Growing Up Literary

Occasionally, even though I know I should be reading new things, I re-read books that I find really enjoyable. Naamah's Kiss, by Jacqueline Carey, and indeed, Carey's whole Terre d'Ange series, are such books. And since Naamah's Kiss isn't mine but borrowed, and I know that eventually I will need to bring it back, I read it again. And there was nothing to be done except that I needed to read the Kushiel books again, too. I've now run out of those that I have in my home, and I needed something to read until I banished enough laziness to go to the library, so I picked up Exile's Honor by Mercedes Lackey. I own many of Lackey's Valdemar books, because for a long time they were my go-to fantasy books. They were fun, the characters were believable, and the stories were entertaining. Which is why I was SO distressed to realize that I may, in fact, have outgrown them.

The two series, Kushiel's Legacy and The Heralds of Valdemar, are similarly flavored. They are roughly historical fantasy, although Kushiel emphasizes the history and Valdemar has a stronger vein of magic. The main characters are usually strong women, in an elite profession, and political intrigue is a main component. I did not realize until today that Carey is essentially Lackey for grownups.

Carey's prose achieves a sophistication that Lackey doesn't, but I don't mean to say that Lackey is a less talented writer; she is writing for a younger crowd, and her stories are less layered. Carey has a larger cast of characters for whom each role is more clearly defined. Lackey is less concerned with the complexities than Carey, and as such, the Valdemar books are easier to follow and easier to read. Her characters are more transparent and easier to understand; they lack the necessity for further motivation than what's on the surface. Which made them good, easy comfort books in high school, but slightly boring now.

I feel kinda like when I moved from Tamora Pierce to Mercedes Lackey - it is weird to figure out that I am no longer an author's target audience. The good thing, though, is that there are ALWAYS more books to pick from. And I look forward to discovering where I'll go from Carey.

But I'm not in a hurry to get there, because I've still got four of her books to re-read.

Runemarks

There is a lot of crap fantasy being produced these days. I’m not going to name names, because I am a firm believer in the “someone, somewhere, likes it” theory, but you know it’s true. I also think that it is a fairly easy writing convention to base a story off some brand of mythology. This can be used to good or bad effect (American Gods was brilliant, the Percy Jackson books are shaping up to be a fun romp, Gods Behaving Badly was…only okay), and I don’t think it’s a bad thing to dig up old stories, but I do think it’s pretty amazing when an author manages to take old, worn out characters and make them new and fun.

Runemarks by Joanne Harris is a solid effort on those lines. The novel takes place post-Ragnarok, but the world hasn’t ended – indeed, she doesn’t even place us in a dystopic or post-apocalyptic type setting. Malbry, the town where all the action is, reminded me much more of Tolkein’s Shire: quiet, unassuming, and out-of-the-way. The Order, a religious sect that isn’t Christianity and yet totally is, reigns supreme even in such a small town; the Examiners dictate life from their glass cathedrals in World’s End, and they have declared magic, runes, and any other remnants from the Elder Age (before Ragnarok) to be anathema.

Enter our heroine, a sprightly girl named Maddy with an unbroken “ruinmark” emblazoned on her palm. Maddy is a fun character to ride with. She’s smart, but it’s an intelligence unpolished by age (she’s only fourteen) so she does make the occasional bad or rash decision, and she gets in trouble and has to get herself out. She’s resourceful, flexible, and endearing, and I was rooting for her all the way.

Maddy’s task is to set the world to rights and prevent another Ragnarok, from which the world probably won’t recover. Her journey takes her far from home and through an extensive network of “World Below” places, including waking sleeping gods, arguing with an Oracle, and outwitting the inhabitants of the lands of the dead. It’s an engaging, surprising journey, and I didn’t mind that I was always pretty sure how everything was going to turn out.

Harris really shines with her characterizations of the Norse pantheon. (A quick side note: these gods have so many thoroughly recognizable nicknames that I think it’s almost impossible for authors to hide their identities from the reader. I was not in the least surprised by the two big “reveals,” but I’m not sure that those reveals are for my sake anymore – is it acceptable for Maddy to be surprised, even if I’m not?) She makes them similar to the Greek gods, in that they are very human – they hold grudges, have tempers, are prone to vanity, and make mistakes. But as is appropriate to deities, those mistakes are on a MUCH larger level with a correspondingly large amount of destruction. But Harris makes sure that you really get to know them, especially Odin and Loki, the two predictable main players. Their personalities absolutely resonate with everything we know about them from their stories, and at the same time, I felt like I got to know them in a more intimate way.

