Brilliant, tedious writing…
Fortress Of Dragons continues CJ Cherryh’s unique trick of combining extremely skilled writing, perceptive observations, well-rounded imaginings, taut action sequences, and extreme tedium. Once again (as with the previous in the series) I was about ready to despair, but whereas in the last book nothing at all happens, we suddenly get a war and some high octane magical conflicts. Cherryh’s approach of writing her characters’ internal dialogue in detail, and representing magic (linguistically at least) as an extension of the same, does the casual reader few favours, but sadly harbours few of the philosophical insights that might justify this very roundabout way of driving the plot. This book clearly offers a denouement to the series, but there’s another volume after this; I’m intrigued to discover what’s in it, and the high quality of Cherryh’s prose is enough to keep me reading…
Food and music and mercenaries and twenty-seven string guitars…
The library’s been closed for a month, and although I’ve had to work the same number of hours overall, they were jammed into fewer shifts, leaving me a lot of concentrated writing time. This past week was the last, and tomorrow we’re getting the place straightened out ready to re-open on Tuesday… I got a lot done this week, writing wise, although the end of it turned a bit recreational (probably to do with summer suddenly being switched on overnight).
I’ve posted three music reviews this week, and I’ve written and posted Episode 2 of The Blackswords! If you were dying to find out what Irtain would do with that chest full of money, click the link now, and read this blether later. As far as background development goes, I’ve finished my extensive essay on the cuisine of my city/ region, which I honestly have to say was one of the most enjoyable bits of writing I’ve done; join me sometime for a bowl of pentao and a cup of arajakh… I’ve also designed my culture’s musical practices, what instruments are used in what ways by different social classes; I haven’t committed myself to any sounds, but I may screw around with some modes at some point and write some actual melodies. The instruments are mainly of an early modern type, but I let my imagination fly a bit, and came up with a giant zither, like a grand piano, with multiple sets of strings, some purely sympathetic like a sitar. I also included a complex harp lute, inspired by this twenty-seven string guitar, designed and built by Keith Smedley…
Still slick, but even more expressive.
Well, I’ve been reading a lot of Love & Rockets books and posting about them on here, so I won’t bore you by repeating everything I’ve said in the past. This is the final instalment of Jaime Hernandez’s original run of Locas, and this was all new material for me. His clean, stylish drawing style remains intact, but he has started to diversify his body shapes: he still draws some sexy women, but even the bombshell Penny Century looks a bit more like a real person here. Kids are more cartoonish than adults, and extremes of emotion are rendered with often hilarious departures from realism… Generally, he is drawing his characters in a more expressive way than previously, and putting more of what’s inside them on the outside for us to look at. His stories are also a little more brutal about the harsh realities of life without money in 80s/90s America. This is absolute gold dust, and everyone should read it. Except people who wouldn’t like it.
A gripping intellectual thriller
Pasquale’s Angel by Paul McCauley is set in early sixteenth century Florence at the height of the industrial revolution. This is a world in which Leonardo Da Vinci was taken seriously as an engineer, and kicked off an era of research and innovation that made Florence the great imperial power of the age. It’s a very well realised milieu, and McCauley has carefully considered the way that some aspects of modernity would inevitably proceed from industrialisation, and others would not. His characters are very much creatures of their times, and it’s the convincing way they are modelled that makes the setting come alive, until we forget that Renaissance Florence did not have streets plied by vaporetti or steam carts.
The plot is a complex conspiracy adventure (well seriously, what else could it be with that setting?) involving the Medicis, the papacy and the rivalry between Raphael and Michaelangelo. I wouldn’t exactly call this a novel of ideas, although it’s a book with a complex and involving intellectual element; it’s a thriller, but it certainly raises some interesting questions about historical determinism and the aetiology of industrialisation. I really enjoyed this book, and I’d recommend it to anyone who gives a shit what I think…
Perfume, geography, hip-hop and cooking…
The past week has been pretty productive. I’ve finished the first draft of a short story about a perfumer, which I will try and sell when it’s been polished to a high sheen. I’d love to hear readers’ opinions, so if you’d like a look at the draft please drop a line to olnezea@arditi.org and I’ll send you a PDF. I also had a guest post on the sense of place in rap music published on Tom Clements’ hip-hop blog, which you can read here. I’ve also written a fair chunk of stuff on the culture of my city, focussing in particular on domestic life and cuisine. The latter has been particularly fun, as I’ve basically been reading through big stacks of books on various mediterranean cuisines and connecting ideas from them to the various ethnic and cultural currents of my fictional reality… Ultimately there’s going to be a substantial book of background material, which I will try to tidy up and publish electronically/ print-on-demand at some point.
Snappy title, bad prose, good stuff.
An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000-1500, in addition to being one of the more snappily titled books I’ve read recently, has a lot of interesting content. I should get the downside out of the way first: the prose is often clumsy, and the large number of sentences I came across that didn’t parse properly suggests that this hasn’t been very thoroughly proofread. Steven A. Epstein also has a liking for somewhat clichéd turns of phrase, which is a lazy habit in my view, and on a couple of occasions here it results in some unintended ironies.
As a work of historical synthesis, I’m entirely unqualified to assess this, and I’m certainly not checking any conclusions against the sources; but it seems to take a balanced view, and the way it approaches its texts and other sources strikes me as intelligent and theoretically sound. As a lay reader, I was into it for other reasons though.
