetry—but, really?  Wouldn’t it be more likely that he would have randomly picked up some other books from his burnings—Danielle Steel, or James Patterson?  Now that’s a scary thought: the end of all human literature and poetry, except for the daring rebels who have memorized…the New York Times bestseller list.

 

(I suppose there are probably a lot of copies of the Bible in print, so maybe Montag just got lucky…)

 

Anyway, it’s interesting to read Fahrenheit 451 knowing that books as we know them—or, at least bookstores and books in open library stacks—might largely be gone from our lives by the time we’re old women and men.  When Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, he was writing a love letter to libraries—and while he could have imagined Hitler burning books and governmental censorship, the idea of a world literally without books was probably unthinkable to him, even though his prescience in identifying the human capacity for disposable and endless cheap entertainment is chilling.  Now, here we are on the brink of books going from paper to digital: one age is shifting into the next, and we’ll all be poorer, even if we get riches in return.

 

Up next: Another Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles.

  (The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles)


“Before her eyes was the violent blue sky—nothing else.  For an endless moment she looked into it.  Like a great over-powering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her.  Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above.  Unblinking, she fixed the solid emptiness, and the anguish began to move in her.  At any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed."  --from the novel.

(...I just came back from Movin' Out, a rather...um...non-birdlashes event.  But, it was a fine night out.  Sorry for the sub-par post coming up...I blame Billy Joel!)

            Reading Bowles, I couldn’t help reading Lovecraft between the lines—Bowles takes himself too seriously, (or is at least too seriously concerned with atheism and God in the Christian/Western sense), to care about the “Colour Out of Space” or Alien Gods, but the sentiment is similar, isn’t it?  Sartre posits the horrific condition of existence as nothingness, complete freedom—but with Bowles and Lovecraft, “nothingness” doesn’t seem to exist as an option.  Whatever exists beyond the “sheltering sky” is malignant, is a devouring force.  The Sheltering Sky is not without its moments—there are brilliantly written scenes of phantasmagoric horror, and the cultural dissolution of three Americans traveling through the vast Sahara is masterfully expressed.  Don’t get me wrong: I quite hated reading this novel while I was reading it—the main character is ravaged by a fever and dies long before the end of the novel, and the psychological breakdown of another main character is utterly preposterous.  But a strange thing happens the longer I let The Sheltering Sky roll around my mind: it affects me more in retrospect than it did during the reading.  It’s not an easy novel to escape.

(...Is this what Bowles had in mind?)

            The novel begins conventionally enough: Port and his wife Kit have traveled to French North Africa for an open-ended stay, wandering from village to village, in the years just after World War II—their marriage and their trip is marked by infidelities born from a stark coldness and antipathy towards one another.  Port seeks out Arab prostitutes and Kit sleeps with their traveling companion, a family friend named Tunner.  We’ve seen characters like these before in countless modern novels and movies, but we’ve never seen them crumble apart quite like Port and Kit.  It’s almost as if Bowles, himself an ex-pat, an urbane intellectual living in Tangier, wanted to punish his characters ruthlessly and thoroughly.  The second half of the novel is bleak, with the succession of African villages growing more destitute, until Port is ravaged by a fever that has been slowly growing throughout the preceding pages.  The final quarter of the book focuses on Kit’s psychosexual destruction, as she embarks on a sadomasochistic odyssey that would be tragic had Bowles been able to create sympathetic, flesh-and-blood characters. 

(...a scene from the movie.  My coworker wants to lend me the DVD because he thinks the movie is great; which means birdlashes will probably have to sit through it eventually...)

            A particularly memorable scene finds Kit wandering through a train, suddenly removed from the comforts of her first class compartment, pressed in together with the shocking crowd of the poor.  The scene demonstrates Bowles’ prowess as an author, as Kit is jostled between the bodies of men, is overwhelmed, sickened.  She sees the mutilated face of a diseased man, a farmer holding the severed head of a lamb.  The problem with the novel is that Bowles eventually overplays his hand, and that the terror of an American woman confronting the Other, and the following loss of Identity that her culture has provided for her, devolves into a caricature of racial or cultural deficiency.  I know the novel has its admirers—but just as one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, while some readers might find Kit’s existential crisis too dreadful to bear, I found the whole thing howlingly awful.

(What's so funny?)

Up next: I have to catch up on some library book reading, but when I get back to the list...Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451!  

 (The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen)


              Let’s get one thing straight: Bowen’s The Death of the Heart concerns a 16-year-old girl getting dumped for the first time—not birdlashes’ typical fare.  Hoity-toity websites or reviews (you know, written by “real” reviewers) may claim this novel plumbs the psychological depths concerning our transition from Innocence to Experience, or that it’s an exploration of the chaotic Dionysian soul beneath the Apollonian façade of the upper class, but really: it’s Gossip Girl dressed for an adult party.  Am I selling the novel short?  Quite likely.  The writing, in fact, is brilliant—Bowen is one of the best stylists I’ve read.  She is painterly in her descriptions, and her psychological portraiture is spot-on and devastating.  I told Audio Input, a fan of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, that I would be very surprised if Elizabeth Bowen didn’t influence Atwood.  Margaret Atwood, if you happen to come across birdlashes, drop me a line and let me know what you think of Bowen! 

  (..Atwood's unaired episode of Gossip Girl, "Oryx and Blake" has some striking similarities to The Death of the Heart)

 

            Not holding my breath that Margaret Atwood will comment on my blog, I’ll continue: Divided into three sections, “The World,” “The Flesh,” and, “The Devil,” the novel concerns Thomas and Anna Quayne, an advertising executive and his socialite wife, when Thomas’s half-sister, the recently orphaned Portia, comes to stay with them for a year.  Portia is shy, and observant—she keeps a diary that Anna soon finds and reads.  Her presence disturbs the frigid rhythms of the marriage and dredges up associations from the past.  This all happens in the section called “The World.”  In “The Flesh,” Portia is sent to a family-friend of Anna’s, to live at a seaside resort in the off-season.  Here, she experiences a social awakening.  She has been entangled with a friend of Anna’s, a cad in his early-twenties named Eddie, and the relationship tangles up in her soul.  There is nothing particularly fleshy in “The Flesh,” as the most illicit and charged moment comes from concealed held hands in a darkened movie theater.  In “The Devil” the events of the seaside resort crash back into the staid London world of the Quayne’s house as Portia returns to Thomas and Anna.  Bowen’s great theme is the churning underbelly of class and society, but the form this theme takes in The Death of the Heart is in moral vacuity.  These characters are stunted in their moral development, and casually destroy one another while, literally, unable to figure out what is “the right thing to do.” 

 (...birdlashes finds this type of Death of the Heart much, much more interesting...No offense, Bowen).

 

           Last night, I finished The Death of the Heart shortly after the first “results” show for this season’s American Idol—the first three contestants were voted through into the top 12, and I was generally happy with the selections.  Herein lies my problem with Bowen: her novel, a day after reading it, isn’t quite as vivid as a throw away episode of a sub-par TV show.  Bowen’s writing is certainly gorgeous—but reading it is a bit like walking through the older wing of an art museum.  We know the paintings we’re seeing are top-notch, the portraits of the dead luminous and perfect, but all a bit frigid and unemotional—it doesn’t challenge us, or mock us, or infuriate us like the modern art we’ll eventually make our way to.  The novel is quiet, and very “English” in the way we yanks often think of “English” when we think of “English Literature”—The Death of the Heart’s been adapted by Masterpiece Theater at least twice, if that tells you anything.    

 (...the first three AI finalists!)

Up Next: The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles