Books - July/August/September 2006 Part 1
More book reviews, ignored until I realised that the pile was getting worryingly huge again. More to follow!
The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin
For some reason I managed to miss this during my utopia/distopia reading binge as I started University, and it’s often cited as one of the great utopian novels, despite never actually seeming all that idealised. It’s done in a very old fashioned sci-fi form, with all of the characters being simply ciphers to get the moral message across.
It follows a scientist whom, having become disillusioned with the supposedly anti-governmental anti-authoritarian political system on his home planet of Anarres due to steadily encroaching power-systems and censorship, moves to the capitalist utopia of Urras. Once there, however, he discover his freedom to continue his work is equally hindered and that the culture of oppression and blossoming rebellion which originally led to the formation of Anarres’ society is still present. He gradually realises that it’s impossible to produce anything useful to the common good without becoming a pawn to someone looking to exploit his work.
The novel won a Hugo in 1975, and it’s easy to see why, since a) it’s well written and b) it’s hugely sentimental, both of which are pretty much requirements for swaying that award’s judges. It definitely doesn’t have the timeless quality of some classic sci-fi, but it’s definitely worth reading.
The Bonehunters - Steven Erikson
Falls squarely in to the ‘Big Phat Phantasy’ category. The kind of multi-book series that is measured in feet of shelf space rather than inches. Most attempts to summarise the thrust of the series make it sound like bog-standard epic fantasy fare but, along with George R.R. Martin’s ‘Song of Ice and Fire’, it’s one of the only series of this type that I can actually stand reading these days. Eriksen manages to sidestep most of the standard pitfalls this type of novel usually falls into, mainly by making everything in the book completely insane. Political and military leaders forced into insane acts, magic performed lunatic realms by mortals on the very edge of sanity, and various marginal gods busy trying to destroy everything. Like the rest of the series, the book is just hugely intense, and you can feel him gleefully ripping apart this world that he’s created.
Having said that, I don’t think it’s quite up to some of the earlier book in the sequence. He’s running into the problem where so much Bad Shit(tm) has happened to the world that there’s not really that much of it left to form the story. There’s a definite feeling of hopelessness exuded by all of the characters involved, with everything around them falling to plague and ruin. Not exactly cheery bedtime reading, but worth it just to see an author actually doing interesting things with the genre.
Shamefully, even though I’ve read all of his ‘Ian M. Banks’-monikered sci-fi, there are still some of his normal fiction books that have escaped me, so I’m trying to rectify that now.
The Crow Road was probably the ideal place to start back in, since it turned out to be my favourite book of his so far. For the purposes of reviewer pigeonholing it’s a crime novel, but really that aspect is just there to provide some drama in a rambling tale about an extended Scottish family and one of the increasingly-central members of it in his bumblings around the Highlands, Glasgow and London.
I can’t even clearly describe why I like the book so much, beyond a very vague notion of ‘it feels like home.’ It’s close enough to several of my own experiences of living in Scotland that there’s a sort of feeling of instant nostalgia and longing for home.
It gets though a lot of story without making you feel like you’re being dragged through A Narrative Structure. It just feels natural that you have to carry on reading and keep in touch with the characters.
Reading this straight after The Crow Road was actually a bit of a let-down. It’s still fairly enjoyable, but doesn’t feel as effortless and natural as that book did. It’s very clear that here we are in the presence of A Story which Will Be Told by page 300-odd.
It’s essentially a thriller about a journalist implicated in a series of unusual and disturbing murders and assaults on high-profile figures, and is also one of the more overtly Political of Banks’ books that I’ve read so far. If I read it again in isolation I suspect I’d enjoy it a lot more, but at the time I think what I was looking for was ‘another Crow Road.’