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.

Adaptations

In this day and age, it certainly seems like Hollywood can't think up an original idea to save its glittery life. Book-to-movie adaptations are riddling the screen, and are all too often dismissed by literary types because "it'll never be as good as the book." While this is true 98% of the time (I mean, have you READ Jaws? Christ.) it isn't quite fair to the movie makers - books and film are two completely different media. I feel like the mark of a good adaptation is not necessarily complete faithfulness to the source material, because let's face it, that's impossible. A good adaptation is a film that retains the feeling of the book, that captures the intent of the story. It may have to be told in a different fashion, and things will always get left out because of time and visual constraints - what works on paper does not always work on the screen. But this doesn't mean that the movie is wrong, or less valid than the book.

In my lifetime, I have known several truly great adaptations. Jumanji, while a brilliant film and excellent book, is not one of them - I argue that the film uses the book simply as a jumping off point to explore a really neat idea (a boardgame that affects reality). There's so much of the film that was never in the children's book that, at most, the film was inspired by, rather than based off, the book.

Which leads me to my central point: my top five book-to-film adaptations, as based on my opinion and what I described above.

5. A Clockwork Orange
Visually, this film is terrifying, and that's what it had to be. It took the nigh-incomprehensible semantics of the book, which read so twisty and sinister, and spins them into a nightmare landscape whose only real "flaw" is the non-inclusion of the final moments. I happen to think the film ends on a much more haunting note, where the book is perhaps a touch unrealistically uplifting. Alex is much more compelling when he's irredeemable. The "conditioning," scary enough when isolated to print, becomes utterly horrifying when visualized (talk about things you can never unsee), and on the whole the film visually captures the political and social turmoil in a truly excellent way.

4. Coraline
I've already done this comparison, but as a recap: Gaiman's sparse, Victorian story telling puts this gothic fairytale into clear relief, which the film illuminates with brilliant color and breathtaking animation. The few changes the filmmakers made only added to the eerieness of the whole picture, making the two pieces good companions to each other.

3. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
In my personal opinion, absolutely the best Potter movie that's been made so far (including Half-Blood Prince). Ironically, it's also my least favorite book - all of those long, long pages of Harry suffering teenage angst are remarkably well taken care of in one camera shot. This film also continues the Potter tradition of fantastic casting, with Natalia Tena (Nymphadora Tonks), Imelda Staunton (Dolores Umbridge), and Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood) positively stealing their scenes with their perfect embodiments. Lynch as the spacey, goggle-eyed Luna was one of my very favorites. The film showed the darkness descending on the magical world in an exciting way, and made way more of the final battle in the Ministry than I thought they ever could.

2. The Last Unicorn
I couldn't decide whether or not to include this, because it's animated, and then I thought, "why not? I'm making these rules anyway." This happens to be my very favorite book anyway, so one could argue that my standards are higher - and boy, does this deliver. The animation is reminiscent of Miyazaki without being derivative; it is ethereal when it needs to be and earthy, full of emotion. The voice talent is unparalleled, and Christopher Lee as the bitter old King is neither shocking nor disappointing. Angela Lansbury is also brilliant as Mommy Fortuna; the only weak link in the cast is Mia Farrow who plays the Unicorn herself. The film is sweet, sad, and nostalgic in all the right places, just as the novel is; it's a fairytale that reminds us there's magic in the world while hitting bittersweetly.

1. The Lord of the Rings trilogy
I know people who flat out refused to see these films. Because they knew Peter Jackson would never be able to encompass the whole of Tolkien's vision, and because they were terrified that parts they loved (Tom Bombadil) wouldn't make the final edit, they skipped out rather than see something they loved trimmed down and changed for a different audience. Try as I might, I can't get them to understand that this isn't a re-do of Tolkien's fantasy classic, and it's not pretending to do the same things the books do - it CAN'T. But what it did do, I think, was perhaps even more important than that.

The Lord of the Rings (I may be cheating by putting all three films into one bullet point, but it's my blog and I can do what I want) was a cinematic masterpiece. Jackson did something with film that absolutely no one had been able to do before: he internalized a classic story and translated it, slimming it down to the essential plot points and visualizing them in an effective and breathtaking manner. He narrowed the focus, but not the vision; just because you do not get to meet Tom Bombadil doesn't mean you miss out on the fear and uncertainty the hobbits face when setting out from the Shire. It truly encompasses everything that I loved about the books; the tense action and drama of the war, the futility and dystopia of Mordor and Frodo's quest, and the relationships and brotherhoods, love stories and companionships that have been repeated and reused through literary history. They are monuments of film to monuments of literature.

Fairytales

I've just emerged from a long, long period of frantic paper writing, project completion, and the culmination of commencement. I'm no longer soon-to-be-graduating, I am an official college graduate. While this is not an excuse for not posting anything in over a month, it....well, yes, it is an excuse. But bear with me.

John Connolly, in addition to writing very entertaining mystery novels, also writes brilliantly good, dark, edgy fantasy. Today I'm going to tell you why you should go and read his novel, The Book of Lost Things.



The Book of Lost Things is everything a modern fairytale should be. Its main character, David, is a young boy who is neither insipidly precocious nor idiotically naive. He is smart, introverted, and suffers from an abruptly destroyed family when his mother dies from illness. When his father remarries and has the audacity to have another son with the new wife, David escapes into the fantasy of books and an unkempt, sunken garden in the back of the house his father moves them into.

What follows is an adventure worthy of the Grimm Brothers, as David is transported into a fairyworld that takes every expectation you might have and turns it on its ear. Connolly cunningly takes basic fairytale tropes and twists them unexpectedly at the very last minute, leaving you on your toes through the whole novel. The combination of that vein of familiriaty coupled with Connolly's own imagination means that the ending, while somewhat predictable, is still profound and will leave you thoroughly satisfied.

The Book of Lost Things has several winning components: an endearing, likeable, and realistic main character, a frightening and sadistic villain, and an engaging story. I'm about to start Connolly's book of short fiction, Nocturnes, and I'll let you know how that is posthaste.