Coraline

I'm dispensing with the "Chapter #" headings because it's kind of tedious and a bit of a pretentious conceit. Anyway, I know that Coraline is not exactly a lesser known novel, but I saw the film over the weekend and I thought it would be fun to do a comparative bit about the two.



Coraline by Neil Gaiman is a fairy-tale esque story about a ten-year-old girl that discovers a doorway into a mirror-like world in her new apartment. This world is inhabited by her "other" mother and father, as well as alternate versions of the other tenants in the buildings. Her other parents are attentive and fastidiously loving, unlike her somewhat absent-minded and busy parents in the real world. Coraline is lured further and further into this world, before discovering that the "other mother" is actually a creature from nightmares that spins her trap out of the wishes of unhappy children. Coraline is a brave, imaginitive, resourceful girl, the perfect heroine for a reader to invest themselves in. Gaiman's prose is, as always, dark and eerie, weaving a childhood nightmare into an urban fairy tale quite deftly. The issues I had with the story where few; generally, I didn't always buy that Coraline was such a young girl. There were moments when her gravity and intellect seemed far beyond her prescribed ten years, which was only distracting in that I don't care for idealized characters. The syntax also fell flat in parts - it wasn't as vivid or as energetic, reading more like a Victorian tale (which may have been the point, I don't actually know). But the villain was suitably creepy, and the final scene was so disturbing me to me that I actually dreaded seeing it in the film. So overall, it's a good read - although I don't think I would ever actually let my child read it unattended.

All my issues with the book were ironed out and perfected in the film. Henry Selick takes the story and breathes an all-together new life into it, creating breathtakingly gorgeous scenes with stop-motion animation. Coraline, voiced by Dakota Fanning, is all that she is in the book, with a few key adjustments: in addition to being bored, she's impatient; she's intelligent and creative, but with the limited experience of a child. She needs help finding the answers in the end, even though it's her own bravery and skills that save her in the end.

The biggest thing that separates Coraline the novel from Coraline the film is possibly unfair; the visuals give the story more dimension than Gaiman's text ever does. There were two large additions to the story that I also thought added to the spirit of the thing, rather than distracting from original material: the woman who owns the apartment building had a sister who was taken by the "other mother" when she was a girl, giving the nightmare the history and mythos it needs to be truly horrifying; Wybie, this woman's grandson, is an added character of an age with Coraline who gives her someone to bounce off of and also to shade in another creepster element to the villain (in her "other" world, the changes that the other mother makes to Wybie are skin-crawling).

If you get a chance to see this in 3D, absolutely take it - the stop-motion was meant to see on a three dimensional platform. It adds a level of depth to be able to see the elements as they were modeled.

Chapter Seven: The Chess Machine

At the moment I am quite absorbed in Midnight's Children, a fast and loose and wildly fascinating novel by the much-lauded Salman Rushdie; I won't urge you to read it, as the Booker award committee already has in plenty. But just to repeat, I'm enjoying it quite a bit - Rushdie manages to achieve that delicate quality in a very stream-of-consciousness narrative which manages to bring the reader along instead of rushing past them. His fluid story-telling weaves in and out of itself, braiding one story after another and yet still managing to retain its essential core around Saleem Sinai, the appealingly self-conscious narrator. So far, I love it. And that's all I'll say about it for now.

Today I thought I'd take a dig into the annals of my reading history and tell you about a charming and gothic steampunk novel that a very good friend recommended to me, called The Chess Machine by Robert Lohr.



The Chess Machine is a finely crafted historical fiction piece based around the mysterious Mechanical Turk, an automaton presented in the court of Empress Maria Theresia by the inventor Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. Lohr uses this historical event as a spring board, weaving a deeply complex and intriguing explanation for the real-life Turk, who defeated every opponent that sat down across from it.

The richness of the historical background comes into play for every aspect of the novel. The political intrigue of the Viennese court, the greed and desire for recognition of the nobels and courtiers, and the influence of pride and arrogance are hypnotic. Lohr skillfully hangs on to the allure of possibility; the scent of steampunk hangs around the pages, giving the streets of Austria and Hungary an appealing weight of gaslights and fog, but he never veers completely into fantasy. Nothing Lohr presents in his tale is impossible; it retains that slight disbelief necessary to make a story seem totally real.

Where Lohr occasionally trips up are pure details of editing. The Chess Machine is the first novel from the German writer, and there are places within the piece that drag slightly due to over-description or sloppy narration. But these moments are few and flighty, and don't detract from the enjoyment of the work. It is surprising that Lohr does not get weighed down by over-meditation on ethical or moral dilemmas, preferring to hint at their import and leaving the reader to contemplate them rather than letting his brass-and-gears fairy tale get bogged down.