Runemarks is a wonderfully fun odyssey, with a few gem-like surprises hidden in its occasionally predictable story. For fantasy lovers, it is a treasure among the largely sub par offerings, and for everyone else, it is an interesting take on mythology. Either way, it is definitely something to be enjoyed.

Patient Zero

Popular culture has been fascinated with zombies for a long, long time - I think it's because zombies, unlike other supernatural beings, can be justified through science. At the moment, it's fake science, but a virus that reanimates the meat of a dead person is minutely more probable (in our collective imagination) than a virus that turns you into a wolf. This is speculation on my part, based on the extensive explanations often provided in zombie stories - the rage virus in the 28 Days Later franchise, Max Brooks' examination in World War Z and The Zombie Handbook, and Bill Pullman's turn in The Serpant and the Rainbow, to name a mere handful. Making zombies believable has certainly been more of a focus in zombie media than it has been in, say, vampire media.

This is pretty much the only strength that Jonathan Maberry's Patient Zero has over the plentiful competition.

The novel starts strong with a really neat premise: an Islamic extremist group, backed by a wealthy third party, has developed a highly contagious disease that they intend to release on the American populace. All that stands in their way is a secret government organization (think Men In Black, only with less giving up your entire life) and our Action Hero Joe Ledger. Ledger is part military, part cop, and all badass - his friend-cum-shrink, Randy Sanchez, basically exists to prove how tough and hardened and on the edge of insanity Ledger really is. But you root for him, because he also deals with the terror and sheer bizarreness of the situation.

Ledger is backed mainly by a cast of military personnel, and his personal team is pretty awesome. For the first half of the novel, everyone is tough, ready to rumble, professional, and awesome. They kick ass. Mr. Church, head of the Department of Military Sciences (our super-secret organization) and Major Grace Courtland are a good pair for Ledger to bounce off - collectively, they have enough tactical and practical smarts so that I never felt like leaps of logic were being made without the reader to follow (until the end...but we'll get to that).

It unravels startlingly fast in the second act. It feels as though Maberry loses track of his characterizations; he feels the need to twist his established personalities into several stilted, obvious, and unnecessary storylines, that do nothing for his characters and bog down the pace of the novel. One of his villains, a deliciously amoral representative of the pharmaceutical companies, becomes a completely different person in a really irritating way. The only consistant characters are the most two-dimensional; they can't become something different because there's not a whole lot there to start with.

The other major weakness of the novel is that it changes perspective and place nearly every chapter; this in and of itself is not a criticism, but all of the sections with Ledger are told from a first person perspective while none of the rest of the novel is. This makes the prose tremendously uneven and rather untrustworthy, since the reader doesn't get a consistant narrator to hang on to throughout the story. I understand that to tell the story Maberry obviously wanted to, he can't keep the whole thing in Legder's perspective, but I wish he'd scrapped the first person in favor of a third person omniscient. It would have been smoother AND made more sense.

Long story short: Maberry isn't Max Brooks, and this is no World War Z. I just wish Patient Zero had been satisfying enough on its own that I wouldn't feel the need to make that comparison.

Prospective Reads

I was originally planning to do a fairly academic, drawn out post here about how Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash is not actually cyberpunk, but my smarter-than-me boyfriend has informed me that, in fact, it's categorized as "post-cyberpunk" and not actually the former at all. So. That happened.

(My reasoning was going to be an elegant deconstruction about how the focus of Snow Crash is actually the relationships between people, rather than mankind's relationship to technology and machines, which is what I think the point of pure cyberpunk is. Snow Crash is much more involved in tracing the connecting lines between people, following threads of religion, language, and conformity to show the web that's netting all of us into one big mass of humanity. And then that humanity breeds viruses and programs, I don't know. I stopped outlining what was essentially a college essay when I discovered that this is not a new theory.)

I could ALSO give my excuses for not reading One Hundred Years of Solitude yet, but that one boils down easy: the guy in my office who told me I have to read it, said I need to watch some bizarre film called Gummo first. I haven't watched the film yet, so I haven't read the book yet. I'm going to begin it tentatively, I can tell you that much - I'm no longer intimidated by not finishing books, so if it drags too hard I'm putting it down. But I'm probably being unfair to it; Lord knows that since finishing school I've gotten HELLA lazy in my reading habits.

What I will do is cheerfully tell you to go read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and its sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire. Wonderful character-driven mysteries, and Larsson the author is a master of story-telling. The fact that they are both translations (Swedish to English) didn't actually impact the prose for me, either (I tend to think translations come out a little stiff, but Tattoo and Fire are both fluid and charming).