Most of us, myself included, have an impression of medieval history formed largely from some ill-remembered kings and wars, and a vague impression of what feudalism was like, probably informed more by Monty Python movies than anything else. This book is not about domestic life or material culture, but it’s a very illuminating survey of the way medieval European societies were organised and did business. What most readers will get from this is a new appreciation of the sophistication of medieval societies, and of their sheer diversity. Feudalism and the manorial system were deeply entrenched in certain areas, and completely absent from others. Particularly in the great trading centres, the Italian city states and the cities of the Hanseatic League, social and economic practices were common that most ill-informed readers (such as myself) would associate with modernity; there were multinational companies in late medieval Europe, financed by sophisticated instruments, and issuing promises to buy at certain times and prices – futures contracts in other words.
The reason I chose to read this is related to my current attempt to invent a fantasy world with an approximately late medieval/ early modern milieu. Given that the majority of high- and epic fantasy is set in a psuedo-late medieval world, this book should be of considerable interest to readers and writers of that sort of thing. It’s certainly given me a new perspective on a lot of things I’ve read recently, and given me a renewed appreciation for the research that informs the books of CJ Cherryh and GRR Martin.
Quiet week, but a New Thing.
This last week has been mainly full of things other than writing and reading, such as working at Clacton Library, having a broken car and dancing while drunk. Which is all good, but not particularly newsworthy. I have, however, published my first ever interview, with a very interesting grindcore/ambient band called Barren Waste (pictured),which you can read here. I’ve also started work on the second of the short stories I’m writing to develop characters for my novel set in Megano (my city what I made up).
Progress on fantasy fiction continues apace, with the main news this week being that I’ve actually written and posted the first episode of my serial, The Blackswords. That took relatively little time to write, once I’d put the requisite time into character development and sketched out the plot, which is how I’m hoping things will go in general: if there’s enough background information in place, the stories should write themselves. I’ve also done some character development for my next short story, and mapped one of Megano’s districts, as you can see above. I’m going to have to do a further six maps at that level of detail to cover the whole city, so it’s going to be a major task; that one isn’t even finished, as I still have to add street names etc.
In music writing, I’m about to start on my first ever artist interview, and I’ve been asked by Tom Clements to write a piece for his extremely excellent hip-hop blog, which is an exciting development. All this and trying to stay on top of writing reviews is proving fairly challenging, and I’ve had a load of time off; back to the library this week, so it remains to be seen how much I get done… Till next time, walk tall, pardners.
Grippingly entertaining philosophical discourse…
This is the first time I’ve re-read this book, twenty odd years since the first time, although I’ve re-read the tetralogy to which it is a sequel. It’s honestly very rare that I read anything as complex as this, or anything that’s written with such a masterful command of the language. Many fans of Wolfe will tell you that this is a good book, but not up to the standard of The Book Of The New Sun; I think they’re missing the point somewhat.
The Urth Of The New Sun is where Gene Wolfe works out the loose ends left trailing by the earlier books: not loose ends of plot, or character, but of ideas. I won’t attempt to paraphrase the very nuanced and deeply humane philosophical and theological discourse that Wolfe presents, but I will say that it takes in a wide sweep of existential, ontological and aetiological themes, explored through such fantasy devices as time travel, magic and the questing lone warrior. At times it gets into the same territory as a book that recently made a huge impression on me, Marcus Boone’s In Praise Of Copying, but I think that what his dying earth setting allows Wolfe to do most of all is to postulate a world in which the Catholic Church may reasonably be supposed to have been erased by time, and to explore how religious truth might be apprehended under such circumstances. It also allows him to create a messianic protagonist without risking blasphemy…
I am a confirmed atheist myself, but I have no time for the blinkered prejudice of many so-called ‘militant atheists’; I understand just how angry creationism makes people (myself included), but Wolfe gives the lie to common anti-religious attitudes. From within the confines of the most doctrinaire and authoritarian of Christian sects he allows his faith to inform an engagement with various extremely thorny philosophical questions. He may not come to the same conclusions that I would, but he is profoundly aware that a belief in God provides no easy answers, and his fantastic setting allows me to swallow his premises just as it allows him the free play to explore them.
This is a beautifully written, linguistically burnished work, that is breathtaking in the way its plot, characters and dialogue all play the parts they are needed to play in a work of fiction, but also serve to articulate the most complex of philosophical dispositions, so that the unceasing flow of ideas is never dry or didactic, but grippingly entertaining.
Here’s the most visible product of my week’s writing: getting a ‘finished’ version of the world map together is a major milestone, as it wasn’t really possible to commit to enough of it until I’d got a certain amount of history and cosmology down and settled. Something about doing it makes my world just that little bit more real for me: the whole map making process has turned out to be of huge creative importance, rather than the necessary bit of record keeping I originally thought it would be.
I haven’t written quite as much as I hoped to, but I’ve done a lot on my city’s society, including a complete list of its guilds, and some other social structures. I was planning some lengthy essays on culture, but that will have to wait a while, as I’ve now started writing character sketches for my forthcoming serial. You heard it here first: The Blackswords will be an episodic story following the adventures of a mercenary company around the region of Rogadol, set around ten years before the date of most of the background work I’ve been doing. I’m planning to publish it on my blog in relatively small chunks, so I’m hoping you can expect the first instalment sometime next week!
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